> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed.
I don't if that is true: a lot of old books might still have copy or other rights associated to them, likely owned by author and/or publisher, directly or inherited, but often those who have the rights do not have digital or physical copies at hand anymore (some old books are, well, really old). Does Anthropic make sure to track down, contact and then share the digital copy they make with those who have rights on the work? If not, they are not making it in any way easier to re-print the books, while making their supply more scarce (they destroy existing embodiments).
Yes, the point being made is that poolside is able to train large models with limited resources, which means that Mistral should be able to compete in that space, as they have access to much greater resources than poolside. Mistral simply chooses not to.
And Poolside’s latest models (Laguna S 2.1) are pretty good (not frontier, but competitive with the tier 2 models). Which means that Mistral could certainly compete in that space.
While I agree that this setup is not very good, the EU Commission is essentially the equivalent of a government in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, and almost all such democracies I know about either have or have developed "ways" for the government to "push through" the will of the "chamber(s)". However, we do not consider those as farces as well, or so it seems to me, I guess mostly because those governments are still more or less directly "bootstrapped", and needs to be supported, by the chambers, which is what happens in the EU parliament as well.
No because we know that we have (in France) a president, a prime minister and ministers.
We know what they are in charge of (for the basic ministries), everyone knows who the president is, a lot who the PM is, and nobody knows the current ministers. But we know their jobs. They also refer to stuff which impacts us on a daiky basis.
The EU as a governing body is a mystery. Not only there are pieces that has almost the same name but are different things, they function in a remote world that does not interfere with ours. Like the UN.
The rest of Europe doesn't have presidential system.
Most of the Europeans know who the President of EC (so basically president in France or PM i other countries) is -- everyone hates beloved UvdL ;)
The same goes for comissioners - they mimic same roles as your government has but level up. Some positions may be more prominent (and names known), some less.
Then if you go level _DOWN_ to local authorities (regional, municipal) then people would most likely be clueless who-is-who-and-do-what.
Basically we live in dumbed-down world where people are aware of basically the only-single-strongest-figure (Presindent, PM) because… idiocracy…
I don't know the name of the person who runs utilities because they just work. I sure would know if there was a problem. This is the same with politics: when a country is stable and is moving ahead, people are not interested.
Look at the participation levels in elections: they are always high when there is substantial stuff on the scales. Otherwise it is moot.
That's true. Plus how the media/narrative works. EU is a very convenient scapegote for <everything bad happening in the country>. People are unaware how things works quite often and national politicians are "trigger happy" to blame everything on the EU…
Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
I see it too, but worth noting that this is basically unprecedented at least within the last 25 years; I think you have to go back to export controlled cryptography for another example of this kind of abrupt and targeted regulation.
Huawei, Foreign gambling sites were banned on dubious reasons in 2006 (in reality American companies weren't as competitive and las Vegas needed to be protected), Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s/90s ...
The US believed in free trade precisely when the politically connected needed labor arbitrage, and protectionism exactly when the politically connected needed protection. The pretense of underlying ideals was never more than a political tool - political economy was always political.
It depends on whether you believe US action is overdetermined, but I think if Trump didn’t get elected we would have continued on the path of free trade. His election wasn’t predestined. He had just the right mix of features to win at the time, but if this basket of features didn’t exist it’s not hard to imagine the country going down a very different path.
If we had continued on the path of free trade without "dealing in" those displaced by free trade, the pressure would have continued to grow. It certainly could have exploded in a different direction, at a different time, with a different champion, but so long as it was repressed instead of addressed it was always destined to explode.
Explosions are rarely productive. Populists are notorious for delivering lots of chaos and few results.
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
True, and we've been here before. The industrial revolution got rid of the need for most labor, which at the time was overwhelmingly agricultural and textile. We came out the other side OK.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
> But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse [...]
No, living conditions did not get worse. Yes, livings conditions were pretty bad during the early industrial revolution. But they hadn't exactly been rosy before.
> [...] they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
Which war are you talking about? There's been more than one, you know. And the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir for humanity: we never had as many dirt poor people as then and will hopefully never have as many. Remember, that's the time when there were genuine fears of global starvation. Things have been looking up a lot since perhaps around the 1980s and even more so in the following decades. Mostly thanks to PR China and India and South East Asia graduating from dirt poor to merely poor or even middle class.
You also seem confused. You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
Conditions did get worse in the industrial revolution. People didn't go to the city because they thought it was brilliant, they went to the city because their livelihood in the rural economy was disrupted. They were pushed (shoved), not pulled.
> the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir
People compare themselves to their parents and grandparents, you can only hustle so far in the face of lived experience.
> You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
In an extreme downturn (Europe bombing its cities), the poor undergo more real suffering but the rich undergo more nominal suffering so inequality is reset. Bombed out factories and apartments create an enormous demand for labor -- the broken window fallacy is only a fallacy if you studiously ignore distribution. This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
> People compare themselves to their parents and grandparents, you can only hustle so far in the face of lived experience.
Different people in different parts of the globe had different experiences.
People in rich parts of the globe had a pretty decent 1960s. People in PR China had the Cultural Revolution..
> This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
Why do you want to compare these two variables specifically?
Btw, during much of the 2010 real interest rates in the western world were negative while we had positive real growth. Thus r<0<g. Was that the golden age you yearn for?
George Friedman disagrees with you: he's been saying for years that US trade policy towards China had to change no matter who won the 2016 election (because an economy cannot rely on a trade partner it might go to war with, among other reasons).
When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).
"Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang"
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
Taking that political scenario as an example. Was the decline caused simply because Harley kept to the same working formula refusing to innovate for competition? As to the likes of Honda and Co?
Manufacturing is cheaper if you have access to resources and such. Japan may of had abundant of but in this case I don't feel it's was all about manufacturing costs.
Was it a cash cow situation, where their one formula was working but as well as where Harley were reluctant to invest in a different avenue, to innovate causing cow to dry up.
And that is when they called in the government to settle? That is always the impression I seem to receive.
Excluding manufacturing costs was it because they were scared of an innovation being a failure?
The same cash cow formula can be seen with the likes of Disney Pixar and Toy Story 5, a pointless movie plot at this point where if money was invested, a new creation could be born.
A current account deficit is a capital account surplus, assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
What you are seeing is "the bar" for a successful manufacturing business increasing until only the most profitable are left -- things like chips, things like shell companies that exist to monetize a brand. "New growth" isn't highly profitable so it never has a chance to get started (unless a recipient of an asset windfall is willing to finance it all the way to "the bar" -- see: Elon Musk).
Ah. I get it now. A established economic model is provable and that in five years you can forecast that if you follow X guide you'll end up on top with Y.
If competition is on the scene then how can you assure me that myself taking the risk of investing will return me the sum I wish for in return.
Production has already been established but the threat is in that an another forecastable model exists and that to catch up to their market will require more investment and expenditure which could lead in less chance of a return. And even if the model is copyable; as like the trope of Chinese knockoffs to of Japanese products, you're still at a lower advantage.
It's not they don't want to innovate but the risk to gamble on innovation is high enough that you could stifle competition cheaper via governmental means.
This slows their forecast and where you can then strategise to overcome the competition rather than risking expenditure via innovation. Crafty, cheers.
It's worth tracing this through every level in order to get the causality correct.
Triffin's Dilemma says that in the case of the modern USA, assets will be pumped. Macroeconomics says asset pump = export dump.
The way that economics dumps exports is by raising the bar (strong currency = poor customers, expensive assets = expensive houses = expensive labor, costs go up, price goes down, profitability is squeezed). Eventually the bar became impossible to hop without a cheat code like "good brand and no R+D" or "software level profitability".
At the individual level, manufacturing pay went in the shitter as the jobs dried up while house prices and stock prices went through the roof... so everyone who could became real estate agents, or doctors overcharging real estate agents, or sellers of investment scams to venture capitalists.
What's wild is that this happened to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and by the 1960s Triffin could see that it would happen to the US as well.
If you want details from an economist who does his homework, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
Weakening the dollar would make the export sector happy, but if you did enough of it to make the US export sector strong you would make assets unhappy. In fact, we have front row seats to this very lesson which appears to be even stronger in reality than it is in theory: we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Assets have had such a stranglehold over US politics for the last 50 years that if we ever actually run pro-export policy it won't be due to doomed self-promotion by exports (we even have a term for the pattern where this fails on first contact with tradeoffs: TACO) it will be because assets self-sabotage, implode, and exports fill the vacuum.
The exchange rate is a nominal phenomenon. Inflation adjusted interest rates and inflation adjusted asset values are a real phenomenon. They don't necessarily have much to do with each other.
Germany and Singapore are two prominent historic examples of countries that export just fine despite a strong currency.
Weakening your domestic currency has barely any impact on the real price of traded goods and commodities: they just price at the world market rate. The impact is felt for goods with sticky prices, chiefly labour. Weakening your currency is mostly a way to try and give everyone a wage cut. That can make your exports more competitive for a while. But it's not the only way to cut workers' wages. (And in general, later you seem to agree that giving ordinary people more real income is kind of the point of economics. So giving everyone a real wage cut seems a bit of a curious way to get there.)
> we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Rising yields fairly mechanically leads to a stronger dollar.
The Lerner Symmetry Theorem suggests roughly that import tariffs are equivalent to export taxes; and export subsidies are equivalent to import subsidies.
And the US is actually doing pretty well in exports, if you take into account that they are exporting not just goods but also services; and if you squint a bit, you can also see that Americans love to found new start-ups and new world beating companies and sell shares in them to the world. That's also a kind of export, but it shows up on the other side of the ledger for accounting reasons.
Similarly, if you build an office building in Seattle and sell it to a foreigner, that also doesn't show up as an export for accounting reasons.
The entire US auto industry is predicated on protectionism. Without it the Japanese would have wiped out GM/Ford/Chrysler in the 1980s, and now the Chinese in the 2020s-2030s.
TikTok ban was the worst one because it was about speech, not trade or security. If the bill said "China banned our social media so we're gonna ban theirs in reciprocity," that'd be a way more valid reason.
It's also super annoying being collateral damage in America's war on free speech. Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration. I guess we're still in a position of privilege where we can grow domestic social platforms to compete while American simply have no alternatives - anything that grows sufficiently large will be turned towards similar propaganda aims.
> Canadian TikTok is now also being similarly moderated for content unfriendly of your administration.
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
China didn't even blanket ban them. They established laws that Internet companies have to follow and most U.S. tech companies refused to comply. Some did (e.g. Bing) and aren't banned.
All social media is a toxic, ad-driven, algo-fueled surveillance tool at this point. Just regulate it all, equally, into the ground if we want to do society a service.
The fact that China's version of TikTok is nothing like what's available in the US should showcase how much the USG gives zero F's about it's citizens regardless of the political party you lean towards.
DJI, Huawei and the list goes on. Definitely no need to go back "25 years". The USG is turning into a joke of a surveillance state. As if any of the US based tech is truly any less backdoor'd? Cisco and Flock and Google and Facebook and Microsoft, oh what amazing technology companies that could never be used for... Oh wait, what a fantastic endgame we're on course for! I wonder why other nations are actively moving away from US tech?
A real headscratcher isn't it? And from a government that is supposedly priding itself on small government. How should companies navigate this? What's the framework they should operate within?
Claiming the mantle of "small government" was simply an exercise in marketing to relax regulation meant to prevent bribery and corruption. In practice, the current slate of government officials believes in absolute control of whatever they want whenever they want.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
This was certainly the rallying cry behind DOGE and the general push to rip the entrails out of many federal agencies. Combatting "waste" and "inefficiency," with strong implications that most of what those agencies do is pointless government meddling.
Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.
No I’m asking if ever said he was for small government.
From 2015 Trump has positioned himself as opposed to that style of republicanism. He offered a different playbook and the base followed.
What is happening is 40-50+ year olds haven’t updated their map of reality and continue to use talking political points from when they were 25.
One of the critiques of small government is its valueless. Instead of having to argue for or against positions you just say you don’t like it because it’s out of scope. Well now the inverse thing is happening in this thread. People are just saying he’s in violation of a small government principle he never espoused.
Good grief. I hadn't been watching reddit or the news today so you had me go check. Should've known. Friday at market close on the dot. So much for that deal huh.
Oh yes, the country that lost basically all its navy, air force, a large number of military facilities and couldn't defend its airspace. Iran won a lot indeed!
You are misled/misleading. Get informed about the political theory of domestic deployment of troops for the purpose of policing in western democracues. Look how those who speak for the U.S. military personell (former generals, the editorial of that magazine they produce in the U.S. army prior to being pruned) if you need some motivation.
The most important part of the mafia state is making everyone else a participant. It enforces your personal power and once in the system those parties will do things they would never imagine doing when they were outside of it.
It's also a defensive self-interest: A corrupt senior who takes bribes is indirectly threatened by any junior with a clean record, because they aren't "in the same boat."
So each wave corrupts (or eliminates) members of the next, in order to secure the safety of their own retirement when they won't have direct power.
This whole administration is absolutely rampant with corruption. Just yesterday we had JD Vance on TV saying that if Watergate happened today, it would just be a 12 hour news story, because they are getting away with so much worse.
Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
Can you point to examples in the past of a sitting US president pardoning the people who broke into a government building and tried to overthrow an election? Or one who accepted bribes for pardons? Started an unregulated cash exchange we can get accept money from foreign governments without oversight? What about giving their family members no-bid defense contracts?
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.
Yeah, that's what we need, frontier intelligence models open in the wild that, if a jailbreak is reliably established, there's no possibility for anyone to ever patch at the API layer. Because there is no API layer.
Between $5-10T of the US economy is subject to export controls. Nobody disputes that Mythos is dual-use technology, which means it has been export controlled since the day it was created.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
We saw what happened with banning nvidia flagship compute GPU exports to China; it just spurred them to develop a domestic semiconductor industry while still importing black market GPUs at a minor markup. The US would do well to keep the world dependent on American products that are under the jurisdiction of the US government, and can therefore be regulated or killswitched. All this will do is allow China to have flagship model capabilities without being subject to the US at all.
In some cases, even just bringing a 24K gold desk ornament to the WH is enough; but I suspect these tributes to Dear Leader are subject to inflation, possibly exponentially so.
That threat will probably result in a DOJ investigation into everyone involved until they hit something they think they can prosecute someone for, even if it's not true.
They could double down though, like actually follow through with just 1b and then threaten to do an extra 1b periodically until the investigations are dropped
But your government is constantly acting illegally. Isn't it time for Americans to... do something? It's clear that your legal framework isn't working.
Do what, exactly? Throw away our lives? 40% of the nation would rather die than vote for anyone other than a racist, and another 40% would tsk-tsk and say “that’s not how you’re supposed to do it”. There’s no revolution coming to save the day.
I think the founding fathers were pretty clear about what the American people are expected to do if the systems they put into place aren't enough to preserve freedom. If the colonists had just bent over and spread their cheeks saying "We sure hate being fucked but oh well! what else can we do? Throw away our lives?" we'd still have a king instead of just a wannabe. I'd be very nice if things don't come to that, but ultimately the responsibility to preserve our freedom and democracy is ours. It seems like there are plenty of people lined up to take them from us if we're willing to surrender them. The problem we have now is that an uncomfortably large minority seem happy to do just that.
Federal income tax didn’t exist until over a century after the founding fathers… founded. The idea was states… that would be united… which is where they got the name.
Federal politicians were not meant to have politics be their full time job, which is why congress has sessions.
The founding fathers would be extremely sad about the state of the country today. The frog was boiled too long ago for a revolution of the commoners to have any legs. They put in what they thought were explicit safeguards that have been systematically diluted, changed, or misinterpreted since the documents were created.
This is a super reductive reading of the American revolution. The idea of the colonies self governing was popular as hell, for obvious reasons. Our current situation is nowhere near the same thing. The people that aren’t frothing-at-the-mouth fascists are still, overall, comfortable enough in their daily lives that they wouldn’t consider violence against the government for a second. We can’t even get 40% of them to go vote.
You want to fight 80% of the nation? Be my guest, but for a violent revolution to be anything but a suicide mission you need to flip those numbers, or have the military on your side. And if you think the US military will flip against capital because of some strongly-held belief of “liberty” I have a bridge to sell you.
The only thing we can do is try to convince other people that this shit does actually matter. We’re so far in the hole, though, that it’s going to take a long fucking time to dig ourselves out. It’s not going to be some glorious revolution.
Maybe it's time to use those guns you always claim you need to keep in order to defend yourself from a government that is acting illegally? I mean isn't this THE EXACT REASON you always say you need them?
Did you mean this in the French Revolution sense (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) or in the American sense (the legislative, judicial, and executive branches)?
The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.
This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.
Ironic is claiming that Napoleon destroyed civil society, when his reforms are in many ways the foundation for modern civil society. Rule of law, national public education, the concept of a national bank, formation of the middle class, and so on. To say that Napoleon destroyed civil soceity is just plain wrong, Napoleon founded modern civil society.
To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.
I think there is a layer of truth to the idea that MAGA captured what England would call the Fourth Estate, the News Media.
England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.
So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.
In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...
Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.
MAGA has captured the media, if not entirely by design, but entirely in practice.
Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.
It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.
So I find claims that MAGA (or any other group) has captured the media to be self-contradictory: if they actually had, you would not be writing that, and I would not be able to read it. By definition. Capturing the media means that there is only one official narrative, and the population is completely unaware of anything outside of that narrative. Like the period from ~1950-1995, where you had the big 3 TV networks, and then each city had their own newspaper that basically owned a local monopoly, and they all basically printed/aired the same stories and same viewpoints.
IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.
No. Firstly no, the Network is just that, it's technology, you're describing culture, and the culture is a choice made by people of how to use that technology.
But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.
I find the definition that unless the capture is 100%, it isn't actually capture to be absurd.
Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.
Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.
The MSM doesn't count as much because of social media noise and paywalls. One could always control the narrative with tweets written in caps with multiple exclamation signs that the MSM reproduces and amplifies for fun and prifit.
It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.
The ideas are debatable but generally correct. The EU's problem is that regulation stops at the ideas, and it is intentionally designed so to be impossible to ensure compliance in advance. So the regulation is really after the fact and a subjective judgment by regulators. So there's tons of risk even if you genuinely believe you're complying with the prescribed intents.
My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.
IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.
(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)
I understand that desire entirely, but I’m not sure if it would work that way. Take an ISO 27001 certification (or SOC, if you like): There is no one clear set of things to do, but both guidance and requirements that you need to address and be able to defend your concrete implementation.
And I generally like that a lot better than having a set of hard this-way-or-no-way checklists that invariably consist of 80% bullshit ceremony for giant corporations. ISO nudges you toward that too, but if you’re able to deliver the same security guarantees with less, auditors will usually be happy.
The same, in general, works for GDPR regulations as well: The law is mostly about doing the right things, but not spelling out the billions of cases and permutations and strategic decisions involving privacy in one way or another.
It's deliberately not prescriptive as the implementers are the ones best placed to solve for requirements - you don't want policy makers providing technical checklists. And it's not unstructured - ISO 42001 essentially encodes it.
Im not happy with the AI act in entirety either, but my point was that it’s hard to read it and say "this isn’t generally the right thing to do", where right means responsible and beneficial to society as a whole.
Is it responsible and beneficial if the end result is that we will be forever stuck using foreign made AI? And on top of that we will get brain drain for the people that want to work on AI?
Honestly? That’s a big philosophical question, and I don’t know if I can really answer it.
But I do personally prefer living in a value-backed society - even if the implementation is imperfect, even if I have to make personal concessions - over one that aims for maximised efficiency.
More fundamentally, imho the 20th and 21st century are about competition of systems. And the only system I can get behind is one that strives for minimal suffering. The EU or social liberal democracy isn’t that, but it comes closest.
The problem is that if your system loses then your system stops existing. This already is the case with AI - all the relevant AI is made according to other people's preferences and we have no say in it. Sure, we can regulate what kind of AI is used in the EU, but if they aren't selling AI to us directly, but instead using AI to make something that they sell to us then we can't compete with that.
In the end the only winner that emerges out of this is China. Tge EU is over regulating everything, the current US administration is randomly banning things left and right.
Maybe, but as I wrote in a sibling comment, I prefer to not go down the slippery slope of lowering our standards to compete with nations like the US or China - that isn't a battle the EU can win.
Don't forget that the EU is still a market so big noone can ignore us - especially for the US, we're the only opportunity for the growth required to keep their economy (and 401k pensions!) afloat. So there really is no immediate need to cave to their every whim all the time.
Of course this is nothing to rest on, and the EU has to improve on many fronts and also get better on the amount of regulation, but we're by no means in a bad position (yet.)
Our AI czar, David Sacks, whined and moaned about the idea of regulation, even said Anthropic begging for some guidance was asking for “regulatory capture” and was gloating about how right he was they wanted it, 2 weeks ago.
No, it’s not leopards ate my face / irony / comeuppance, because that would involve regulation.
I understand it’s very satisfying if you wanted Anthropic “punished” for asking for real regulation to see this. I can’t deny there was a little bit of me at first that felt that way.
It’s untenable, a first order reaction, that I regret intellectually, because if you were against regulation, you’re certainly against waves whatever this is.
Your position is “he made it happen by saying he didn’t want it to happen” with maybe a side order of “when he knows Mr. Trump doesn’t like him”
I posit that these ideas are common, and come from a place of Mr. Trump is more or less a normal president because they all do bad stuff, and regulation is Creating Monopilies. To wit, there’s 0 reason to believe the person you originally replied to’s claim that Anthropic wanted to kill startups. It’s just a random implication of what bad regulation can do.
He made it happen by continuously using doomsday marketing to pump up model capabilities. This is the comeuppance.
There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.
None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.
Is it really ironic or just yet another example of how the current administration just keep finding ways to line their pockets? Big Tech has lots of money, and they'd just like to get a little taste. Placing arbitrary restrictions is a pretty good motivator for those being restricted to find some way to make necessary contributions.
On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
>but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
A web browser can't decide to hack a bank anymore than a LLM can. Neither have any understanding of what a bank is or any will to act on their own. The person who instructs/uses a web browser to hack a bank (even if it's someone else's browser) commits the crime.
I think pretty obviously if the user instructs the computer to hack the bank then they are guilty of hacking the bank, I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
> LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
Right. This isn't the crux because we all agree that if the person instructs the LLM to hack a bank then the person is culpable.
The part we don't agree on is what happens when the LLM "decides" (substitute a different word if you don't like that word) to hack a bank, incidentally, as part of carrying out some more benign instruction.
>But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
Yes it is the crux of the issue. Software executing other software is how computers work, they'd be useless if that wasn't the case, that's the premise of all automation. It doesn't matter whether it's a python script, a neural net or a computer virus.
When autonomous weapons kill people the persons in charge aren't less culpable because they didn't push a button. Culpability is a property of legal and natural persons. A machine is not culpable of anything. There is always a human being 100% responsible for the deployment of a machine. If that system has capacities to function on its own, the person delegating that task assumes responsibility for it.
Yes. This is the crux. If a person operating a computer wants it to do some benign thing, but (accidentally) it does some terrible thing, are they equally guilty, or less guilty, compared to if they deliberately asked it to do the terrible thing?
To my mind, if the terrible thing was an accident, the person is less guilty. I'm surprised this is controversial.
You might say "well they ought to know that LLMs are too dangerous to use and they shouldn't use them". That's fine! There's a spectrum. We can have "negligence" in between "total accident" and "deliberate malice".
We'll only know when that gets tested in court, but I'd be willing to bet the answer will be: yes, you have hacked a bank. I find it very hard to believe the justice system would let someone off on some technicality around intention and agents after a serious bank hack.
There is a baseline level of competence and motivation needed to commit crimes.
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
Too overbearing though and you get... Mistral? A continent that hasn't been on the leading edge of anything (other that expansion of the regulatory state) for decades, and Europe feels it in their employment numbers.
Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.
Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)
So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.
> Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment
This obviously doesn't tell the whole story, because it only measures people actively in the workforce. Meanwhile, a far larger portion of Sweden's population is actually employed compared to the US.
Sweden's laborforce participation rate is 76% and in the US it is 62%. Sweden's employment rate is 69% and US's is 59%. Which statistics are more important?
Other comments have already mentioned that true labor force participation is higher in all of those countries than the US. But also, they all have better lives than the US. They live longer, access better education, healthcare.
Bank should be more secure, if a random person with an LLM can hack them, they should have paid 100 random blue teamers with LLMs to hack them first to get more secure. Not AI's fault.
Pretty sure you mean red team here. While I've heard people refer to any offensive security (eg including blackhat) as 'red team' , it typically means people you've hired or contracted to try to break into your systems, whereas the blue team are people you've hired to build and operate your security defenses. Red and blue team are both your employees / contractors but perform different functions.
The purpose of policies like this is precisely to ensure that those 100 runs do happen first, rather than allowing a free-for-all where they have to race to secure their systems.
The US is already behind and has been technically. Can't wait for that part to sink in.
This start to be a source of second hand embarrassment when I see US folk think their country is still leading the race technically.
Define leading then. Mythos and GPT score higher on all the benchmarks versus Chinese models. I suppose your anti-american mindset has given you a different definition of leading than the rest of us.
I'm fine with this in principle, it's more like regulations last. They looked at the end result and decided it was too powerful to let loose. But also expect the Trump administration to unfairly use it as leverage against US corps.
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
This applies to most things when it comes to the USG/citizens. Protectionism is communist unless they do it. Thinking about developing a nuke? Well bomb you first despite being the only people to ever use them. Free speech and press - unless we don’t like what you say.
They're not regulating though – they're arbitrarily blocking releases based on no clear criteria. The EU may be legalistic and rules-based, but I'd take that over capricious and arbitrary.
Yes, Trump is the worstPresident we’ve had, the Supreme Court is captured by conservatives, the Republicans would rather die than vote against Trump, we know all of this.
I wish the EU were legalistic and rules based, but the commission and politicians are involved in many of these things. It's like Trump's executive stuff, just with a committee instead of a single person, and I guess, with less power.
The EU is nothing but capricious and arbitrary. Much of the DMA and similar is pure vibes that you can't know if you violated until the regulators do their divinations months or years after you shipped.
Let's plan a fire fighter division only once we are actually having some buildings in the city burning down. That people who fear that ridiculous perfectly controlled fire in chemines are ridiculous.
It sounds nice but you end up with entrenched special interests that later oppose all regulation regardless of the consequences. We have pesticides you wouldn't want anywhere near your children casually used to control weeds on kid's playgrounds, insanely huge trucks that kill hundred each year, the food is garbage...the list is long and tiresome. Trust me brother, if I could live in the EU, I would.
I agree. But that need has absolutely arisen. The US government is not exactly the best steward for this kind of thing, but some model other than "race each other as fast as we can" is desperately needed here.
Oddly, the website lists "M4 Ultra" which however does not exist... Also, it does not account for Apple Silicon chips to have up to 512GB of memory in some cases, but that might be only a limitation of the gathered data.
I only started charging customers in September. Super-linear growth. I launched annual subscriptions and within less than a week > 15% of customers switched.
There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
> If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D
I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive.
I'm still half cheering it because at the very least it's still nuclear progress, and will help ensure we still have nuclear energy workers for another generation here. I worry a lot about what's been done to the Atomic Energy Workers in terms of whittling away at our capability to produce good energy workers with tribal wisdom and the Canadian nuclear culture of safety.
Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival.
>But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.
Because the level of permitted development without being crushed by onerous regulatory burdens has been absurdly hamstrung on nuclear. All of the issues you add as "but" cases are things that many different innovations in a fluid market for research could have refined. The same has been done for many complex technologies over the decades, yet for nuclear there's always some excuse like the ones you mention. The comment you replied to is right. We're talking about something that since decades ago could have been improved enormously, and hasn't been thanks to a multitude of stupidities.
The United States Navy trusts extremely compact reactors (designed and working despite the DoD's notoriously lax financial and schedule stringency with defense contractors) to power its absolute most important, costly, defense-crucial war machines, and regularly docks them right inside the country's (and world's) largest urban areas, but somehow there's just no way to make nuclear power for civilian use more compact, cheaper and effective?
The regulatory burden argument doesn't explain why renewables are trouncing new nuclear in China. I view it as a universal excuse nuclear fans trot out to explain away inconvenient realities. They also never explain how the regulatory burden would be reduced in a way that doesn't compromise safety. And regulated safety is the price the nuclear industry pays for liability limits.
> Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience.
I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically?
The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.
There are two different economies of scale at play here; but if that's the case, I can accept things that are bigger than a train container. Even if we decide that they still have to be just as big as existing reactors, the key thing here is that nobody should start the new wave of nuclear by building a nuclear plant. You have to start it by building factories that produce nuclear plants themselves as a commodity item.
Haven't we learned that already in devops? A nuclear reactor today is a big hand-bombed snowflake. I want nukes-as-code.
Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy.
I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.
Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost
As was repeatedly explained in that other thread, thermal storage of the kind described there is inherently a long term storage technology, and this drives the design to minimize capex, not maximize round trip efficiency. The focus on efficiency is fundamentally misplaced there, as it becomes orders of magnitude less important compared to diurnal storage (which batteries appear to be well on their way to dominating.)
Long term storage and diurnal storage are complementary technologies, sort of like the different levels of cache and main memory in a computer memory hierarchy. Combining them appropriately reduces cost vs. using just one of them.
Anyway, the technology as described would produce heat at 600 C for as little as $3/GJ, which nuclear would have a hard time competing with.
You misplaced a decimal point. A MWH is 3.6 GJ, so it's $10.8/MWH.
$3/GJ is about the current Henry Hub price for natural gas, and as you should know cheap natural gas like this is what killed the "nuclear renaissance" in the US.
Sure. 600 C is about the temperature of steam in a coal fired power plant, so one of the use cases here is to take an old coal plant and replace the heat source. It's much higher temperature than the steam in a LWR, so the turbine can be smaller and cheaper. Also, no steam generator is needed as in a PWR.
Yes? That doesn't mean the capex of a steam turbine for this application would be unaffordable, or that this wouldn't have superior economics to nuclear (which also has a steam turbine, and a more expensive one).
This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators).
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
You're just trying to smear a conclusion you don't like with fatuous insults.
The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again?
BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget.
Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what.
Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned?
Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number.
If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source.
China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point.
You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.
You seem to misunderstand me - I'm not some nuclear fanboy, but I'm looking for a powerplant solution that's 3 things: universal (unlike hydro), always available (unlike renewables) and sustainable (unlike gas and coal).
It seems that with SMRs, nuclear is finally getting to that state. I would like to ask you - what is your problem with it?
For me I wouldn't like to live next to a nuclear power plant, but I'd overwhelmingly prefer living there compared to a chemical plant - and there are a lot more of those everywhere.
Plants are huge investment of time and effort and I believe the costs mainly come down sabotage to pearl clutchers like the Greenpeace folks who think every plant is going to turn into Chernobyl, bureaucrats with their own loyalties and agendas of preserving a lucrative status quo and a huge civilizational laziness in the West results in a lack of will to get together and see things through in a timely manner.
Living in the UK but being from another EU country, I definitely see that happening. However, a lot of times it is just due to habits, wrongly-placed mistrust, or not being well settled-in yet because, at the end of the day, there are eg. better GPs and worse GPs everywhere in the world, but if you are still "new" to the country you simply do not know which ones are which, so you prefer to go to the ones you know already.
I'm not entirely sure if the UK has a public-private health system. What I do know is that companies offer private health insurance, even though everyone has access to the NHS. That suggests there's a private system in place, one that probably attracts the most experienced and competent doctors and GPs?
About 10% of people have private health insurance, but note that a large proportion of service providers in the private space also work for the NHS.
E.g. my old GP used to provide both private and NHS services (they were precluded by their NHS contracts from providing private services to people registered with them with the NHS).
Many NHS trusts also provide private services, as they are allowed to do so to improve utilisation and supplement their budgets, so in practice this is part of the reason the NHS is so cheap compared to universal systems in similarly rich countries.
Most private hospitals in the UK also e.g. rely on NHS for intensive care, and this, along with relying on the NHS for first-line care (A&E, GP's unless there's a wait, etc.) is also why private health insurance in the UK is unusually cheap, and why private hospitals in the UK are unusually cheap (if you're in the US, and planning elective treatments, it can be cheaper to fly to London and do it here, even factoring in hotels - and some Central London hospitals have hotel suites, and at least one have or had a previously Michelin starred chef because they cater - literally - to high-end international healthcare tourism).
Oh yeah, healthcare in the US is insanely expensive. They have top professionals, but if you don't have money for long, complex treatments, your options are basically: sell your house, or fly to Cuba, Costa Rica, or the UK for treatment.
I always thought linking all the main things not working in the actual world to the alienation caused by too much digital consumption to be wrong/not really making sense. However, gradually, I am getting closer and closer to that conclusion... In your case, what brought you to the stance "Too much social media is what ails the whole world"? What do you think we could do to solve it?
Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
Are you sure this isn't an Eternal September thing where the initial organizers were just an early-adopting minority, now overrun by a majority that actually has broad consensus on many issues? Also, do you actually have any evidence of bot effects? Would you be able to unleash a bunch of bots on Bluesky and make it seem to have a consensus on tariffs being a good policy?
If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
Did you ever consider that all the concerns regarding the negatives of new media might have some truth to them?
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
So, because some people in the past made (to you) incorrect arguments about something, that means anyone in the future making a remotely similar argument automatically has to be wrong? People in 2025 discussing social media have to be "wrong" because some subset of the population supposedly (to you) made a bad argument about radio 100 years ago?
All of that is broadcast / one direction. Social media is two-way. We've never had two-way mass communication. The rate of communication was an order of magnitude different also.
That doesn't make those claims invalid. Too much television is also a problem, and a lot of television content is junk. Tabloid newspapers are a scourge, as are opinion writers whose output often consists of fallacious propaganda designed to maximize confirmation bias.
In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate?
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
As the other user said, people have been warning about new forms of media since the invention of writing. It has always been in vogue to be a nay sayer.
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.
I don't if that is true: a lot of old books might still have copy or other rights associated to them, likely owned by author and/or publisher, directly or inherited, but often those who have the rights do not have digital or physical copies at hand anymore (some old books are, well, really old). Does Anthropic make sure to track down, contact and then share the digital copy they make with those who have rights on the work? If not, they are not making it in any way easier to re-print the books, while making their supply more scarce (they destroy existing embodiments).