It is a list of wealth created for index funds, pensions, employees and co-founders, not the overall benefit to society.
A more serious ranking would probably be dominated by these groups:
* Agricultural and public-health innovators - affecting billions of people at low cost - Louis Pasteur, Norman Borlaug, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, followed by sanitation engineers, vaccine developers and epidemiologists, then the myriad of scientists/engineers responsible for clean water systems
* Open standards and open-source creators - Linux, Git, FFmpeg, TCP/IP, HTTP/HTML, Python, PostgreSQL, etc - they repeatedly eliminate costs for millions of organizations. Richard Hipp created SQLite that is embedded in millions of phones, browsers, apps, OSs, ... - Claude Shannon, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds
* Institutional and conceptual inventors - double-entry bookkeeping, randomized clinical trials, peer review, container standardization, cryptography, etc - reducing transaction costs and increasing trust across the world.
Until the 80s, many medical professionals believed infants could not feel pain due to an underdeveloped nervous system and performed major invasive surgeries in babies without anesthesia.
Doctors sometimes used paralytic agents to keep the infant completely still instead of pain relievers.
It was horrifying when I found out about that.
Ubiquiti has another cool device: a little travel router that you can configure with WireGuard to VPN into your home network and make yourself safer while on coffee shop and airport wifi.
It is nice to be able to access your local NAS and LLMs while away from home too.
> I object, as a non-American paying Anthropic customer, to being surveilled and then having it justified in a press release?
You genuinely think you're not already being surveilled? And that Anthropic is somehow responsible with just a few words in a press release?
In what world are you living in and how is the rent there?
A modern version of the old dongle seems to be the FIDO key (commonly known by the brand Yubikey), although it is for a different purpose than copy protection: anti-phishing/MFA authentication.
I did something similar decades ago: ran on debug with and without the dongle, then compared the execution path to identify where exactly it deviated.
Then replaced the "jump" with "nop" to prevent it from branching out when the dongle was absent.
This was with an early version of Visual C++ and I knew only a little 8086 Assembly.
A more serious ranking would probably be dominated by these groups:
* Agricultural and public-health innovators - affecting billions of people at low cost - Louis Pasteur, Norman Borlaug, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, followed by sanitation engineers, vaccine developers and epidemiologists, then the myriad of scientists/engineers responsible for clean water systems
* General-purpose infrastructure creators - electricity, semiconductors, refrigeration, telecommunications, etc... - Faraday and Maxwell
* Open standards and open-source creators - Linux, Git, FFmpeg, TCP/IP, HTTP/HTML, Python, PostgreSQL, etc - they repeatedly eliminate costs for millions of organizations. Richard Hipp created SQLite that is embedded in millions of phones, browsers, apps, OSs, ... - Claude Shannon, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds
* Institutional and conceptual inventors - double-entry bookkeeping, randomized clinical trials, peer review, container standardization, cryptography, etc - reducing transaction costs and increasing trust across the world.