Everyone I know who had cancer (and that is a large and increasingly growing list...) found out about it because they went in to the doctor for a non-routine appointment because they felt pain, or felt a lump, or had a weird reaction to a vaccine, or whatever else. Even early stage cancer can produce symptoms, and luckily most of those people survived.
We don't need to resort to cultural tropes like "face" to explain this.
This is about power and control. The Communist party does not want any other centers of power or control to emerge which might challenge the party. Jack Ma, and the tech industry in general, was emerging as such a power. Now that problem has been taken care of.
Point 2 does not logically follow from point 1. That's the entire problem here.
Between point 1 and 2 there must be quite a few other steps, causally linked, otherwise it's just a massive imaginary leap based on assumptions that nobody is explaining.
> The dismissals from Tyler Cohen and Pinker are mostly just relying on heuristics which are often right, but even if they're right 999 out of 1000 times, if that 1 in 1000 error is the end of humanity, that's pretty bad.
EY is not arguing that the end of humanity is merely possible. He is arguing that it is obviously the most likely outcome and will almost certainly happen a very short time after AGI is invented. That's a much harder case to make.
EY's arguments aren't really possible to engage with because they don't have much of a causal basis.
Nobody who says AI is likely to kill us all can demonstrate a plausible sequence of events, with logical causality linking the events together, that leads to mass extinction. It's all very handwavy.
Steven Pinker said it pretty well:
> The AI-existential-threat discussions are unmoored from evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, real AI, sociology, the history of technology and other sources of knowledge outside the theater of the imagination. I think this points to a meta-problem. The AI-ET community shares a bad epistemic habit (not to mention membership) with parts of the Rationality and EA communities, at least since they jumped the shark from preventing malaria in the developing world to seeding the galaxy with supercomputers hosting trillions of consciousnesses from uploaded connectomes. They start with a couple of assumptions, and lay out a chain of abstract reasoning, throwing in one dubious assumption after another, till they end up way beyond the land of experience or plausibility. The whole deduction exponentiates our ignorance with each link in the chain of hypotheticals, and depends on blowing off the countless messy and unanticipatable nuisances of the human and physical world. It’s an occupational hazard of belonging to a “community” that distinguishes itself by raw brainpower. OK, enough for today – hope you find some of it interesting. (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/st...)
You know what's most likely to lead to human extinction, and has been for all of our lives? Nuclear war. EY argues that we should bomb "rogue" datacenters and that is obviously and immediately more dangerous than anything he has proven about AI. What does he think would happen if the US bombs a datacenter in China or Israel bombs one in Iran?
I'm not calling UBI communism. That's not the point.
My point is that if we could simply invent any economic system we wanted, communism would have worked.
Communism failed because it's not possible to do that, because there really are some things about human nature and the way economies and societies work that we can't ignore or change, and those factors prevent utopian schemes from working.
You can't just engineer whatever the heck you want out of an economic system, or a government, or an entire society. There are at least some fundamental laws of nature, including human nature, at play.
After a century of failed communist experiments all over the world, it's disappointing that people still believe that utopian economic systems are possible.
Even if it does, it will simply mimic the systems other companies have created and documented, because GPTs don't create anything new. They recombine what already exists.
Plus let's be honest, the technical problems are the tip of the iceberg for software architecture. If an AI ever manages to convince my director to pay for things I'd be happy for the help.
There is always going to be a chorus about something. Power users are impossible to please because they all have strong opinions but not the same opinions.
People will still want different screen resolutions, aspect ratios, keyboard layouts, etc. Now that AMD is available people will want particular CPU SKUs. It will never end.
I wish Framework luck, because they are targeting the pickiest userbase that exists.
Banking has been a quasi-government-operated industry for over 100 years, since the creation of the Fed in 1913, the creation of the FDIC in 1933, and the increased regulation since 2008.
In 2008 the Fed created a two-layer banking system: banks that were "too big to fail" whose deposits are effectively insured for infinite amounts, and all other banks whose deposits are insured for $250k. Nobody realized this until a few weeks ago, and without the government's scramble to respond everyone would have moved their deposits to the big banks, killing all the others.
People finally realized this because of duration risk on long-term investments. Who caused that duration risk to actually manifest as a real problem? The Fed! The same people who are supposed to run the banking system in a stable way have contributed to the instability of the banking system by keeping rates low for so long, overreacting to Covid, assuming inflation was "transitory", and then raising rates very quickly trying to squash the inflation they caused.
That's not capitalism. We haven't had capitalism in banking for a century.
People have an impression that banking is a private industry and the government comes in to bail it out, when really the government was involved the entire time.
Aside from the crash in 2008, where the Fed really did help, a number of the major recessions in the past century have either been caused by or made worse by the Fed, including the Great Depression by Bernanke's own admission.
Banking regulations certainly need to be changed because of what happened last week, but the way the Fed is run should definitely also be changed.
VCs are a convenient scapegoat but if you look at what actually happened, this is the fault of bankers and bank regulators.
Are we supposed to blame people for putting money in a bank that had a solid track record since the 1980s, and didn't have any regulatory red flags? Are we supposed to blame VCs for not knowing about the bank's investment problems when the regulators who were supposed to know about them didn't know either? Should we blame founders for taking banking advice from their funders and boards of directors?
Are we supposed to forget that the era of easy money the article dislikes was created by the Fed, and that the duration risk on long-term securities that doomed SVB was also realized because of the Fed's reaction to its previous mistakes?
We should blame everyone, including the government, for this mess.
When people like the author single out VCs and rant about AI being a boondoggle it's clear they just don't like or understand tech. Tech has been the space program of our generation.
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
VCs made all those good things possible and if we also get dog-walking services and NFTs of monkeys that's a small price to pay.
Why do people think VCs are libertarians? Most of them are Democrats! So are most major tech CEOs. Political contributions are publicly recorded if you want to see where any individual stands…
And when did VCs rail against “bailouts” in the past?
There is a pretty big difference between being a mainstream capitalist and being a libertarian.
Of course it is irrelevant to depositors, that is why the bank failed.
However, it also proves that holding bonds to maturity is different from selling them at market rates. It demonstrates the distinction between solvency and liquidity. Every financial publication has made this point when discussing SVB in order to educate their readership about the problems of duration risk and explain how a bank with enough assets to cover liabilities can still fail.
Now, the nice thing is, the government has time to wait for the bonds to mature. So the government can take the bonds, pay off the depositors, and get the money back when the bonds mature. The government won't lose money if they do it right -- just like they didn't lose money with TARP in 2008.
The whole subscription box industry consists of undifferentiated companies with zero moat. Look at any category: beauty products, men's grooming products, wine, watches, etc. and you'll see a bunch of companies that all look the same selling the same stuff.
On top of that, the first thing people cut when they have money problems are luxury subscriptions they don't really need.
I don't know why anyone would invest in any of these companies.
You can spend a lot of time getting databases and other stateful workloads to work -- mess around with StatefulSet and PVC on top of all the normal Kubernetes concepts, and what do you get in the end? Are you really better off than you would have been if you ran the database in EC2?
Plus, "herds not pets" kind of breaks down once you start using StatefulSets and PVCs. Those things exist to make Kubernetes more like a static environment for workloads that can't handle being run like ephemeral cattle. So why not just keep using your static environment?
If Kubernetes is the only workload management control plane you have, then I guess this makes sense. But if you are already able to deploy your databases with existing tools, and those existing tools don't really suck, it's probably not worth migrating. It would take a lot of time and introduce significant new risks and operational complexity without a compensating payoff.
There is also a ton of legal and compliance complexity.
Imagine you sell things in 100 countries -- whether it's apps in an app store, or games, or movies, or physical goods. Now you have at least 100 legal and regulatory regimes to deal with around pricing, credit card stuff in general, refunds, age verification for regulated content, advertising restrictions, EULAs, GDPR, etc. In the United States alone there are 50 legal systems to deal with. Plus there are tons of localization and internationalization issues.
An enormous amount of work is needed to get all that stuff right and not be sued or fined out of existence. It's not just work for lawyers, it's work for all the software teams who have to implement the business logic to tailor the user experience for each set of customers and keep everything in legal bounds. Simple mistakes can cause your company to break the law, so everything needs to be reviewed extensively, and approved by a large number of people.
No company with such concerns can maintain per-employee productivity at the level of a startup.
The article is grouping things together that don't belong in the same categories.
OO, functional, imperative, declarative: these are ways of controlling dispatch.
Monoliths and microservices are both ways to organize codebases and teams of programmers and control whether dispatch is intermediated by the network or not. Either way, both of these options are implemented by some kind of language in the previous category (OO, functional, imperative, or declarative).
Service-oriented architecture applies to both monoliths and microservices, and very few programmers still working in the industry have really seen what an alternative to service-oriented architecture actually looks like.
I'm not anti-blockchain, although I have to say that so far the blockchain has not really been useful for anything other than crypto.
I am anti-crypto, because I know some history, and I know that the situation that existed before state-backed fiat currency and regulated banking was worse in many ways for normal people. Many crypto enthusiasts are essentially extreme financial libertarians and view crypto as the enemy of those good things, are they are trying to drag us back into a situation that is like the 1890s but with computers.
On top of that, many bad actors, scams, and manias (e.g. NFTs) have come out of the crypto movement, but few real benefits have been realized.