Linus stopped scaling sometime in the late 90s - 00s. That's when lieutenants took over more authority, and a more or less informal line of succession formed. BDFLs can promote their own replacements from trusted collaborators who share the vision.
Qwen 3.8 27B, not even the superior Flash Next 125B, running on a single 3090 in my workstation handily whoops ChatGPT 3.5 from just a couple years ago.
Seems like he's just drawing that line into the future. Which seems sensible enough.
I'm drawing the line into the past. Back when Biden was president, a computer that currently runs Flash Next 125B well cost $1400.
But yeah, I assume that when the economy gets back to normal-ish, in 2024-equivalent dollars, we'll be at 500B-1T for < $2000. That'll be 3-4 Moore's Law doublings since computer prices were sane. 125B * 2 ^ 4 = 2T.
The user doesn't have to be someone that grew up on Defcon talks and CTFs anymore though. Any Joe/Jane off the street can ask an LLM what is a JTAG or what is a 90 nop and keep asking until they're satisfied. So we have to assume the user is capable of all of those things.
We used to have these things called "books" that you could ask. (And if you didn't know which book to consult, we had these people called "librarians".) I don't think it's a much greater threat surface than before: if anything, it might be smaller, because the internet is harder to search.
As someone who grew up with libraries, card catalogs, microfiche, and an encyclopedia, I can confidently say that talking to and working with an LLM is much faster, much easier, and much more informative than all of the above combined.
The stock market is basically a system for abstracting ownership away from human beings.
When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.
And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.
So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.
It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.
> So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees.
Maybe? Maybe not! Just saying it doesn't make it true.
I'll skip the step asking Claude to produce the lengthy list of examples where market concentration richly benefitted customers, employees, and taxpayers.
One difference: the longer your money is in a casino, the more likely you are to lose it; while the longer your money is in the stock market (especially in a total market index fund), the more likely you are to win:
Isn't that the place where if I win loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back? The same place where if I lose loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back?
The mission architecture discussed in that video has already been scrapped.
In-orbit refueling will permit missions to the moon and beyond. This has been stated repeatedly.
reply