I don't disagree with you that freely distributed software on conveniently licensed terms is going to be the go-to stance for the majority of solo and non-commercial developers.
I just believe I could arrange the universe such that I get to have my cake (commercial licensing) and eat it too (with default open source licensing).
It is my experience that corporations do pay handsomely for software they use, even SaaS ones as the cost of doing business. Open source communities need mechanisms for funding that are consistent and low friction.
This is why the software language/repository/platform itself needs to facilitate license tracking and billing for alternative commercial licenses, to make it easy for corporations.
A successful new language effort that provides this facility need not be an enforcer except to say if an enterprise is willing and signed up to pay for any dependencies it uses, it is obligated to pay for all of them with something like AGPL 3 as the poison pill they have to swallow otherwise if they distribute or serve from any copyleft software.
Having simple, consistent rules that vendors and consumers have to follow with no rugpulls will be important for market acceptance. Having voluntary compliance with license terms will also be important to not turn people off from the ecosystem and to let them kick the tires. If software vendors want to distribute only unencumbered free and open source, then god bless 'em, they should be able to do it.
For libraries, I like the Gnu Affero Public License[1]. If you run the library in software with that license, you have to publish all the source of the entire project that incorporates it.
No corporation could tolerate this, though, so the library vendor can negotiate a commercial license of their software for appropriate fees.
That said, corporations are not going to want to negotiate fees with 100's of vendors over constantly fluctuating dependencies in their software.
This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.
Similar to Amazon's Dynamo API, whatever the next big language/ecosystem is needs to be designed around _billing_ and automatic license management for # of deployments, seats, call volumes, etc.
Element.scrollHeight first appeared in the DOM API with IE6 in 2001 as far as I can tell. That browser was the first really modern one, with javascript and CSS that could drive a dynamic layout and they innovated with things like AJAX and vector graphics. The web browser had matured from a document model with live elements to a programmable operating environment.
The API implementation was klunky though, where DOM Elements attached to the DOM became 'live' objects. Reading some of the properties would necessarily require reflowing the page in order to calculate the value. It's interesting to think about all the ways the DOM thread can stall for synchronous API's. The Paul Irish gist is always the top hit when I search:
I'm always impressed by how old sins like element.scrollHeight can get papered over with newer API's. You can use ResizeObserver or requestAnimationFrame() to time your reads of the property and hopefully get the reflows for cheap or free.
Because an LLM is the only way to express intelligence with a computer. So your conception of ram/cpu/storage/networks and learning (training on huge corpus of data) is the only way to do artificial intelligence?
LLM's are the perfect consumer-grade AI, safe to release to the public. It lacks creativity so little chance for a runaway super-intelligence, and it gives the people real tools. It's the best case. Isn't it tidy how reality is? Almost seems planned.
> so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.
Well, did they? They do fritter away a lot of money. Maybe there's a long-running black budget somewhere that could account for it.
You are framing your argument in technologies and technological progressions that you are familiar with. Reality isn't so neat though and there are surely many technological paths to artificial intelligence they could have exploited.
Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's?
NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it.
You have to be told something before you can believe it, right? You also get to choose whether you believe that something you're told is 100% god's honest truth or a load of bullshit as well. It's kindof sad to see people try to gatekeep thought here. Lot of rigid thinkers.
I recall Intel in the 90's trying to build clockless pentiums. They couldn't figure it out or maybe it had integration problems with clockful peripherals and it never came to fruition. But I wondered if that was some furtive attempt to seed some tech into industry. I just try to keep an open mind to these sorts of things.
I'm not saying the movie War Games was a limited hangout for a super-intelligent secret military computer system/network that already existed. I'm just saying it could have been.
I see those trillion dollar data centers we're building in the US are classed as military installations or at least appear to be a public-private partnerships where the data centers are being built on air force bases.
Perhaps the consumer compute tech has advanced to the point that it's good enough to host the next phase of intelligence for the military. Maybe all the water AI datacenters need is for energy, not cooling.
The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.
That is to say that (practically) all software has a finite utility timeframe. So it's a lot like an organism in that way in that it 'dies' when it is no longer useful.
I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.
I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.
React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.
Yes, I hope I didn't contradict you, the economy has been shite. Was just trying to leave a positive note on recent developments that will continue, God willing.
Some enjoy their local cultures, customs and sovereignty and do not wish to dissolve into a homogenized nowhere-land of world culture/governance. Some people do not cheer for dystopia.
Continue with the scold though, very convincing argument so far.
There are upward and downward revisions this year at least, it seems like a mixed bag with many policies juicing the economy. [1]
Job opportunities differ by state and de-growth hostility to business policies and crony investments. Where I am, layoffs and offshoring continues. I hear new grads are increasingly opting for the skilled trades, which is interesting given they aren't getting use out of their degrees.
Modern invented flag peddlers only seek to have us fly flags of the division they seek to generate. I only fly the flag of the country I live in and give side eye to anyone that does otherwise.
> I'm referring to the model itself. The `.ckpt` file is clearly transformative wrt its training set. Or, at least, substantially more transformative than other things that have long received fair use protection.
Oh, I see. And the model weights are what one can make the copyright infringement claims on in the US?
Not to split hairs, but do you believe it's so transformative because you can't read plain text copies of original works in the weights or because the source material is so hopelessly discombobulated that the original work could not be reliably recreated?
I believe the 'hopelessly discombobulated' argument is probably pretty solid, but one could argue to a judge that the weights are something like JPEG compression. Sure the forged image of Mona Lisa is a bit foggy in the background and some of those details are incorrect, but the wry smile in the foreground is perfectly captured.
> On the contrary, I'm invested quite heavily in the exactly opposite hypothesis -- that the ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini UX you're referring to is not fit-for-purpose.
Oh! Excellent, carry on!
> rather than an anthropomorphic entity.
But it unfailingly passes the Turing test, at least with regards to an immature, non-discerning human mind like a child's. You may as well rub a lamp.
> But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.
This iteration of the tech, I agree. In future iterations that use intensive persuasion techniques, who can say?
> Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.
The US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one, though, because it is codified law. Immoral laws eventually get overturned, but until then it is the rule because the collective we says so right now.
What is the derivative work of an AI response? Who is the creator making its derivative works? The AI is not an entity, it is a software engine operating over an obfuscated index.
Beyond the muddiness of copyright, there is the question of human flourishing. How the heck would you train children and adolescents on the responsible use of AI?
The current UX, the "friend computer"-themed REPL, is chock-a-block with moral hazards. Loss of privacy and profiling, fostering undue trust, emotional dependence and manipulation. Like, I get that you're invested in the industry, but we should condemn this tech.
I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
https://clubcompy.com