My static sites are built on the server (Github pages or Cloudflare Pages). They rebuild each time there are new commit on the repo, and that way I don’t need to version built artifacts.
I built locally for many many years and I’m much happier with this model since the commit log is a much better reflection of what changed and there are no inconsistencies as whenever you’d commit source and built artifacts that don’t match.
… It demands some extra care in terms of making sure the server can pull the dependencies and run the build scripts, but that also means my colleagues (or me in the future recovering the project from the repo) would be able to build with what was commited and nothing more… which is a requirement in my case.
"Freedom" is a valuable concept but a poor model for understanding behavior.
I'd support that if there were no business incentive to spend money and research to influence people into taking the wrong decisions.
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago.
Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.
I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.
No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.
In the limited pockets of society you experience directly.
How much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia, the economic inequalities globally, or even in the West, etc...
if you look at macro, everything moves according to laws that have little to do with the even distribution of technology and a lot to do with the decision makers that get to pick how that distribution takes place.
That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from.
I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?
You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.
I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.
A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.
If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.
And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.
The relationship between the West and Asia in its current form (Asia as a manufacturing powerhouse, the West as hub of global finance, outsourcing all over the world, JIT manufacturing) all this stuff is totally dependent on instant communication over the internet.
We would not be able to coordinate the world's production activity from Manhattan without the internet. Capital would be far less accumulated and allocated in a way less granular way. Demand signal would be completely different, based way more on brick and mortar. Feedback loops between capital and demand would be constrained to different geographic areas which would make basically all markets way more segregated...
So it changes labor, production, demand, markets, culture, media... I think that's basically everything!
I'll tell you. I would have a different job, my city would have a different population, I would spend my time after work differently, I would shop differently, I would watch different movies and listen to different music.
Life in Asia and Africa has changed pretty dramatically, and improvements are accelerating. Yeah, we're not in utopia yet, but more people than ever live comfortable, safe lives. "Business at the speed of light" has become a reality, and we're still getting to grips with it. We dealt with a global pandemic with an efficiency never seen before - had it happened in the previous century, we would have probably seen "black death" levels of casualties.
Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.
Well, population explosions tend to happen in hellholes and sensible declines happen in civilized society. The term happiness of course isn't something you can measure that easily, though.
Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate.
Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero
Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.
I think war caused by conflict for resources is a much more probably cause of societal collapse, and indeed extinction.
Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that.
Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate change - it's a really odd thing to focus on.
Area's of the world where birth rate is still high tend to be in poorly developed regions where human labour is required to survive.
However, in developed countries - the idea that we need the same or more people to maintain civilisation when the means of production is being increasingly automated doesn't make sense.
As an example ~100 years ago in Europe you were looking at nearly 50% of the population being involved in food production, whereas now it's about 5% - and that includes a 50% increase in the population to feed.
Note the EU is a net food exporter - even if it does import bananas.
I don't think I can do any better than you by asking the most advanced LLM to be as pedantic as possible whilst not addressing anything actually being said.
I was responding to 2 assertions, used to justify an argument, that clearly don't hold water.
ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy' is completely specious ( sic ).
If you want a wider argument - then the reality is the birth rate is dropping because when women have the choice ( via birth control and increased socio-economic independence ) they are largely choosing to have less children. So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.
The second bit is speculation on motive - which is why I didn't bother the first time - but in my view, those that push an argument that there is a fertility/species crisis ( using specious arguments like the above ) - who say women aren't really happy with their choice etc - is all about subjugating women to baby making machines to satisfy the ego of people like Musk. Whether the original poster has that motivation or has just fallen for the "species crisis" ( or even worse 'race' crisis ) rubbish - I have no idea - I didn't want to assume the worse.
Hmm - childlessness ( note this is different from reduced family size ), almost doubled for women in China between 2010 and 2020, and over a similar period the female suicide rate has halved.
How do you explain that?
Sure having children is still a protective factor, but the highest risk is amongst those that wanted children but couldn't, rather than those that choose.
> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?
Yes.
> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.
You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.
If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.
Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.
Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.
Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.
I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.
The downsides of it are well known, however. Higher costs of living near work, less mobility (both home and work need to be mostly in the same place, so you end up missing opportunities), unmet demands for housing (resources invested in office space), more time spent commuting in public transport (or worse, cars), and so on. Even for employers, the cost is limiting where you can hire talent. I live in Ireland and, while a lot of talent is concentrated in the Dublin area, there are other talent pools that are simply out of reach to us.
I too love to meet my colleagues in person, but the cost for society, and for myself, are non-trivial. I would love if we had a weekly office day, so we could have meetings, lunch, discuss work, projects, intersections on what we are doing, and so on.
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
> Turned out: not much have changed
Changed a lot, I am getting to know what a random person living some where in the world think about what change it has brought
> What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.
I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative.
Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't).
I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
Did you write more about that experience somewhere?
This seems to corroborate my feeling that aptitude with language is a very poor proxy for intelligence, although it's often used as one. My own experience is that I'm less struggling to find the right words and sounds more clever at the times when my brain is actually empty and I'm "not there", and at the contrary the more "self-aware" I am and the more I struggle to articulate my thoughts, as if my brain (or ego?) was stepping in the way and slowing me down by trying to supervise what I'm saying too closely, making me sounds dumb.
The issue is not that Linux lacks a central authority that holds some encryption keys and controls what software you can run.
The issue is that you should not run any software from a source that can't be trusted. When we used to run only software from community distros or that we compile ourselves, launching a malicious program was a non issue.
Interesting, thank you.
Are you aware of any quantitative data to back up the claim that llms are more performant in code mode than mcp mode? Not that i doubt it, but I'm curious about how big of a difference it can make.
Very few "user facing" applications will have to deal with real users any longer. From an author's point of view let's admit that it will make things easier.
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