munk-a

It might be wise to review comment posting guidelines - but, for clarity, no AI is involved in any of my responses.

From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.

But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.

In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.

1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.

> like “make a cure for <disease>” that will yield billions of dollars of value

I think it's important to qualify that while I will very much appreciate such an innovation and I think it'll provide significant value to society... I remain doubtful of the ability for any company to actually capture such an astronomical yield. Either there's enough of an investment required by the company to help get that to market that the yield will be significantly lower or everyone and their brother will just launch competing products two days later. And, as a society, I don't think it's logical for someone writing "Hey Alex, cure cancer" with billions of dollars so I doubt there's going to be much appetite for creating such a moat via legislation.

This gets to the same point of "If ChatGPT can make you a successful million dollar business in a few prompts why is OpenAI sharing it" paradox. It very well may be that AI tools can accomplish the labor that used to be required to create such a business, and I'm sure a few people will land a jackpot and get rich in the transitional phase but if it's so cheap to build it why would someone pay you money for yours instead of just running the same prompting themselves? For most people that's because they lack the knowledge that they can but you'll still have a significant number of instant impersonators.

I disagree, Yahoo was actually seen as a technological leader and, unlike Google that was purely a search engine in its early years, Yahoo was a full platform that seemed poised for a while to become a landing page for the internet.

When it comes to AI there simply isn't a moat - Anthropic would be my best guess out of the current entrants due to them trying to construct one via value-adding code assistance tools that might create enough friction to prevent customers from jumping ship but the models themselves are a commodity that depreciates extremely quickly. If you want to retain the frontier premium you need to constantly be improving due to the ease of distillation.

And the folks currently in the FTC mysteriously will receive cushy board positions when the administration turns over. Literally everyone wins!

Except in Canada where we get the silly Gulf of Mexico sub-script name but Lake Ontario is labeled just that.

In one fell swoop Trump accidentally made all Ontario Residents Americans and entitled them to Social Security benefits.

Google Maps shows Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) to Canadians - it does properly label Lake Ontario, though. The idiocy isn't limited just to the US.

I'm surprised the strata was able to offload that to you. Most building corps are in charge of maintaining the fire alarm system especially if it's a tower (rather than just a SFH community under a strata) where unit to unit spread needs to be addressed promptly.

Fire is one of those things that really sucks for you - but also really sucks for your neighbors.

You never want to supply any reason for someone to demur about reporting a fire.

Counter point - accumulating extreme wealth seems to require a cooked brain. I genuinely believe that level headed people are unable to reach more than a few million in accumulated wealth as they'll clearly see how much more that money would benefit others compared to themselves.

Nvidia GPUs in the post-apocalyptic radioactive barrens are going to be stupid pricey.

I'm not at all close to knowing their internals with books in particular but for most products Amazon has made a significant effort to remove themselves from direct product stocking wherever possible (instead preferring to warehouse other people's stock for efficient shipping). I would guess that they aren't particularly well positioned with publishers at this point... Also, most publishers probably loathe Amazon at this point for all the times Amazon has tried to fleece them w.r.t. Kindle.

They could revert to the pre-LLM craze where Alexa was actually able to answer prompts in a reasonable amount of time. Alexa is a glorified egg timer for nearly all users - it's super convenient to use a voice prompt to start/stop timers while cooking and being able to play music on voice demand is kinda alright. It genuinely doesn't need to answer hard questions.

Yeah, one of my main points of contact was a gmail address for a number of years. I've switched over to giving out an address on a domain I own but it's a huge pain migrating contacts over.

I hope the younger folks learn better the lesson to own your nameplate - even if you just end up forwarding message to gmail or what-not for consumption, keeping control of the nameplate gives you the flexibility to shift later on.

Ah, to clarify, Canada's upper house is basically a house of lords equivalent that we expect to be full of puffed up nobodies that get paid a too generous stipend to sit there and keep their mouths shut. Canada has one elected congress body (the one we all talk about) and then this vestigial senate which is generally expected to sit there and silently approve everything that passes through it.

It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.

Yeah, I think it'd be excellent if we could just disband our upper house and while it's worth pushing them to act on this bill I loathe the senate's continued existence and would rather be in a position where this emergency call happened prior to it passing the house.

Do you think that perhaps a sample of Canadians that emigrated to the US might not be representative of all Canadians?

Also, if you're in a tech sphere then there's even a notable bias of folks in SF that are happy to have left whatever other part of the US they used to reside in.

I think it's fair to say that a large portion of their valuation comes from their political ties lending an air of invincibility. If Palantir came under scrutiny it's guaranteed that neither JD Vance nor anyone else Thiel could mobilize would remain silent and let it happen.

It does not and it's quite confusing. You'll often see people use the term LPC or Liberal and avoid lower-case liberal due to the confusion of that word. In Canada the Liberal party is a fiscally centrist/corporate & socially liberal(ish) (aka it's similar to the traditional British definition of Liberal). The Conservatives are a large right wing reactionary block that seems to be perpetually in the minority but with a large loyal voting block while the actual opposition mostly comes from three parties that rotate in and out of relevance as a left-wing voice BQ (Bloq-quebecois), NDP (New Democratic Party - fading since the death of Jack Layton), and the Greens (Environmental sorta, but also weirdly anti-science sometimes). And that's on the national level - at the provincial level it gets even weirder with the BCLiberals (recently named BCUP) being socially and fiscally conservative and opposed by the BC NDP and other minor parties.

Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.

As a Canadian-America - nope, Canada is far better off than the US. I don't know if the US has a route out of the hole it's digging at this point.

Canada has problems - a state media that barks the party line isn't one of them. One political party would love you to believe that and it's aligned with the party south of the border that's trying to destroy media credibility across the board, but that's a political effort because transparency is an impediment to their agenda.

This isn't to say there aren't biases in media - there always is, everyone is biased in their own way - but the presence of that bias can be understood and having a robust pipeline for news is more important that trying to futilely eliminate all bias.

Yeah, I'm pretty certain the Americans don't want the solution the Germans got to correct that problem.

They will say that regardless of their intentions - that doesn't mean we should ignore that possibility but that isn't a great indicator.

That is a statement that may be true but we've spent a whole lot of time thinking about it and there's still significant disagreement at an academic level, though, with our better understanding of quantum mechanics it has been much more difficult to justify the point that we live in a fully deterministic universe, lately.

And if we reject determinism then definitionally there's arbitrary probability somewhere in the heart of our decision making (though probably in a very minor role compared to established biases).

Yeah, the human ones are because we're talking finding a human answer to a human question.

It's possible has been trained to match a human level of assessment (though imo it's still a ways off) but the AI response is never going to be more representative of true understanding than a human response when it comes to a human question expecting a human answer.

It's quite likely that a given AI will have a more representative response than a given human - but we haven't ever tried to pump so many resources into the training of a single human scholar.

There is an old saying "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". This is just yet another facet of CYA where we know it's of limited utility and the cracking will happen either way but if you specifically argued against Denuvo before the cracking happens it's your ass on the line for it.

I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.

Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.

Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.

Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.

They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.