Pretty much all tech companies and universities had a drop-in ftp server where anyone could, anonymously, put and retrieve files. It was a collective 'pastebin' useful to exchange information with clients and partners.
On the ftp server of the company I worked for, someone had put a cracked copy of our software for their colleagues to use.
Or I guess the kid can set it if they're smart enough to reinstall the OS or spawn a VM. I'm sure there will be online resources to help them that kids know how to share
Or, as I like to put it: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to figure what is it I really want. And still, quite often, I think in terms of the programming language I'm used to and the library I'm familiar with.
So, to really create something new that I care about, LLMs don't help much.
In Europe, more and more public transportation is free, or at least very heavily subsidized
The costs are covered by local taxes, to curb on individual vehicle use and reduce congestion. After some hiccups, some cities manage good economies of scale where everybody, including the environment, wins.
As for housing and food, while there the incentive structure is more fragile, at least, we have homeless shelters that are free, and once again, everybody wins: the costs are very low, and cities are far safer and cleaner.
It is not entirely true that no one cares about quality. I'd like to stay optimistic and believe that those who are demanding on the quality of their production will acquire sufficient market differentiation to prevail.
After all, this has been Apple strategy since the 80's, and, even though there were some up's and down's, overall it's a success.
I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.
If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.
My way of phrasing this: I need to activate my personal transformers on my inner embeddings space to really figure what is it that I truly want to
write.
I'm more and more convinced top execs are most likely to be advantageously replaced by LLM.
They navigate such complex decision spaces, full of compromises, tensions, political knots, that ultimately their important decisions are just made on gut feelings.
Replace the CEO with an LLM whose system prompt is carefully crafted and vetted by the board of directors, with some adequate digital twin of the company to project it's move, I'm sure it should maximize the interest of the shareholders much better.
Next up: apply the same recipe to government executive power. Couldn't be much worse than orange man.
Even Knuth, in TAOP, acknowledges that using O(n) asymptotic behavior as a measure of performance is just a heuristic and not an absolute.
Cache-awareness and structure discovery are 2 important tools of the engineer to optimize practical problems.
If we wanted a reliable measure of the difficulty of a problem instance, it should rely on a function of O(K(n)) where K is the kolmogorov complexity of the input.
My numbers come from conversations I recall with René Amalberti, a notable specialist in the area, having advised, among others, Airbus. The conversations were around 1993-96, when I was doing my PhD, and thus may be a bit blurry by now. Also, it is perfectly possible the reference values and measurement units have evolved since then.
Still your projection shows that both reference indicators and actual values are in the ballpark of the estimates I cited.
My (and Amalberti's) main point is that safety assessment is not just about minimizing the raw number of accidents, but involves tradeoffs between various concerns, including psychological perception and revenue. Otherwise, the safest airline would be the one that does not fly anyone.
Fun fact: in the 90's, the reference gauge for aircraft safety was 1 accidental fatality per 100 million hours of passenger flight. Which is amazingly safe, far better than car and on a par with train.
Now, facing the growth of air travel, it was decided to raise this bar to 1 per billion hour. Not as an end by itself - this comes at very high cost and had a significant impact on travel prices. But because, with the growth of air travel, this would have implied one major accident per fortnight on average. And because those accident are more spectacular and relayed by media, civil aviation authorities feared this might raise angst and deter the public from air travel.
So, safety was enhanced, but mostly for marketing reasons.
The enterprise had to declare me as an apprentice for 'trade jobs', as it was against the law to give a regular salary to someone under 16.
I remember my first paycheck with deductions for retirement, which pissed me off quite a bit.