So I think money or wealth is the bigger weight here.

At some point that becomes less sustainable and looking at something with less abstraction assures you’re at least looking at a baseline source of truth, even if the volume is massive.

There’s going to be a whole world in the knowledge economy, not just software but everywhere, around validation and sign off of information that we’ve taken for granted as a cost prohibitive process where only the best options make it to high levels of function and maturity.

I’d be more concerned as to how this ends up in agent platforms using the LLMs, when you don’t have a fairly autonomous agent based system using these the entire point is that a human isn’t involved, so who are you serving ads to and where are you injecting them.

Moreover, if you are injecting them everywhere, does that survive stare for subsequent steps, meaning from the first set of results I get, does that loop back in again with the ad injected into the context. Because now, we have yet another dangerous way of injecting instructions into an already issue prone surface area.

I’m guessing they’re going to have special APIs that don’t include ads, and those are going to cost more, especially for non embedded agents (processes that already exist inside ChatGPT that kick off transparently from prompts, like asking it to work with an office document). After all the customers using agents aside from developers are mostly businesses, so it’s where the money is. The ads will exist for the poor to subsidize their use, and probably create even more barriers for agentic use like I described. Just my thoughts.

And good luck litigating against any business in this administration. Unless they explicitly tick off certain people or refuse to kiss the ring, they can get away with almost anything right now and there’s little risk of doing it or not because ticking off this admin will raise illegitimate prosecution even if you’re perfectly legal, almost the same level of if you’re not. It’s the ideal playground for doing all sorts of manipulation, just kiss the ring and you’ll be fine.

Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.

I don’t like to be the ugly American who just assumes the world should speak my language, so I was ready for language barriers, but I had no real issues at all.

Meanwhile more specialized agents that try to add or enforce constraints around a problem space where certain aspects tend to be well established don’t sit well with a lot of uses. “No, you and general knowledge don’t know best, I know best… do this.”

I can see the use case for both but I’m seeing a whole lot more willingness to want confirmation bias, essentially to automate away parts of jobs and tasks people already do but in the personalized or opinionated way they’ve established, unwilling to explore alternative options.

So the general purpose agent structures that just kickoff whatever they can tend to favor best in terms of positive feedback from agent users. Meanwhile it to some degree ignores many of the potential benenfits of having agents with general knowledge and bounded by general established bounds. It’s basically the whole “please do parts of my job for me but only the way I want them done.”

People aren’t ready for being wrong or change, they just want to automate parts of their processes away. So I’m not sure “no” is going to sit well with a lot of people.

Now a lot can be cast off to LLMs to focus on the problem space and the innovative computing use around them. It’s been exciting to not worry about arbitrary idiosyncrasies and machete through jungles of technical minutia to get to the clearing. I still have to deal with them but less of them. And I don’t have to commit nearly as much in the technical space to memory to address problems, I can often focus on higher level architectural decisions or new approaches to problems. It’s been quite enjoyable as well.

I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.

Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for.

And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.

But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.

Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.

Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.

I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.

I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.

I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.

Some paths are emerging popular, but in a lot of cases we’re still not sure even these are the long term paths that will remain. It doesn’t help that there’s not a good taxonomy (that I’m aware of) to define and organize the different approaches out there. “Agent” for example is a highly overloaded term that means a lot of things and even in this space, agents mean different things to different groups.

The only shortcoming now really is if you want to view with several people and socialize after, it may be difficult for someone to accommodate a large party with good viewing in their home without a theater setup. And of course audio, audio is where theaters can still stand out. It’s a pain in the ass for most homes to setup a good sound system, you really often do want a dedicated theater area which most aren’t going to have. A soundbar helps. You can Jerry rig some surround speakers into any space but it’s often a pain. So that’s really the last barrier: cheap low latency sound that can beat a theater.

For me comfort trumps the slightly degraded sound. Plus some baby crying or random person chatting during the movie can break that as well.

Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.

That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.

I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.