> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?
Probably individual actors have different motivations, but let's spitball for a second:
- LLMs are genuinely a revolution in natural language processing. We can do things now in that space that were unthinkable single-digit years ago. This opens new opportunity spaces to colonize, and some might turn out quite profitable. Ergo, land rush.
- Even if the new spaces are not that much of a value leap intrinsically, some may still end up obsoleting earlier-generation products pretty much overnight, and no one wants to be the next Nokia. Ergo, defensive land rush.
- There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI to serve, which in essence means deprecating the labor class. The benefits (to that specific someone, anyway...) would be staggering enough to make that a goal worth pursuing even if the odds of reaching it are unclear and arguably quite low.
- The increasingly leveraged debt that's funding the land rush's capex needs to be paid off somehow and I'll venture everyone knows that the winners will possibly be able to, but not everyone will be a winner. In that scenario, you really don't want to be a non-winner. It's kind of like that joke where you don't need to outrun the lions, you only need to outrun the other runners, except in this case the harder everyone runs and the bigger the lions become. (Which is a funny thought now, sure, but the feasting, when it comes, will be a bloodbath.)
- A few, I'll daresay, have perhaps been huffing each other's farts too deep and too long and genuinely believe the words of ebullient enthusiasm coming out of their own mouths. That, and/or they think everyone's job except theirs is simple actually, and therefore just this close to being replaceable (which is a distinct flavor of fart, although coming from largely the same sources).
So basically the mania is for the most part a natural consequence of what's going on in the overlap of the tech itself and the incentive structure within which it exists, although this might be a good point to remember that cancer and earthquakes too are natural. Either way, take care of yourselves and each other, y'all, because the ride is only going to get bouncier for a while.
Oracle acquired them. So, now you have the full power of Oracle standing behind them to convince customers to adopt it, and the same power to keep customers from migrating.
Have you documented your VSCode setup somewhere? I've been looking to implement something like that. Does your setup provide next edit suggestions too?
I keep idly wondering what would be the market for a plug and play LLM runner. Some toaster sized box with the capability to run exclusively offline/local. Plug it into your network, give your primary machine the IP, and away you go.
Of course, the market segment who would be most interested, probably has the expertise and funds to setup something with better horsepower than could be offered in a one size fits all solution.
I'm not seeing anywhere in that page anything about an assumed static basket of human wants and needs. Maybe I missed it -- can you point out where you saw that?
Interesting, though, that per the very same article someone like Adam Smith concurred empirically with Marx's observation on the titular tendency of rates of profit to fall. This suggests to me it likely had some meat to it.
Without going too deep on it (I used to be a fan in university as a silly youth), the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is the key aspect of Marx's crisis theory.
Basically dude thought the competition inherent in capitalism would cause all profit to be competed to zero leading to an eventual 'crisis' and collapse of the capitalist means of production.
Implicit in this assumption is the idea that the things humans need and want changes/evolves in a predictable way, and not in a chaotic/fractal/reflexive way (which is what actually happens).
An eventual static basket of desired goods would be the only mechanism by which competition ever could compete profits to zero. If the basket is dynamic/reflexive/evolving, there's constantly new gaps opening between human desires and market offerings to arbitrage for profit. You can just look at the average profit margins of S&P500 companies over time to see they are not falling.
The further we get from subsistence worries (Adam Smith's invisible hand has pulled virtually the entire globe out of living in the dirt), the more divergent and higher abstraction these wants and needs become, and hence the profit opportunities are only increasing -- which is how the economy grows (no, it's not a fixed pie, another Marxian fallacy).
again, marx didnt see it as a fixed pie. thats the whole reason behind his idea of absolute vs relative surplus value, is that the pie isn't fixed. he absolutely saw the (at his time) modern capitalist economy as a revolutionary, dynamic force that brought about a great increase in the absolute amount of productive capacity and wealth in the world
No one is "forcing" anything on you, and I'm finding this argument increasingly disingenuous. If you prefer the current versions then you're entirely free to keep them.
But you do not get to demand that future versions are only ever implemented your way. If that's what you want, fork the project or pay someone to do it for you. Acting entitled about the work of volunteers who are sharing it with you for free is not a good look.
Not in love with its insistence on recreating the container from scratch every step of the pipeline, among a bundle of other irksome quirks. There are certainly worse choices, though.
Opposite of Jenkins where you have shared workspaces and have to manually ensure workspace is clean or suffer from reproducibility issues with tainted workspaces.
I'm aware, but thank you. Unfortunately, given sufficiently large artifacts, the overhead of packaging, uploading, downloading and unpacking them at every step becomes prohibitive.
Whoops, the European company just got bought out by a US entity. Tough luck! [1]
Is this part of the spec? If not, it's as loose as a tent. And by "part of the spec" I mean "all your assets will be forcefully nationalized the second you or a parent company of yours becomes less than X% European owned", where X is well above 50.
As a rule of thumb, I wouldn't assume that any scenario you came up with on the spot was overlooked by an agency whose job it is to not overlook complex scenarios, let alone trivially simple ones.
To start with... states can and will absolutely block the sale of strategic national companies to foreign actors. But I'm sure you knew that.
The link shows that this isn't something I've come up with on the spot, it's literally happening today, and it's not being blocked. They can, yet will not, because scared of the US.
As far as I understand, NPM packages are not self-contained like e.g. Python wheels and can (and often need to) run scripts on install.
So just installing a package can get you compromised. If the compromised box contains credentials to update your own packages in NPM, then it's an easy vector for a worm to propagate.
Fair point -- I was only thinking wheels, but you are right.
Would source distributions work as a vector for automated propagation, though? If I'm not mistaken, there's no universal standard for building from source distributions.
