For much the same reason most people choose Windows or Mac over Gentoo. Most people set up something like Tailscale to accomplish something rather than create a project and ongoing maintenance burden for themselves, and setting up Wireguard is not terribly friendly to the uninitiated.
WireGuard is one of the easiest things to set up. The total amount of reading you'd need to do to set up WireGuard amounts to half of a page. I spent more time figuring out what firewall rules are needed for WireGuard traffic than actually setting up WireGuard, it's so simple.
I'm going to disagree with you there. It's been a while since I set up anything with WireGuard but "easy" is not a word I would apply to it. A simple tunnel or VPN configuration was close to that but a network comparable to a Tailnet got pretty involved to do properly. By contrast Tailscale was effortless.
Needing to do additional things like figure out firewall rules is exactly what I'm talking about. I enjoy tinkering for fun most of the time but I'm generally looking to tinker on something specific, not every step along the way.
It's also removed the difficulty of configuring a mikrotik router as well. Mikrotik has a cloud router instance which is much easier to deal with I think than linux. Mostly because there's a UI interface for Mikrotik that makes it a little easier to inspect what's going on.
One of my pet projects I need to get back to is an SDN to make configuration for mikrotik routers easier (particularly with VLAN's, wireguard or VPNS, or routing configuration between ports).
Winbox is nice in a sense because it tells you the true configuration. But what I really want is something that can start with a network diagram (e.g.) and then get the current state of the router, and then validate that against the network config.
I agree there isn't a lot of value in trying to prognosticate all that far, but I propose it isn't quite that far-fetched. As a thought experiment, replace "RSI-capable AI" with "billionaire". Look at what Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos can accomplish by throwing money around. Now imagine one of them gets seduced by AI and just... does what it tells them to.
So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state or some other entity with a public face to hide behind and adequate resources to provide the necessary compute tripping over this nascent AI and giving it the keys. Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
If Skynet ever happens, it will come in the form of corporate feudalism. At that point, it will own the biolabs and can do whatever it pleases. People will go along with it for the same reason that people work in Amazon warehouses today.
Ah, to be clear I'm not full accelerationist. Dumb shit can still happen, and cause massive human loss and suffering. (E.g. acceleration of global warming, cybercrime, mass surveillance, the usual.) My point is: human extinction pre-RSI? Nahhhhhhhh.
> it will come in the form of corporate feudalism
Yep. This I fear way more than cyber-ebola-pox.
> So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state...
> Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
Nah. It takes a stable society for an operational electrical grid. If you have warring factions, you do not have stable infrastructure for AI. Also, where are you gonna get your chips from? One EMP over Taiwan... You see the chaos over Hormuz? What they did to the Amazon datacenters? Now imagine your average redneck ready to do battle. Those datacenters won't stand a chance.
Another factor in the cynicism is that robust enforcement is very 'pay to play'. I think your point is accurate for a company like Fireworks, largely doing business with peers that could afford litigation if necessary.
Good luck to an individual or small business trying to hold OpenAI or Meta to account if they breach contract over training, or do something crazy like copyright infringement on an industrial scale.
Ah, memories. I miss the old MEC, before they overextended on real estate and had to sell the farm to private equity. I have a pile of MEC branded gear I'm still happily using 20 years on. I have some restrained hopes for the new ownership group to bring it back, but I'll always miss the co-op.
These lights would have predated the private equity era but I'm guessing sourcing options were somewhat more limited back in 2016.
The best motorcycle sunglasses i every bought were mec, from the vancouver store in around 2005. Flat sided (for helmets) with interchangable lenses, and seriously dark lenses too. But when I walked in, in full sportbike leathers, i got more than a few dirty looks.
I had a membership since 1994. They basically erased it.
Between that, and selling out to a foreign-private-equity-held holding, and the incident during which an innocent shopper who came to return an item was attacked by a security guard, and the idiotic Vancouver location with no connection between underground parking and the store room, I decided never to set foot there again.
Fuck MEC, the Mountain Equipment Coo^H^Hompany! Not the MEC you knew.
Actually, I should mention that I didn't know about their corporate change from a co-op with members. My first contact with the change was my account being erased and being told to create a new one because they are "changing over to a new system". No mention of having become a different, scummy company. Basically they started out by lying to long-time customers of the old MEC that it was just their database that was changing and for some inexplicable reason, not being able to migrate the old membership accounts. Just despicable.
Reminds me of when Imgur started trying to push changing gifs over to gifv, which were just mp4 with a strange new file extension. I didn't like their approach but it really was such an improvement on file size and quality.
Minecraft has limited, well-defined inputs and perfect feedback response. That's very different than operating a digger, let alone engaging in more complex real world tasks like trying to build and print and ship and assemble semiconductors to go skynet itself.
I don't mean to dismiss the risks or overlook the amount of damage that could be done just by lever-pulling - we sure have enough outdated infrastructure hooked up to the internet - but the jumps in complexity and necessary compute for most of these tasks are probably somewhat larger than the analogy implies.
This is all spitballing, but I'd wager it's a third the type of workloads, a third hedging against your business depending on a single external provider, and a third trust.
Not everybody is coding or doing work that lends itself to burning tokens for warmth. Reuters for example seems to be more interested in using it for research, editing and formatting citations and the like. There's only so much of that work that needs doing, it doesn't always need to be real-time, and they probably don't see it scaling exponentially. They also need to be very aware and in control of their model's biases, or they risk it compromising their work output.
It's widely expected that all of the major providers will need to - and surely want to - drastically raise prices to justify the ludicrous amount of capital they're burning. Multiple companies have already talked about how their AI costs have exploded, and from what I understand that scale of enterprise is paying API rates. I would be disappointed if big business wasn't having a think about what that liability could look like. It's one thing to be reliant on a relatively "stable" vendor like Microsoft for Windows and Office, another to get AWS sticker shock, and then this is promising to be an order of magnitude worse.
Then just plain trust. What if ChatGPT starts recommending your competitors products, or the USA bars export of Anthropic's latest model (again, but for real this time), or they stop serving a model your business now depends on, and so on... That's a lot of risk to leave outside of your control.
Depends where you are in your journey. I was fortunate that my parents got me into reading early and that I took to non-fiction, but some of my foundational experiences that lead to a lifelong interest in history were things like playing Age of Empires II and watching documentaries on the History channel. Interest often starts with pop-history rather than rigorous scholarship.
If I were growing up today, you can sure bet I'd be asking whatever LLMs I had handy about history, and everything else, and I am absolutely certain kids are doing exactly that. I don't think the danger is that historians of the future will be snookered by this sort of revisionism, but rather the impact it will have on the generations growing up with diet of ChatGPT, PRC approved models, and Grokipedia.
That's been my association as well. I see Flash get brought up a lot in relation to things like OCR and PDF processing frequently, and a lot of other routine multimodal workloads.
I think open source will remain competitive among smaller players and adjacent industries wanting to avoid lock-in with the majors. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are all out to win - they require profit extraction from their R&D. China seems to have, over the near term, accepted that they can not (or at least have not) pull ahead and so open source collaboration speeds the collective development, keeps them close to the frontier, and ensures their industry has access to learn from and implement. The USA playing export controls games with Fable made that aspect very stark.
But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.
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