Same, but the cost of maintaining a fork fell through the floor in recent years. If a decent fork gains momentum, i can probably even stop spending tokens on mine.
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLMs [1] but i'm probably in the "AI is just a tool" camp.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
The AI of today is just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But I don't think it's a big step for it to reach a level where the majority of humans will be unable to to meaningfully contribute to the economy ten years from now.
I think computers, internet and AI - all of them have impact - but they consume it by converting it into new structure. The benefits are in the infra not handed out to us individually. We might not see large changes on individual level, or the displaced work is replaced by management work for the automations and raising baselines push us to do more. We now have data centers, fiber backbone, GPUs, models, apps and open source projects, yet we still only have 24 hours a day.
I keep seeing this argument. But isn’t the inverse true as well - if you extrapolate from the past movement of the ball, you will see it going way farther than it will actually go because of friction, wind, someone catching it, etc.? It seems reasonable to look at where the tech is right now if it helps you understand fundamental constraints. A person witnessing the first flight as a child and the moon landing in adulthood might expect FTL travel for their children if they didn’t understand physics.
> Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet?
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
The UK has stated that the current mileage check within the annual roadworthiness test will supply this data.
A clear weakness is that mileage readings can be altered. This used to matter on a smaller scale: dodgy second-hand sales, but now more or less anyone could be considered as potentially incentivised to interfere.
The mileage must remain a changeable field since the recording component may need replacement, for example, after accident damage or to correct a fault in the assembly that recording memory is part of.
Pure mileage is one option but many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.
A more central issue is the synergy between fuel consumption and damage to roads. Heavier vehicles do more damage but also burn more gas and so pay more tax, a synergy between cost and revenue. A flat rate based on mileage alone would equate all EVs as the same regardless of some being massively more damaging than others. We would need different rates for difference classes/weights of vehicles.
fuel pump meters can be altered too as well a farm diesel abuses - scofflaws trying to get around paying their fair share will always take some regulatory effort
Do it like taxes, have a low rate for the first X kwhs then increase after. Great aunt Mildred gets to heat her home, your neighbour that has a massive house, EVs, jacuzzi etc etc pays more.
EVs are always going to be an outsized user of electricity, and it's unclear to me why someone's jacuzzi should be heated vat free.
Huge range of efficiency difference between houses. (How did "Insulate Britain" fail so hard?)
I had an actual aunt called Mildred, and she lived in a very old (possibly literally Tudor, not mock, actual) cottage with actual fireplaces and so on.
Her place likely used about 42 MWh/year to heat, though this would be coal and wood not electricity because actual fireplace, compared to my house which is so well insulated that it took a week to notice we'd switched off the heating, in winter, while it was snowing outside.
For 42 MWh/year, you can fully recharge a 100 kWh car battery every day and still have more left over than my house consumes in total.
...and, to be a bit more explicit about it, the worse the efficiency of the house, the more likely that household is to already be lower income. So a tax like that would end up being seriously regressive.
And with solar power becoming cheaper and more common, it's going to be making less and less sense to disincentivize electricity usage.
If we want to preserve and maintain our roads, we might have to...*shock, horror* increase income taxes on the wealthy!
Because the use of a jacuzzi does not burden any public resources. That jacuzzi isn't occupying a space on a road, or adding wear and tear to that road. And you don't need an entire licensing/enforcement infrastructure to regulate who/how/where/when jacuzzis are to be used.
Why couldn't you express all those as test cases rather than instructions?
In test cases i can do anything, a test framework is just a way of discovering and then scheduling functions to run. I can emit useful instructions to the agent from the failed test case: "After walking the AST of all use of state machine X, a branch was found at Y which reused stale state. Ensure stale references are dropped..."
I can force the agent to pass the test suite before it considers itself done. I can reject edits of such test cases to partially mitigate reward hacking. etc etc
You can express them as tests, but you also need a feedback mechanism that creates the rule that when the LLM generates some net new code or performs some refactor, that there are these CAPAs that it needs to cover with test cases.
The CAPA is a learning that sits outside of the mechanism of verification; it is a record of problem:root_cause:preventative_action. I see it as the instruction that would be required to generate the test case to prevent the next occurrence of a class of failures.
In a real-world process, for example, there is usually a QA lead that is verifying that the process is followed by looking at the paperwork and evidence.
> Why couldn't you express all those as test cases rather than instructions?
How would prevent removing the test case and the code that it tests? That's a legitimate thing to do when you're modifying a codebase. My intuition is "corrective and preventative actions (CAPA)" is a level or two up from test cases.
This isn't ai slop. It's fascinating and well written.
But I learned something really basic - i didn't know that the ANE (and the data pipeline around it) was designed for CNN rather than transformers. It's always been an open loop in my head, wondering why the ANE was less impactful than i understood it should be.
Yank on that thread harder, developers and engineers are not safe just because they rely on different patterns.
But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.
Optimal judgement is worth a premium... in some cases. In other cases, it's sufficient to merely keep trundling. Numerically more companies are boring than exciting.
MBAs are just components, and the cost of that component just went down.
I don't think it's common knowledge how much they dropped imports since the Iran / straight of hormuz crisis.
Back at the start of that conflict there were a lot of breathless takes about what catastrophe was in store in a few weeks time, and what materialised was bad but not in anything like the same league as what was predicted.
The thing that wasn't accounted for in the analysis at the time was just how rapidly and by how much China could suppress its appetite for oil imports.
They had basically been planning for this shortfall for ever as a likely outcome of sanctions/blockades during an invasion of Taiwan.
Curtailing imports so much is a smart soft power move in not only does it ingratiate countries that would suffer most from the price spike but it could soften the resolve of Taiwan in showing that one of the largest penalties that would result from the invasion isn't nearly as punishing which in turn makes Taiwan's porcupine strategy less viable.
Along with US own goals like the thoroughly bungled and unplanned invasion, tariffs, corruption (both business crimes and more moral crimes like pedophilia or disregard for following legal process) it's made most of the west rate China above USA in favourability [latest Pew research poll].
System 1: a system for recording an image of a location at a given place over time.
System 1 can refer to the dashcam or the mk1 eyeball + notepad in your example.
System 2: a system for tracking the presence of a person across both time and location
An example of system 2 would be the facial id system being trialled on the london underground currently.
These are a difference in kind not in degree. It doesn't matter how many system 1's you deploy, you cannot unlock the capability of querying where any given face was observed across time and location.
Where did you learn that? It doesn't reflect the structural volumes present. Central banks make interventions all the time in line with little stabilisation programs. Those are almost always deemed success.
Maybe you deduced it by yourself? If so, fx is weird despite traditionally being seen as the simplest area in finance. E.g. It's counter-intuitive but we tend to think trade make up most FX volume globally. It's in the area of less than 3%. The majority by far is speculative and hedging.
The other trap is fx volume, people assume the know what volume is but then they learn expressions of fx volume is almost always actually tick volume.
It works very well in rich countries, but it is expensive, especially if the volume of exchanged currency is low. This is one of the reason behind the Euro, countries realised it would be way less expensive to defend the currency if they banded together. This is also a big why ex french colonies keeps colonial money, because that currency is pegged to the Euro and that peg protect it (the only way to get out cheaply is to do a West African Union or something similar, which is why anti-colonialists are big on the subject. They are right).
