Hi, so I generally actually agree with you and your criticisms of this blog post (in your thread with the author). I think there's something pretty true in the blog post you shared from Joel (true in that it applies to more than just the software world) and looked at some of his more recent posts.
This one in particular reads similar to what this comment section is about, it looks like Joel is basically becoming an architecture astronaut himself? Not sure if that's actually an accurate understanding of what his "block protocol" is, but I'm curious to hear from you what you think of that? In the 25 years since that post, has he basically become the thing he once criticized, and is that the result of just becoming a more and more senior/thinker within the industry?
I think there is reason to think that we will reduce energy consumption.
US energy consumption per capita peaked in 1975 and has trended down even as population has increased. There's going to be a peak in global population, likely before 2100 (and it keeps getting revised sooner, not later).
So it stands to reason that as we become more energy efficient (already happening) and we start to have fewer people on earth (likely to happen in your/ your children's lifetime) that overall consumption will in fact go down.
I don't think the OP is saying he has an issue with the reporting of facts. I think what he's getting at is that a lot of what passes for news today (especially online) are really just op-eds.
Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.
Congratulations, you've bought into the fascists' framing.
Whenever the media doesn't present the fascists' narrative unchallenged, it's declared that they're being biased. Doesn't matter what the facts are, the accusations still come.
Not sure if it's a "flaw" or not, but I always get stuck on AI + 3D design stuff with there being no dimensional information or control.
How big is that mug? Slowing it down and trying to catch some dim info the initial cylinder has a radius of ~39. Regardless of if that's default inches, that's one hell of a mug.
Sure you can scale it, but it's not great practice to design something and then just apply a scaling to get it to the intended size.
All the dimensions are in mm by default, so 39 mm radius on a mug is about right. For all their flaws, the LLMs do usually provide reasonable dimensions.
That's fair, it just bothers me when examples are like "a block with two holes in it" and sure the result is a block with two holes, but when are you going to want that without having those two holes in very specific spots at a specific size? lol
I feel like this ignores how big of a part the software is for those "consumer electronics" Apple is so good at making.
Apple definitely has software expertise, maybe it's not as specialized into AI as it is about optimizing video or music editors, but to suggest they'd be at the same starting point as an agriculture endeavor feels dishonest.
So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just someones opinion).
The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic abuse.
> So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
No they were already being sued for antitrust violations, it just mirrors what they are accused of doing to exploit their platform.
So if it mirrors something they were already accused of (like you're saying), my questioning should be pretty easy to map onto that issue as well?
It's the line of thinking that I'm trying to dig into more, not the specifics of this case. Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
If that case was prosecuted and Apple was found guilty, I suppose you can point to it as precedent. But again, does it only serve as precedent when it's a deal between Apple and Google? Is it only a precedent when there's a case between two "large" companies?
Again this is all really squishy, if companies aren't allowed to outsource development of another feature once they pass some sense of "large", when does it apply? What about the $1T pharmaceutical company that wants to use AI modeling? They're a large technically component company, if Eli Lily partnered with Gemini would you be sitting here saying that they also are abusing a monopolistic position that prevents competition in the AI model space?
> Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
No it's antitrust because they have a failed product, but purely by virtue of shutting out competitors from their platform they have been able to turn three years of flailing around into a win-by-outsourcing. What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants? Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology? How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly? This is why it's an antitrust issue.
No other thoughts on my actual questions? You're just addressing one-off sentences from my responses.
"it's antitrust because they have a failed product" is objectively hilarious
> What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants?
Probably pretty much the same. What would Gemini's position be like today if they hadn't blocked out default voice assistants? You only get Gemini when you use Gemini, just like you only got Siri when you use Siri (up until this deal takes effect). Also Siri has used ChatGPT already, so I'm not even convinced this is a valid criticism. They already didn't block OpenAI from being part of Siri.
> Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology?
This is relevant how?
> How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly?
How would what measure against other ai models? How would their ability to recover from a lack of investing in a better "homemade" AI model differ if they used OpenAI instead of Gemini? How does that have anything to do with antitrust? That's a business case study type of question. Also, shouldn't they be allowed to recover from their own lack of developing a model by using the best tool available to them?
> it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model
The problem isn't that they used another company's model. It's that they are using a model made by the only company competing with them in the market of mobile OS.
That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is.
Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".
The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.
Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.
Yea I'd say any university. Here's the results of maybe 3 minutes of quick googling for universities around the world:
University of Mumbai: "The Fruit of Learning is Character and Righteous Conduct" - highlights character and behavior as key to learning
University of Tokyo: "The University of Tokyo aims to be a world-class platform for research and education [and] ... nurture global leaders with a strong sense of public responsibility and a pioneering spirit [and] ... to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in partnership with society." - yes it's academically focussed, but again highlights strong civic duty and partnerships
University of Sydney: "We make lives better by producing leaders of society and equipping our people with leadership qualities so they can serve our communities at every level." - pretty focussed on creating leaders who serve communitities
Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has a listed value: "AAU pursues innovation, research, and development through team spirit and partnership within the institution, with the communities it serves and with its global partners."
So.. yea most universities? Are there exceptions that are just ultra focussed on being exclusively robot-generating education factories? Sure. I'm not sure where you live that they are so common, but a quick survey of Africa, Asia, and Australia I was able to find universities that check the box for what I claimed.
But again, sorry for being so US-centric on the US website focussed on discussion (mostly) US news (and in this case discussing literally only US universities????), and the goings on of US tech start ups where most everyone speaks English and is active during the US timezones peak hours.
Quite a few routes on the heat map that appear to not be following great circle lines (i.e. "straight" lines from china to the west coast) - is that from seasonal currents allowing for more efficient transit with the tradeoff of taking a longer route?
In those thousands of years of history, did we ever have multiple cities with populations over 10 million people? Did we have electricity demands? Were the agriculture/ food expectations the same?
Are you really trying to make the argument that if a significant chunk of the population is forced into unemployment, that's fine we'll just tax all the stuff that automated jobs away and it'll all just work out? Panic sets in if unemployment hits like 10% because of all the negative consequences it has on societal outcomes. Just assuming the government is gonna magically be able to reallocate resources it gets from taxing the automated systems that replace human work is a pretty insane thing to expect to work imo.
There are a hell of a lot of assumptions baked into your thinking that need to be explained and probably put under more scrutiny.
Take "We don't have to all commit to back breaking labor for ~100% of our functional life just because this is the system most of us were born into and we don't know any better" for example.
No we don't need to do manual labor 24/7, but what people generally do need is a purpose. Purpose here meaning something akin to meeting an expectation that they contribute to their own survival and to the benefit of society, even if abstractly. Take a look at most NEETs and I don't think you're going to find healthy thriving individuals, I think you're going to find people who are resigned to life and checked out. We didn't evolve to sit on our hands.
Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little, focus on critical thinking and media analysis skills in primary and secondary education - not as the main focus but certainly as important, civic building classes.
News media gets harsh anti-monopoly rules: no more billionaires owning every station in every jurisdiction, in fact no more conglomerates whatsoever. More independent funding for local news: I'm content for a bunch of these to go bankrupt on a regular basis but we'll sponsor more people putting out independent journalism.
At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism, with a mission charter the citizenry must have accurate reporting to understand how they will choose leaders to guide international politics. This one would be tricky to get right, I suspect you'd probably end up tying resource allocation to government funding alotments and the like via some automatic mechanisms.
The first and last are probably pie in the sky: really let's start by shredding a couple of media empires into 50 different fiefdoms and let them battle it out for views, but there'll be no more mergers or cross-media ownership that's for sure.
Personally I'm all for breaking up the media conglomerates. Especially the news. There is a tremendous amount of group-think from professional elites who all goto the same universities and then go work in the same newsrooms. When combined with endless M&A it creates insular monoculture with low tolerance for opposing views in most of these news outlets.
> At an international scale spin off an entity like the Federal Reserve which would be the Federal International Reporting Bureau with some iron clad rules about funding changes and the sole mission to baseline the availability of boots-on-the-ground international journalism
That sounds great in theory, but given the recent scandals at the BBC and uncovering of systematic bias there we can see how fragile such institutions can be. Even without M&A driving it the BBC has become a primarily leftist monoculture.
> Increase education funding, mandate a couple of levels of free choice liberal arts/philosophy type courses to ensure people have to expand their thinking a little
Sounds great, but also prone to systemic bias. Universities in general have become echo chambers in liberal arts departments.
Perhaps combine that with options for doing national service of some sort that would balance out education. Afterall, classroom learning only gives one aspect of life and experience. Often just exposing people to new places and environments broadens their outlooks.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/12/19/progress-on-the-bl...
This one in particular reads similar to what this comment section is about, it looks like Joel is basically becoming an architecture astronaut himself? Not sure if that's actually an accurate understanding of what his "block protocol" is, but I'm curious to hear from you what you think of that? In the 25 years since that post, has he basically become the thing he once criticized, and is that the result of just becoming a more and more senior/thinker within the industry?
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