> Many providers build their proxy pools by partnering with device owners who agree to share their bandwidth, while others use embedded SDKs in free apps or VPNs.
I used to part time for the (Danish) mail service.
The only sorting that was done automatically was the post codes. That was enough to get the letter to the right post office. The rest was done by the mailmen/women early in the morning.
It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what was meant by some of the addresses. The older people in particular often knew the story of why certain places were sometimes addressed in certain ways, or could guess the addresses based on the names of the people living there.
> After reading the article, the main "case against geometric algebra" I could find in there was that the author does not like the people using/doing research in geometric algebra
Mathematics is a social activity. The research cultures of different branches matter.
I recently built a very large test bench for System Verilog.
I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source ones.
Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM (Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test bench wasn't to blame.
But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.
It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues. But then, maybe they could just have their LLMs do the same.
> The rate of fundamental, broad-based breakthroughs lifting all LLM applications has clearly slowed with many of the most impactful recent discoveries being in scaling, optimization, tuning and productization toward specific domains.
To me it definitely feels like it's still accelerating, with the most impactful recent discovery being RL training reasoning models (late '24, early '25).
There's an interesting article called "sigmoids won't save you" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you which argues that (unless you have privileged information) you should always assume a process will continue about as long as it’s continued already. (Lindy's Law)
With that in mind the current disruption should last another 10-15 years (assuming it started in '10 or '17.)
The human savant will remember where they read it and give you credit. It might lead more people to read your work, and ultimately you make money.
The AI won't even know where the page of text it's seeing came from, and people will avoid your book as they can just ask the AI. So you make less money. (Talking about specialized technical books here.)
> In 1983 David DeWitt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt) published benchmarking results showing poor performance for Oracle databases. Larry Ellison wasn't happy with the results and it's said that he tried to have DeWitt fired.
> Given how difficult it is to fire professors when there's actual misconduct, the probability of Ellison sucessfully getting someone fired for doing legitimate research in their field was pretty much zero. It's also said that, after DeWitt's non-firing,
> Larry banned Oracle from hiring Wisconsin grads and Oracle added a term to their EULA forbidding the publication of benchmarks. Over the years, many major commercial database vendors added a license clause that made benchmarking their database illegal.
Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.