Haha. Liberals suddenly knowing about Myrotvorets style shit would be hilarious since the ones that knew about it were like "Well yeah, they have their reasons".
where we're going we don't need eyes to see
DeepSeek is probably going to be the straw that breaks the camels back in terms of full mask off fascism vs keeping status quo of polite business fascism that America loves. Let me explain, keep in mind, a pro-move would have been if TikTok did this.
So for those who don't know DeepSeek is covered by the GPL. The current bill to ban DeepSeek and "imports of Chinese tech" basically has a problem.
- Source code is free speech
- GPL'd source code exists before the ban
- The way copyright works if that if I make a change in DeepSeek no matter how minor it becomes a derivative work that I can then release.
- Therefore PiggySeek is my freeze-peach not China's
Essentially the US has to destroy the last 100 years of jurisprudence in multiple arenas (free speech, copyright, etc) to effectively create this ban. The reason the TIkTok ban was ruled legal is because by the US law, your speech is your speech, the platform is the platform, so there is a technicality there that can be used without talking about chilling effects. GPL and OSS enables "their" speech to be "your" speech in terms of software.
With the tech industry dollars and demand time table behind this.... well let's just say it's the time of the cool zone folks.
This process was already killed and ignored once with encryption where the government made the issue go away by loosening requirements and not prosecuting, despite a ruling against them:
Many new phones don't even have a digital audio converter built in anymore, so the basic USB C to 3.5mm pass through dongles don't work. You have to get a dedicated DAC dongle and many can't even charge the phone while they are in use, it's insane.
Can't wait for RFK Jr. to let the free market decide how much listeria people choose to ingest.
By "retire" I mean, when I have aged out of software and I can just burn all my bridges.
I'm confident a lot of startups will spring out of the ground that will be developing DeepSeek wrappers and offering the same service as your OpenAIs
This is true. But I don't think OpenAI is even cornering the tech market really. The company I work for makes a lot of content for various things and a lot of engineers are tech fetishists and a lot of executives are IP protectionist obsessives. We are banned from using publicly available AI offerings, we don't contract with Open AI but we do contract with Maia for creating models (because their offering specifically talks through the "steal your IP" problems). So OpenAI itself is not actually in many of these spaces.
But yeah your average chat girlfriend startup is going to remove the ChatGPT albatross from its neck, given it's engineers/founders are just headlines guys. A lot of this ecosystem is really the "Uber but for " style guys.
So LLM's the "AI" that everyone is typically talking about are really good at one statistical thing:
"CLASSIFYING"
What is "CLASSIFYING" you ask? Well it's basically attempting to take a data and put it into specific boxes. If you want to classify all the dogs you could classify them based on breed for example. LLMs are really good at classifying better than anything we've ever made and they adapt very well to new scenarios and create emergent classifications of data fed to them.
However they are not good at basically anything else. The "generation" that these LLMs do is based on the classifier and the model, which basically generates responses based on statistically what the next word is. So for example it's entirely possible that if you fed an LLM the entirety of Shakespeare and only Shakespeare and you gave it "Two households both alike" as a prompt, it practically may spit out the rest or Romeo and Juliet.
However this means AI's are not good at the following:
- discerning truth from fiction
- following technical processes (like counting r's in strawberry)
- having "human like" understandings of the connections between concepts (think of the "is soup a salad" type memes)
So… is what I said above really just how AI is being used in the US, and is that the reason for the huge bubble in asset values of companies like Nvidia and Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, yes this is a solution in search of problem. But the real reason that there is a bubble in the US for these things is because companies are making that bubble on purpose. The reason isn't even rooted in any economic reality. The reason is rooted in protectionism. If it takes a small lake of water and 10 data centers to run ChatGPT, that means it's unlikely you will lose a competitive edge because you are misleading your competition. If every year you need more and more compute to run the models it concentrates who can run them and who ultimately has control of them. This is what the market has been doing for about 3 years now. This is what DeepSeek has undone.
The similarities to BitCoin and crypto bubbles are very obvious in the sense that the mining network is controlled by whoever has the most compute. Etherium specifically decided to cut out the "middle man" of who owns compute and basically says whoever pays into the network's central bank the most controls the network.
This is what 'tech as assets' means practically. Inflate your asset as much as possible regardless of it's technical usefulness.
I think the need to have a shared monoculture is a deeply reactionary way of thinking that prevents us from developing human empathy. You don't need to say "Bazinga" at the same time as another person in order for you to relate to, care for, and understand strangers. I think the yearning for monoculture in people 25-40 is a mirror of boomers who complain that they cannot relate to kids anymore because nobody really believes in the pledge of alligence or some such other "things r different" nonsense. Yeah I haven't played Hoop and Stick 3, we don't need to play the same video games to relate to each other.
It's a crutch for a brutal culture where you are too scared to show a modicum of openness or vulnerability with other humans because deep down you need to be reassured that they won't scam/harm you simply because they believe in the magic words of Burgerstan. People are uncomfortable with change and things they don't know because we've built a society where change often begets material vulnerability in people, and information and even cultural media have become a weapon to be used against others.
Monoculture was never good, it simply was. Also despite this being a real aesthetic trend, you should also remember that the vast majority of consumer technology produced at the same time was not clear plastic tech. If anything the monoculture of tech products of that era was that gross beige that yellows in about a year or two. It's just not aesthetic enough to remember, and in 10 years everything just defaulted black. I've actually never seen a clear plastic Dreamcast/ Dreamcast controller IRL. I've been a tech guy forever and despite knowing about it, I only know of 1 person that had actually experienced the Dreamcast internet. This is very much nostalgia bait vs actual how things were.
To put it into perspective for one of those phones with clear plastic, there were 10,000 of these
if time travelers kidnapped a few thousand scientists, engineers, and so forth from the present and took them back thousands of years and dropped them naked in the post-glacial northern european steppes, ... they certainly aren't building a chip manufacturing plant to start making computers.
You can blame British adventure novels for this bullshit idea. Every other day a Kickstarter of "THE END OF THE WORLD BOOK WHERE YOU CAN BUILD COMPUTER FROM SAND AFTER NUCLEAR BOMB" gets launched.
the apparent contrast of "low-tech" and "high-tech" is only going to feel like a contradiction to people (like me) who have internalized liberal economic theory based on the notion that value is ultimately created by the very smartest of fail-children having the very best ideas.
As an immigrant form the former Soviet Union, it's not liberal economic theory notions. Plenty of Post Soviet Liberal morons out there with the same notions. It's living in a rich country where you are isolated from the practicalities of the systems that shape your life.
This Archer clip on the origin of meat (before it becomes dictatorial lulziness) sums up the distinction nicely:
https://youtu.be/JHMJxFICUjk?t=57
One of the things that most Soviet Intelligentsia complained about was the fact that as students they had to work on Kolhozes (communal farms) during college summer break. But because of that everyone in the Soviet Union effectively had an intimate and direct relationship with their food supply chain. At one point (when all forms of back filling fail e.g. trade, stockpiling, etc), someone has to pick the food, fire or no fire. Otherwise nobody eats. The practical problem here is how to make that as fair and as safe as possible. This is why communist theory is the theory of misery.
piggy
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Same problem exists in the self driving space.
Level 2 partial automation is ADAS or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Some Level 2 features actually harm driver attention like:
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/12/long-term-use-of-advanced-driver-assistance-technologies-can-result-in-disengaged-drivers/