Well Starlink has 12 million subscribers, which is already more than 0.1% of the population, so clearly you are incorrect that 99.9% of people don't want it...
> Obviously the author has irreversibly became AI-pilled and the day API costs balloon or APIs are down, what work will the author do?
I am old enough to remember having these thoughts when documentation for things moved from books to being online. I thought looking things up in the internet was a recipe for failure, because the internet was new and unstable and changing, and what happens if you run out of your 10 hours a month of being online, or if someone in your house picks up the phone and you are disconnected?
Clearly those people were internet pilled, and the day the internet costs ballooned or was down, what would they do?
I think this is just a sign that AI is now participating in the normal evolution of language over time. Language has always been about imitating... someone or some group comes up with a word/phrase/saying and uses it, other people hear/read it, and if they like it and/or find it useful, they incorporate it into their lexicon. This process is constant, and words and phrases are tweaked and morphed over the years as trends come and go.
Now, AI is participating in that process. It reads human words, and some of those words end up getting used more based on the algorithm, and then people read those words and copy some of them. This will feed back in to the AI as it ingests more content, and the feedback cycle is complete.
I think this is exactly what the person you are replying to is saying; everyone knows it, but the people in charge of setting up the incentives still don’t seem interested in changing the incentives.
A few years back I underwent an effort to image a bunch of old 3.5” floppies I had from when I was a kid. I used KryoFlux, and had a close to 100% success rate (eventually)
Some things I learned:
1. Different drives could read different sectors. I am not exactly sure why, but some disks would show bad sectors when read from one drive, but would have a different set of bad sectors when read from a different one. I had 5-6 different drives I was using (I bought a bunch of used drives, they are pulled from old hardware and resold). I think it likely has something to do with the heads being slightly misaligned or something, so they would struggle with different sectors.
What I would do is scan a disk with one drive, and if I found any bad sectors, I would re-scan with a different drive. I would repeat this process until I had at least one good scan of each sector. I would then pull the missing sectors in one scan from a scan that succeeded on that sector, and would patch together an entire image.
2. I didn’t realize how varied the formats are for disks I had. I remember single vs double sided, but there were quite a few other variations I found in my collection.
3. If you hang out with computer nerds of a certain age, you are going to be surprised by how many of them still have a collection of old floppies that they can’t access anymore. I had so many requests to help archive many different collections!
It really doesn’t, and it is easy to demonstrate by using an extreme example.
Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%
Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?
Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.
I don't think those previous capitalists were any different than the ones today, they just didn't have the same opportunity. It wasn't possible to build a company the size of modern ones with the technology at the time.
Look, I am not saying there aren't horrible flaws with capitalism. There are a ton, and we should, as a society, work to mitigate them.
I just don't think the solution to the problem is for us to ask capitalists to not seek the highest margin. This is not a problem that is fixed by people just being more moral.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
This is the frustrating thing reading these comments, where people seem to assume that any profit margin is good enough to sustain a business.
People see a 3% return and think, "Well, they aren't losing money so there is no reason they can't just keep doing business as usual." What this idea is missing is that the investors in a company aren't choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "sit on the cash", they are choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "invest my money somewhere else"
In other words, you aren't just looking at direct returns on an investment, you also have to think of the OPPORTUNITY COST of the investment. By keeping their money invested in a business making 3% returns, they can't invest that money somewhere else.
"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism. I get your complaint, but if you reframe it I think it isn't the real problem here.
The whole point of a market-based economy is to allocate resources to making things people actually want. How does the market figure out what people want more of? Well, profit margin. If someone is making a lot of profit selling something, that is a really good sign that people want more of that thing. Other people see the high profit margin, and move to get into that business. More of that thing is created, and people's demand is satisfied.
The high profit margin is the signal (and the incentive) to get more of that thing.
In other words "Compulsively chasing only the highest margins" can be rephrased as "investing in things that people want more of"
On the other hand, I drive to Target to pick up curbside deliveries quite a few times a month, and I am almost only driving there just for that one trip. I would probably do the same if I was going to Costco rather than Target, I just hate the Costco parking lots in my city so I don't use Costco.
I don't know which of us is the more common scenario. What other sorts of things are you doing in the area when you go to Costo? I simply don't have that many things I have to drive for, so I don't have other errands to combine with my bulk good pickups.
You aren't seeing the entire picture, though, so it makes it hard to understand the efficiency calculation.
How full are those Amazon trucks, and how many deliveries are they each making on their route? If those Amazon trucks are all full, and are making deliveries constantly along their routes, than more trucks doesn't mean less efficiency.
They aren't optimizing for "fewest truck trips to the block", they are optimizing for total cost. As long as we price in all the externalities properly (which we don't, but we could and should), then Amazon is going to be strongly incentivized to create the most efficient delivery schedule.
That may include many trucks running to the same location, or it may not. You can't tell which will be most resource efficient just by observing.
It focuses on the average (mean), but does not talk about the distribution at all. It groups ALL uses of AI together, which isn't very helpful in determining if it is worth it or not to use AI for a specific purpose.
For example, these stats could mean every single use gets 3% time savings, or some uses get 80% time savings and other use cases actually take more time.
You can certainly have a problem with Elon Musk, but the people who have invested money with him over the years have done quite well for themselves.