Although I understand your point, Shoshanna Zuboff would say otherwise. We are the resource; not the product, neither the consumer.
According to her, "their" product used to be information. Then it became prediction. And now it's behavior modification, which they achieve by constantly mining us (the data we provide them).
At least IMHO, this is a more accurate depiction of the current state of affairs. Although in the end, it may be quite a similar metaphor, either way.
Could you expand on it? It is truly surprising for me that anyone would find code with type annotations to be significantly worse, for any reasons whatsoever.
On the contrary, I joyfully read and write code with type annotations. It is obviously very useful knowing which object types a function expects and which it will return.
Indeed it is, but the second body's mass may be neglected if it is orders of magnitude smaller than the larger body. Or at least that's how I understand it (I'm not a physicist).
Compared to the invention of the Internet and/or the WWW, I'm of the opinion that calling Google (the search engine) or PageRank (the algorithm) one of the Great Inventions in Human History (and capitalizing it) is too far-fetched. The first is an indexer for the former, and the latter is not so different from eigenvector centrality, with the added spice of directed random walks.
I do believe that the Internet/WWW is one of our greatest inventions, though, so this is just nit-picking. :)
That's an interesting perspective, and although it might have contributed, I wouldn't put that much weight onto crypto's legacy for AI, IMHO.
The first papers that used GPUs to train neural networks were from the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, before the Bitcoin price hike of 2013. But years before that, Nvidia had already introduced the CUDA architecture to GPUs in 2006 [1], which were used, among others things, to speed up algorithms to analyze seismic data for oil and gas exploration [2].
So with or without the "crypto fever", I believe the same advancements in GPU technology would have followed - but maybe not the scarcity brought by the investments in crypto mining. Because of this, we may also argue the opposite, that crypto got in the way of AI development and was one of the culprits of the "GPU rich vs GPU poor" division we hear/read about nowadays.
In a very similar fashion, though, I do tend to believe that PC gaming holds far more importance to the rise of both AI and crypto...
After thinking for a while on why it would be so, I've come to the conclusion that the truth of this statement (yours) ultimately depends on whose pair of eyes is watching it, IMHO.
Reminded me of this great literary article I read not too long ago, detailing some of the story behind the TMSC factory of semiconductors. Truly a marvelous read, if you are interested.
> Implementing laws without being able enforce them is not only ridiculous but harmful [...]
Not all crimes are preventable, which doesn't mean the laws aren't enforceable. Example: even though murder is illegal, people still commit murder, but they are rightfully punished for it, as the law mandates.
> [...] harming their own economy.
Do you have any proof that tech regulation is detrimental to the economy?
According to her, "their" product used to be information. Then it became prediction. And now it's behavior modification, which they achieve by constantly mining us (the data we provide them).
At least IMHO, this is a more accurate depiction of the current state of affairs. Although in the end, it may be quite a similar metaphor, either way.