https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu... https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Be really interesting to see how their approach evolves over the next couple years with sea changes happening all around them in this moment.

In this particular case though I don't think "evil” is a moral claim, more shorthand for cost externalizing behavior. Hammering expensive dynamic endpoints with millions of unique requests isn’t neutral automation, it's degrading a shared public resource. Call it evil, antisocial, or extractive, the outcome is the same.

The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have.

I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper.

As the search engine with the largest global market share, whether or not Google has a commercial relationship with a site is irrelevant. Google has decided to let their product become a Utility. As a Utility, Google has a responsibility to provide effective tools and effective support for situations like this. Yes it will absolutely add cost for Google. It’s a cost of doing business as a Gatekeeper, as a Utility.

My second shudder in this comment - regulation is not always the answer. Maybe even it’s rarely the answer. But I do think when it comes to enterprises that have products that intentionally or unintentionally become Gatekeepers and/or Utilities, there should be a regulated mandate that they provide an acceptable level of support and access to the marketplaces they serve. The absence of that is what enables and causes this to perpetuate, and it will continue to do so until an entity with leverage over them can put them in check.

Agree with you it would be different, crypto is global, most of the accessible alternative methods are localized to varying degrees.

You could be dropped in either island near the active eruption areas on some roads and if you didn’t have anything other than landscape clues you’d be hard pressed to tell which one you were on. The fresh-ish lava fields (less than 100 years old) look the same, big black rocky expanses of volcanic rock with little or no vegetation. Iceland’s mosses and grass would be a tell, whereas in Hawaii when life starts to take hold it has a much more jungle look to it. But otherwise, the sulfur smells, steam vents in the active areas, etc are very similar.

I have to say the big island of Hawaii and Iceland are two of my most favorite places on the planet, alongside Alaska. All very rural, not over developed, and an immersion in a raw version of the natural world that is largely abstracted away from us where most of us live.

The RNN and LSTM architectures (and Word2Vec, n-grams, etc) yielded language models that never got mass adoption. Like reel to reel. Then the transformer+attention hit the scene and several paths kicked off pretty close to each other. Google was working on Bert/encoder only transformer, maybe you could call that betamax. Doesn’t perfectly fit as in the case of beta it was actually the better tech.

OpenAI ran with the generative pre trained transformer and ML had its VHS? moment. Widespread adoption. Universal awareness within the populace.

Now with Titans (+miras?) are we entering the dvd era? Maybe. Learning context on the fly (memorizing at test time) is so much more efficient, it would be natural to call it a generational shift, but there is so much in the works right now with the promise of taking us further, this all might end up looking like the blip that beta vs vhs was. If current gen OpenAI type approaches somehow own the next 5-10 years then Titans, etc as Betamax starts to really fit - the shittier tech got and kept mass adoption. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but who knows.

Taking the analogy to present - who in the vhs or even earlier dvd days could imagine ubiquitous 4k+ vod? Who could have stood in a blockbuster in 2006 and knew that in less than 20 years all these stores and all these dvds would be a distant memory, completely usurped and transformed? Innovation of home video had a fraction of the capital being thrown at it that AI/ML has being thrown at it today. I would expect transformative generational shifts the likes of reel to cassette to optical to happen in fractions of the time they happened to home video. And beta/vhs type wars to begin and end in near realtime.

The mass adoption and societal transformation at the hands of AI/ML is just beginning. There is so. much. more. to. come. In 2030 we will look back at the state of AI in December 2025 and think “how quaint”, much the same as how we think of a circa 2006 busy Blockbuster.

Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc. AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at.

To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”

If it pops it might end up being looked at in the lens of history as one of the largest backdoor/proxy wealth redistributions ever. The capex being spent is in large part going to fund the labor of the unwashed masses, and society is getting the individual productivity and efficiency benefits from the end result models.

I’m particularly thankful for the plethora of open source models I have access to thanks to all this.

I, individually, have realized indisputable substantial benefits from having these tools at my disposal every day. If the whole thing pops, these tools are safely in my possession and I’m better because I have them. Thanks .01%!!

(the reality is I don’t think it will pop in the classic sense, and these days it seems the .01 can never lose. either way, the $1tn can’t be labeled as a waste).