Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.
The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.
Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?
From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?
I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.
You can buy a whole lot of practise kits on Amazon. Start with push-through components and move on to surface-mount if you fancy that.
I'd recommend checking out one of the many youtube channels who do repairs for an idea of the tools and stuff you need. Many have links and most use similar tools.
For $300 in tools from AliExpress you can have a pretty complete setup.
The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.
I love the game, but it was truly impossible back then (pirated, no manual, no idea what I had to do) and even today, with an emulator and every hint on the internet ;)
I know it's not actually impossible, some people finished it, but I never have.
Bruce Lee and The Last Ninja though, I can finish either with my eyes closed!
There are an army of people using SPAs for problems best served by a simple and more traditional website. It has been a thing since SPAs started showing up so you have a whole generation who think that Next.js is just how you build for the web.
Then HTMX is to them what the micro-ORMs were for me (and, if you've been in .Net for a couple of decades, I suspect you too).
It was so bizarre seeing people go from pure SPAs, to the concept of "hydrating" a website (ok still makes sense to a point), to coming up with server-side rendering like it's novel.
I mean sure, things like Next, Gatsby, etc can theoretically create the best of both worlds - static site for search engines and no-js users, content first, and very fast client-side rendered content afterwards. But that's a lot of extra engineering, considering a good server-side rendered website is also fetched and rendered within milliseconds.
They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.
I’m pretty sure they actually can actually. On an iPhone with a “ask for no tracking” configuration (no IDFA), I’d wager it’s probably even easier on the web than it is in an app.
Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
It's comforting to believe that large corporations with the greed of the rich and powerful is what makes these inefficiencies but really it's about a million little political negotiations, primarily driven by voters dislike of change.
It's comforting to believe that actual voters have that kind of political influence over these things, but really it's about a million little talls, primarily driven by lobbyists commanded by big companies
You are about 20 years out of date. Modern politicians get almost all of their funding from small donations, in other words, from passionate partisans who care about culture war issues.
That's because megadonors don't give to candidates directly? In order to trigger the unlimited campaign finance guaranteed by citizens united, you create a super pac. They can't openly coordinate with the candidate.
If you add in all super PACs and outside spending, it would make up roughly 30-35% of the overall expidenture. That's a lot but super PAC money is worth much less to a campaign compared to donations because it can't be used for core expenses like labor.
It’s both. Massive regulation is usually driven by good intentions, populism. Large corporations often don’t mind when it means it would prevent smaller companies from competing with them.
Because if it's just a few evil people making the world bad then that's fixable. The truth that it is it's an extraordinarily complex stew of incentives means its harder to fix.
Sure, cynically, you can use the argument that we can’t just limit the influence of megacorps because the problem is more complex than that. Sure, but limiting them will still help.
Why not do the obvious thing that can still help? There are some simple things we as a people or a conglomeration of peoples can do to curb the enthusiasm for state level corruption. It is doable. It will not solve everything - but surely we can still do it.
> lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
Not really
Lobbyists get to talk into the ears of the powerful. It is literally their job. They make very sensible arguments for their point of view. So it seems very sensible, for the legislators, to make laws that aid the powerful and impede the weak.
The legislators are very busy with pressures from all sides. The cognitive load of considering views that you do not hear is enormous. It is not "incompetent or corrupt" to fail.
The system has the corruption baked in. It is one of the mechanisms, of many, that wealth and power concentrate in "democracies "
I have seen this process from the inside, good people making terrible decisions
I'm sorry they're so busy, but everyone's busy. Not everyone gets to drag money out of people on threat of jail, not have to pay any corporation tax on it, and spend that money on offices and salaries, do a bad job, and have everyone solely blame other people for their failings.
It's like if a judge blamed one side's legal representative for their terrible decisions. The legal representative is not paid to be neutral. They're paid to represent their client. The judge is paid to be neutral.
That removes the culpability again from the people being lobbied, who are for paid by mandatory taxes, so they don't have to win work - their only job is expertise and honesty.
I don't think it does. Of course they are culpable, that's the whole point.
Them being in that position of power is not god given though, nor set in stone. Replacing them is a single election away. Still, people keep voting for them. So the ultimate responsibility is with the people who keep voting them into office.
Last time I checked, regulators are part of governments which tend to be confirmed in one way or another in democracies.
Different story on non-democratic forms of government. There the hate is justified. But just complaining about regulators relieves those in power (the voting populace) of their responsibilities. Tempting (and convenient) though for everybody part of that populace.
Elected representatives decide who is in charge. For example, in many countries they elect the government. To which the secretary of housing belongs which decides how housing policy is executed which is implemented by the bureaucrats in that department. It's all rooted in the democratic will, albeit some processes are slow to change (which is a feature too so that a crazy person can't trash your country too bad before you have a chance to course correct at the next election). If it were not then you would not be living in a democracy.
Though it seems we are going in circles since the way you phrased it indicates that you are unwilling to even engage with my argument. Nobody claimed that the regulator is in the political party, (except for one-party states perhaps which are notoriously undemocratic).
I think we agree then that given their eternal, apolitical nature, replacing regulators is not "an election away", even if people weren't already voting on a vast array of different issues and thus no one could determine from a vote that a particular regulator needed replacing.
Lobbying is fine, though. Lobbying isn't bribery, although sometimes it probably looks like it. Lobbying is also an industry saying "please don't kill us; here's why that thing will kill us". The people making the decisions have the power (hence lobbyists need to exist) and they need to be better.
The revolving door between politician to made man (lobbyist) seems like a bit of a problem, no? These poor ex-politicians/staffers need to earn those mil+ salaries or they couldn’t effectively save these poor industries from demise? Perhaps the politician being asked to go easy on the regulations is potentially influenced by the ex-politicians rather lucrative position?
Corruption does not need to be overt to be destructive. It’s absolutely pervasive.
I will treat this comment charitably and just say that it's yet another case of "definition of X sounds good, so X can't be bad".
I believe in reality it's less about "please don't kill us" and more about getting officials to set up the "pleas profit us" situation.
Yes, money don't change hands in an office, so it's TECHNICALLY not a bribery.
Well, unlike regulators, companies die without profit. So they do indeed need profit. Smaller companies might want a system currently tilted against them to be changed. Larger companies might spend a fortune on regulation-following that has harmful outcomes, e.g. raising prices, for no benefit. Both of those motivations sound reasonable, and both getting their way may result in more profit for them. There's nothing wrong with profit.
The only thing that can possibly be bad is the regulation-writer, or the regulation enforcer, behaving incompetently and/or corruptly, who decides or enforces bad rules.
The lawmakers are: in the EU you have a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.
At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).
> a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.
You need to be mad to think it's the right wing parties in the US who get the most funding. E.g. [0]
> The Biden—now Harris—campaign committee raised $997.2 million and Trump’s campaign committee raised $388 million in total between Jan. 2023 and Oct. 16, 2024, the most recent date for which Federal Election Commission filings are available
Might want to take a look at the news channels you're following as none of them describe the Democrats, outside a bit of performative "socially left" things (like keeping the government out of bedrooms - though as a libertarian I don't consider it a "left" issue at all, more a basic freedom).
The two main US parties are firmly right wing, although the Democrats do have a small number of centralist (like Bernie) and centre-left people (though I dunno if any are actually in the Congress).
I'm surprised that was necessary. A single look at the EU website leaves no doubt that the EU is perfectly capable to create a bureaucratic nightmare all by itself (and incapable not to even if it tried).
Erm I've been talking about this for 4 years now. So I'm not sure how it can "come out of nowhere" unless you're paying 0 attention to really important regulation in your field.
There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.
"in your field"? All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar. Now many are just not planning to ship EU wide just because it's too high risk for them.
> All small businesses and solo enterpreneurs that I know who are hit by this are not "in this field". Their field is making jewelry or knitted toys or something similar.
Are they shipping within EU? Then they literally are in the field of shipping within the EU.
Yes, of course. They need to be aware of regulations in all aspects of their business (manufacturing electronics, shipping, consumer warranty, and taxation seem applicable).
You're somehow under the mistaken idea that the primary issue for businesses is that they don't want to be aware of regulations in all aspects of their businesses. The actual issue that you're sweeping under the rug is that these regulations create a minimum floor on the size of a business.
For example, a CRA self assessment including CE will require around $20k in liquid capital that you need out of pocket even if all you want to do is sell a single piece of jewelry with some electronics embedded into it. Not to mention the indirect costs such as guaranteeing 5 years of security updates.
There is also the issue that PLD for cloud services effectively means that you cannot easily update your software anymore while it is under investigation by a claimant because that could constitute destruction of evidence. This leads to a catch 22 with the CRA, where you are legally obligated to patch a security vulnerability within 72 hours.
The conflict here is that for physical products, the owner receives a unique reproduction of the design plans, whereas with cloud software, the customer is using shared infrastructure that can affect other customers if it is under investigation. So the entire cluster running the software turns into the equivalent of a smartphone. If you want to sell an updated product, you need to sell a new smartphone aka run a new cluster.
No one can reasonable think that someone who makes a few hundred artisan sales a year and ships them within the bloc should be monitoring what rules and regulations are coming down the pipe.
If the law wouldn't say 24 hours counting only working hours (3 working days for small business or even weeks during vacations), then it wouldn't be an exempt.
This is an interesting point of view. I've been thinking that only the moment counts, when the manufacturer has been made aware, regardless when the manufacturer has in fact actively become aware. Thanks!
I have a lot of contact with the CRA at work and I actually think its a very good piece of regulation. There are barely any parts where I think they are straight up bad.
I think it only hurts super small one man part time developers but even then: If I pay for a piece of software I expect it to be secure and have a bit of support.
He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.
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