salford

Yes, I've noticed this too. your best bet is to search for something, like the few videos that come up, and then hope that the algorithm catches on. I'm still new to TikTok, but I wish there were easier ways to "collaborate" with the algorithm to try to get it to feed you topics you know you're interested in instead of being limited to the for you page.

A good solution might be to add a new license clause stipulating whether the owner is okay with their code being used to train AI models.

Part of the clause would explain that if you are okay with your code being trained on, then you're also accepting being okay with it being copied verbatim at some point down the line during code completion.

You do get a bit of tragedy of the commons where everybody wants to use the AI model but nobody wants their own code trained on.

I don't like the idea of a world where licensing and copyright law prevents us from enjoying the progress of AI. Caveat: I am not an expert on open source.

Tree talk series by Forests of the Bay is a great source for learning about different American tree species: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcO0QnNhmtEpkLXgYPjaxug

True, I imagine the next course of action would be something like "do nothing" — continue straight, try to be predictable, hope that other people in the situation can react accordingly.

In the context of the many congratulations over how fast the COVID-19 vaccines were developed, manufactured, and distributed, I was surprised to read about the US developed and distributed a vaccine in just a few months the summer of 1957.

The article has many other interesting tidbits too.

Seeing the US treasury website's incredibly poor UX for buying I-bonds convinced me that, as bad as TurboTax is for doing "free" tax returns (see https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...), maybe we would not in fact be better off if the IRS make its own website for doing tax returns.

"What determines the price a company sets for its product?"

My intuition about this is that a consumer will only buy a product if they value it more than its price, and a company will only sell it if it cost less than its price. So the price is inherently some point in between the buyer and seller's value of each item. If the price equals the buyer's value, then the seller gets all the profits, and the buyer benefits zero. If the price equals the seller's value, then the seller gets zero profits, and the buyer gets all the benefits. What determines this tradeoff?

The long answer involves me learning some basic microeconomics with the help of https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-microeconomics/. Maybe one day I will write a longer blog post about it, but I'm still not sure I fully understand the answer.

I am still not an economic expert, but here is my attempted answer to practice my micro thinking: the goal of companies is to maximize profits. If they can raise prices while increasing profits, they will do so! The only thing stopping them from doing so is competition from other companies. Depending on whether you have "perfect competition", "monopolistic competition", or flat-out monopoly, their ability to do so will differ.

For the companies examined in the article, most of the companies experience monopolistic or imperfect competition. The fact that they can increase profits by increasing prices shows that people have more money to spend than they used to (makes sense, due to pandemic saving, stimulus, and a tight labor market and inflation leading to wage growth). Prices will increase until consumers feel enough pain that they transition back to whatever previous mix of thrifty and luxury goods they were using before the pandemic. Is that right?

But then this analysis leads to even more questions...

> There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized

I had the same thought. Ads enable people who previously put up their content out of passion to do the same thing to commercial gain. Is this good or bad? On the plus side, it incentivizes the creation of more quality content. On the other hand, "labor of love" content is homier, less corporatized, and the extent to which they will help you on a given problem is not biased by their ability to earn money from said problem.

It's a similar situation between mom and pop restaurants and chains. Now it's hard to say that one or the other is definitively better -- depends on what you're looking for. I wish there were resources out there to help understand the nature of this tradeoff and how it has played out in different areas of the economy.

I get the feeling that there's a virtue aspect here. In absence of seat-belts, birth control, and vaccines, safety is possible—if you are careful and prudent. Therefore, up to the point where such options are available, public health initiatives encourage and celebrate prudence and carefulness.

Once a work-around becomes available, where one can be just as safe with half the prudence, it feels like cheating: now all these careless people can be safe without any of the admirable virtue in being prudent and following rules. So those in charge resist giving the people an easy way out, because doing so represents a path towards loss of credibility of the authority institution, who is constantly advocating for virtue in the people.