If they pay market rate, the clearing price will go up making things more expensive for everyone. If they go off-grid they make the machines needed to produce water or electricity or whatever more expensive. If they borrow money, they make government bond yields go up and cause governments to start thinking about cutting pensions and stuff, not to mention increased mortgage rates for whoever wants to buy a home or is on a variable rate mortgage. There's no world in which this AI stuff doesn't increase costs for the rest of us.
I think that what's needed is a separation of concerns. Instead of a monolithic institution that is responsible for research, student enlightenment, self-discovery, vocational training, athletic competition, etc, we could move towards a micro-institution architecture and scale the different micro-institutions according to demand. Importantly, we wouldn't cross-subsidize the institutions, so if someone only wanted self-discovery for example, they could just pay for that and get a cheaper price than someone who wanted both self-discovery and vocational training. People could also decide how much of each they need according to their circumstances.
My universities football team is actually self-funding and actually funds a lot of other programs. The sports teams can be considered as courses unto themselves considering this is where the NFL and other professional sports teams find their players (employees). I don't think it's as cynical as tribal ties.
So you don't want the top scientists, engineers and thinkers training the next generation? And you don't want popular sexy things subsidizing inventing new things that haven't had time to be popular yet?
The “next generation” gets trained by adjuncts and grad students. “Top scientists, engineers, and thinkers” are too busy with grant proposals to be bothered with teaching.
When autonomy is solved, they could put a bed or office or dining table in the car. But I agree, this halfway autonomy where you have to watch everything is kind of useless.
> When autonomy is solved, they could put a bed or office or dining table in the car.
Have you ever tried reading a book while being driven around? You get car sick really fast, because your vestibular system does not like constantly getting jostled around with mismatching visual inputs. Eating dinner while being driven around is a similar story: anyone around you does something unexpected, and your dinner ends up being spilled all over the car.
Self-driving cars will never have the same smoothness as planes or trains, simply because they have to share the roads with the general public. You might be able to sleep, but your commute isn't going to neatly match up with your sleeping schedule, so that's only really useful for longer road trips.
> this halfway autonomy where you have to watch everything is kind of useless
No, it is actively dangerous. Humans are extremely bad at staying fully-focused and being ready to act in the blink of an eye, while at the same time having literally nothing to do 99.99% of the time. If you don't let your attention wander, it is significantly less exhaustive to drive yourself. Halfway-autonomous cars exist primarily so that car manufacturers can demand extra money without having to accept any of the reliability.
> Have you ever tried reading a book while being driven around? You get car sick really fast, because your vestibular system does not like constantly getting jostled around with mismatching visual inputs.
I don't suffer from this all, and judging by watching people in public transport I'm not alone.
I don’t know, it might just come down to how good a driver you are.
I agree with the proposition that people are horrible at halfway autonomy.
But I am horrible at driving, and I kind of think almost everybody is. I have a car that just does lane keeping and distance keeping cruise control. The number of times it is notified me that I’m sliding off the side of the road is large. Similarly it’s let off the gas a vast number of times when I was creeping up on the car in front of me and I didn’t notice.
Maybe it’s having just one long, largely empty commute for five years. But I suspect it’s that you can drive any modern car without 100% concentration at which point people are prone to getting distracted.
So I’m thinking the comparison should be halfway autonomy vs a modern “dumb” car and I think halfway autonomy is safer overall.
Like you said, I think skills are quickly subsumed by model abilities. I leave relevant notes about my own projects in agents.md and local comments around tricky bits of code that need them, but otherwise I just use vanilla codex.
I think a lot of people are missing some of the advantages of skills - they're to give an agent/harness the knowledge of how to do something or more context without it always being part of the prompt.
This could be to try and expand the capabilities of the model but in it can be used to store personal preference/workflow/organisational knowledge/improved efficiency etc. The harness could work through and build some of this on its own - but it's much more efficient if it has a document it can just look up. I use them for the database structure and it's quirks, how to use branded document templates, external document tone, system workflows, compliance requirements etc.
I wouldn't want these to load every time but being able to call them is really useful.
I don't think Arabic script is that hard. It's nearly phonetic, unlike English. It's not super broad and hard to memorized like kanji. I don't know, maybe I'm just removed from the struggles of people learning it for the first time.
(one of the blog post authors here) -> once you set up a finetuning pipeline, it's often trivial to rerun it on top of a new open weights model. so, it's orthogonal to base model improvements
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