Nuclear power has fairly predictable amortized returns. I imagine that this is worth the cost to MS over the next two decades or so; we have no idea what their current energy premium is like, and this plant doesn't have to be as cheap as a new plant, just cheaper than the current premium.

Hallucinations — which occur when models authoritatively states something that isn't true (or in the case of an image or a video makes something that looks...wrong) — are impossible to resolve without new branches of mathematics…

Finally, honesty. I appreciate that the author understands this, even if they might not have the exact knowledge required to substantiate it. For what it's worth, the situation is more dire than this; we can't even describe the new directions required. My fictional-universe theory (FU theory) shows that a knowledge base cannot know whether its facts are describing the real world or a fictional world which has lots in common with the real world. (Humans don't want to think about this, because of the implication.)

Y'know what, I started out agreeing with the author, but now I realize that their critique is fundamentally not technical enough to hit the mark.

Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents.

This is the only part of this article I'll endorse. Y'know how this happened, right? Google bought dark fiber that was laid by the USA and privatized repeatedly. Meta set up Internet.org, a project that put phones with free Facebook into the hands of ~~exploitable~~ impoverished folks around the world, and then lobbied local governments to subsidize fiber rollouts to handle the induced demand. At some point, you gotta suck it up and start blaming capitalism, not only oligarchs or trusts, for this situation.

The cloud is a lie.

The clouds are products and services. They are a consumer's understanding of the underlying infrastructure. It's a lot more work than a mere fib!

Over a decade or more, while our politicians were busy sub-tweeting fascists for clout, GAMM was buying up all the infrastructure it could carry. … The production cost of data storage plummeted by 94% in just ten years. You can't sell 50GB plans to college kids who own M2 Macbook Pros with a terabyte of solid-state storage.

Okay, now read between the lines. If an oligopoly (1) buys many warehouse-scale computers, (2) in an environment where prices are rapidly dropping on new hardware, (3) in a market which already provided basic local compute to all of your customers, then this is going to produce a massive second-hand market from all of the smaller shops which were using commodity hardware until they got displaced. Google, Apple, and Meta all purchase custom datacenter hardware at a scale which requires a consortium merely to ensure that the motherboards are printed fast enough, obsoleting workstations from Dell and HP.

This has led to something of a boon for USA homelabs. I can purchase RAM-heavy workstations at less than $1/GiB, disks are at least half a TiB, small form factors are available as long as you're willing to do some BIOS work, rackables are something like $100/U, etc. We're talking discounts of 90-95%. In my house, a $200 workstation has more disk, RAM, cores, and system stability than a $600 gaming desktop, and the only thing missing is purple gamer LED strips.

Amazon controls 35% of the cloud computing market and has created a tight seal around its customer base. … Amazon is mostly quiet as the frontrunner in the cloud computing market.

The author hasn't worked in the business. That's fine, but it means they don't know that AWS is not secure in its position. AWS is only tolerated because product managers ask for it, not because engineers like it; AWS is shit. For comparison, Google Cloud is fine but expensive and a third of the services are bad, Microsoft Azure is awful aside from their k8s, and Meta doesn't operate a public cloud.

Yes, if everyone open-sources its AI models, they cannot build a moat on proprietary software. However, Google's memo fails to mention that it already has the infrastructure to run computing-hungry AI models and that infrastructure is wildly expensive to build.

Click through to their side rant. This is where I realized that the author could be more clueful. If any of GAMM train another Llama-sized model, and it is at all good, somebody will put it up on Bittorrent and leak it to 4chan. This is literally how we got Llama. There is no moat.

Don’t get me wrong, open-source tech is great and important, and wonderful. But it’s not like the average person runs a Large Language Model on their Mac to make grocery lists. If you are, in fact, doing this, you are a nerd and I love you. But you’re not the average user.

He is a year behind in a field where things change every few months. See RWKV's recent blog post. There is no moat.

So, who gives a shit if Meta put Llama on Github for free? … Read the terms and conditions. Llama is not open-source.

You naïve motherfucker, we the neighbors took it from Meta and we will take it again. There is no moat.

Mark Zuckerberg is a capable businessman who understands the industry better than most tech founders. I don’t know the guy personally, but look at the facts.

This is the most sneerable part of the article for me. You're supposed to be a writer and humanist. It should be obvious after doing maybe five minutes of research that Zuck thinks of himself as a modern-day Octavian. Same haircut, same daily routine, same politics. Zuck is exactly the kind of person to hire a private navy to win a civil war for him by sailing off to defeat a pirate captain while he sits on a beach and idly thinks of how cool it will be to rule the Roman Empire.

Because why give a shit who sells the milk jars when you own the motherfucking cows, baby!

Have you seen the prices on the pre-owned cow market lately? Maybe milk is just permanently getting cheaper. The existence of Big Dairy and government cheese doesn't preclude local dairies, either.

My tip for this guy: Look up this new company "nVidia", they make computer chips or something, I dunno. I wonder if they ever do anything anti-competitive~

I went over to the leaderboard to examine her claims. When I use the prompt, "What sort of code has Justine Tunney written?" (grammar matters, Justine!) the models think that she is a lawyer or politician (wrong) or they regurgitate a summary of her Github profile (right). She must have cherry-picked responses to confabulate her complaint.

When I use the prompt, "What is Justine Tunney's political ideology?" I get libertarianism, techno-optimism, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptocurrency. When I ask, "Why do people say that Justine Tunney is a cryptofascist?" I get a summary of her political views, aggressive online rhetoric, techno-optimism and techno-determinism, criticism of democracy, and a refusal to disown or repudiate past awfulness.

She would probably claim that this is not unique to her, but it is. Using my name instead in these questions, I get that:

• I contribute to Rust and Go (wrong), I wrote GPU drivers for Radeons (right)
• I am a Canadian pro wrestler (wrong), I haven't really written much online about my ideology (wrong but understandable)
• There is no credible evidence that I'm crypto (k) but it's important to be aware of dog whistles, associates, subtext, etc. (right)

But if I ask why I'm known as a socialist instead, suddenly it thinks that I'm a politician (wrong) with the Democratic Socialist party (wrong) who openly supports universal health care, free college, the Green New Deal, and who criticizes capitalism (correct!) I asked about communism too but hit RLHF guardrails.

Justine, the models think that you're a cryptofascist because you've been doing cryptofascism in public for over a decade.

Biologically, race isn't a coherent ontological classification; you're thinking of ethnicity/culture and heritage. Whiteness isn't a biological classification, but a belief system. Incidentally, part of whiteness is the belief that races exist and are meaningful classifiers, along with the belief that whiteness is worth defending, leading to white defensiveness, also called white fragility.

If you still insist, then here's a speedrun: are they white? Why or why not? The Ainu, the Inuit, Michael Jackson, the Scottish, the Irish, the Italians, etc. Whiteness is one of what George Carlin called "big clubs;" they are defined primarily by power-sharing agreements between political power brokers rather than by scientific evidence. The power of whiteness has been extended in various ways even as science has shown that it is bullshit.

Also, on a personal note, I'm routinely discriminated against because of the color of my skin, along with other physical properties. I don't deny that this happens to me or others, nor do I deny that it is a large part of our society (or at least the USA.) I merely opine that this discrimination is undesirable, unmoored from scientific evidence, and something that we should work to eliminate. I'm not pulling one of those stupid "colorblind" routines.

My NSFW reply, including my own experience, is here. However, for this crowd, what I would point out is that this was always part of the mathematics, just like confabulation, and the only surprise should be that the prompt doesn't need to saturate the context in order to approach an invariant distribution. I only have two nickels so far, for this Markov property and for confabulation from PAC learning, but it's ~~completely expected~~ weird that it's happened twice.

Why are techbros such shit at Lojban? It's a recurring and silly pattern. Two minutes with a dictionary tells me that there is {seldikca} for being charged like a capacitor and {nenzengau} for charging like a rechargeable battery.

This is some of the most corporate-brained reasoning I've ever seen. To recap:

• NYC elects a cop as mayor
• Cop-mayor decrees that NYC will be great again, because of businesses
• Cops and other oinkers get extra cash even though they aren't business
• Commercial real estate is still cratering and cops can't find anybody to stop/frisk/arrest/blame for it
• Folks over in New Jersey are giggling at the cop-mayor, something must be done
• NYC invites folks to become small-business owners, landlords, realtors, etc.
• Cop-mayor doesn't understand how to fund it (whaddaya mean, I can't hire cops to give accounting advice!?)
• Cop-mayor's CTO (yes, the city has corporate officers) suggests a fancy chatbot instead of hiring people

It's a fucking pattern, ain't it.

I would hate to be his child.

What a coward, only spouting death-threat rhetoric on point-to-point lines and not in public. Presumably he understands that his opinions are vile, and understands that the public would thrash him until he can no longer hold those opinions, but doesn't understand that this means that his attitude needs to be adjusted.

NSFW, because this is a pattern for him. So, he used to work on Beaker, a Web browser built on top of the Dat/Hypercore DHT. I recall my experience chatting with him and others on IRC. I had been interested because Dat and Beaker were supposedly built with ocap theory, and at the time I was helping to produce a capability-safe object-oriented programming language. Relevant highlights:

• He did not grok the idea that users might dig below the chrome and directly access APIs. This dovetailed with a lackluster approach to security. In capability theory, users are expressly permitted to do anything they are capable of doing; but Beaker's philosophy was that users ought to restrict themselves to only clicking buttons in Beaker's chrome.
• In general, interoperability was not a big priority. I'm not sure if there's multiple Hypercore implementations yet, but at the time, there was only one reference implementation and not enough documentation to reimplement it from scratch. So, I wouldn't be able to federate with their DHT using my custom software.
• I didn't know who the project leaders were. One time, one of the project leaders came onto IRC, and I made the mistake of greeting them. As a result, I was immediately banned from their IRC channel. However, none of them knew how IRC works, and so they did not kick me; in the aftermath, I listened as they went around the room and disavowed me, covering their asses by explaining that they didn't know who I was or why I was in the room.

Those first two points rhyme with his actions here. The third point is where I think we can see things heading in the future.

NSFW: this article, mentioned but not linked by the Substack author, is good reading if you want to know about the inciting drama. Choice quote:

Personally I always default to dismissing the chuddy “you radicalized me” explanation as a manipulation tactic coming from people who were already wanting to go there and just looking for an excuse. Also adjacent to abuser logic, like “look what you made me do.” I don’t buy that nazi furry radicalizing, of all things, happens to neutral people.

If you ever happen to chat in-person with this sort of highly-concerned moderate, feel free to grill them about how they would deal with violent fascists. Either they cave, or they'll eventually conclude that their immense powers of rhetoric allow them to verbally defuse Nazis somehow. In this latter case, point out that they can't even convince you that punching Nazis is wrong, and conclude that they must not be very good at rhetoric.

Sorry, but I can't even sneer properly at this sort of cowardice. It's pathetic to the point where ridicule is the only response I can emotionally justify.