I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.
A lot of people are giving Tesla shit here, but surely there should be regulations in place to ensure something like this isn’t allowed to be released for public use?
In many ways, it is an obscene amount of control, and I don’t disagree that this degree of wealth isn’t ethical - even examples like Taylor Swift aren’t from “hard work”, but rather backroom deals, undercutting other artists, etc.
IMO, the best alternative is going entirely the other way. Tell all billionaires in the US that they are subject to a wealth tax, and attempts to fight it will result in freezing assets, expulsion from the country, executive removal, etc. Drive all billionaires out of the country, and let them set up shop elsewhere (they won’t).
It’s a punishment, though. Perhaps they should be punished, but IMO an easier approach is to say “well done” and to tell them that as long as this money goes somewhere for societal gain it doesn’t really matter if they decide to pump tens of billions into making public roads the best roads in the country, it’s better than them just having that money in a fund somewhere.
Where this will likely get dicey is in ensuring that this money stays in home accounts, and in defining what is taxable wealth, and fighting avoidance. That’s where the system will be gamed, but ultimately it’s different to avoid tax that goes somewhere to avoiding your money being spent by you for public good.
I can’t remember who suggested it, but they framed the question differently around taxing billionaires.
Instead of making it a negative thing, they said it should be framed as a great honour to pay these “special” taxes. The billionaire tax should be kept separately from all other taxes, it should be pooled into a limited fund that they own, and should be distributed to areas where they want it to make a real impact. They should then be given additional benefits in society based on the impact generated by their fund. It notes that capitalism isn’t necessarily about accumulation of wealth, but profit, and that wealth should be taxed.
For example, if Elon Musk were taxed 50% as a wealth tax, he is personally invited to the White House to discuss his plans with the tax authorities and the president. He gets to attend specific meetings to see where his money has gone (let’s say to hospitals), and gets public praise for pumping several billion into public healthcare initiatives. Wealth is reframed into an opportunity to help society, whereas capitalism pushes profit.
While I don’t really like the idea of billionaires choosing where taxes go, if improvements are measured on societal impact it’s still better than before where they just hoard wealth.
All of big tech is really worried about this.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
From a company perspective, it’s a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they’ve had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.
I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they’re in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we’ve seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.
I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.
Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.
I liked Outer Worlds, but while I do see some “NV magic” there, it feels like both Bethesda AND Obsidian are no longer the same companies that they once were. Obsidian are still quietly putting out some solid games…but not to the same quality of two generations prior.
Tribalism is surprisingly rampant in gaming, especially when a developer picks a side/is acquired by the creator of “their” console.
The recipes I’ve followed ask for some malt extract in the boiling water. There’s a definite difference in taste and texture, and while I recommend it, most places that sell the extract sell huge jars of it, so you’ll want to make a lot of bagels to get it used up…
For those that haven’t tried them, and don’t fancy going to NYC or Montreal for the “authentic bagel experience”, try making your own and you’ll see the huge difference between what you get in supermarkets (even good ones with good bakeries like Lidl) and a proper bagel. While there’s a few steps, it’s not hard to make.
But for the yanks, you should absolutely try German bakeries. I can understand why even good bagels aren’t a priority for them…
Meal deals are a British staple. Many office workers will grab a sandwich, a snack, and a drink during a lunch break. That’s probably why this has made the news here, because if you wanted to poison the most people at the same time this is probably the best way.
Like most big tech companies, they’re actually several divisions all competing with each other. Lately, the AI divisions have latched on to the hype and they’re pushing their wares to other divisions, often with enough clout to keep those in security/privacy quiet. Integrating LLM’s is also a great way for a middle manager type to curry favour with the bosses, and to build little empires for themselves.
Sadly, I don’t see Gimp ever competing with Photoshop. It’s not necessarily a feature parity thing, nor is it a mind share thing. It’s as you’ve said - it’s not built by creatives to be the best possible tool for many types of design.
It’s truly a shame, because for years Adobe slept on different aspects of digital design, and there was a true opportunity to build a Linux-first tool that made things like Web Design so much simpler. It’s an unpopular opinion, but Linux window managers have always lacked creative input. There has always either been a design-by-commitee, or a design-by-engineer feel - and this is reflected in how poor Gimp and design tools are in the Linux space.
In reality, Linux could have the best photo editing and design-specific tooling, but sadly the tooling either lacks a creative touch, or lacks features that are truly needed to be competitive.
There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.
Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
I use Windows. It does what it needs to do, and while I haven’t upgraded past 10, it’s not complained about much.
At home I switch between Fedora and Windows, but at work I use OSX because using Linux at work gets you a shitty laptop instead of a MBP. I work for a big tech company, with the Windows and Mac user communities being pretty much the same size. What I’ve noticed is that Windows is fairly tolerable, and often has few issues that don’t need IT intervention. The MacOS community, while often being more technical because it’s used by tech workers, has a lot more issues than any other. Major OS updates are events that take months of planning because it’s guaranteed that thousands of people will essentially brick their laptops trying to just do a standard upgrade. Everything seems to break all the time, which is mad when you consider that Apple is a trillion dollar company with one hardware line. Windows and Linux support many hardware lines.
Ultimately, you know what you’re getting with each choice. All I care about is that my OS does what it intends to do.
As someone with IBS, I’ve kept an eye on potential remedies or cures for years, and while I’d love to be supportive of this, I’m skeptical that it will actually amount to something until human trials are effective and treatment actually starts to roll out.
Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,
I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.