The counter-counter argument is that while we’ve been here for a comparative blink of an eye, we’ve left behind 4 orders of magnitude more stuff than just nests, bones, and a feather or two.

Could I have made it myself? No!

Am I grateful that I can have the output of Mozilla’s internal efforts — the browser source code — so that I can at least tweak it and rebuild it myself, and even ship the results myself? Yes!

A open weight model is both an incomprehensible binary blob like Photoshop, but also patchable and adjustable piece of source code, like Firefox.

Not to sound overly cheerful, but shout out to my Makita DHP484 combo drill/driver and 100 piece bit set that, for a low three figure price, is far more powerful and capable than the noisy old corded monster it replaces.

  Chelsea
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  Flatiron
  Murray Hill
  Flatbush

  Chelsea
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  Chelsea
  Murray Hill

It’s as if they had two choices:

“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs

“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”

and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.

I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.

Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.

His honour Count Binface is from Sigma IX not Sigma 6! To lump him in with those scurrilous, pro-littering hoodlums is the kind of anti-Recyclon smear I would associate with Sigma X’s online forums, not this place!

On the other hand, aside from the commit messages, one didn’t ever have access to the underlying thought process of human developers either, so maybe it’s not equivalent to say that secret prompts mean closed-source.

As we’re seeing in the UK right now, if you stump up £500 and find ten people to counter-sign your candidacy, you can even run against your MP as a novelty candidate. If you choose your novelty name right you also get to stand next to them at the alphabetically-ordered result announcement.

Compare with comatose Kentucky senators on their deathbed or EU commissioners based in a country with French train signs. Neither are insurmountable obstacles to democracy — hold up a sign? Google Translate? — but, by my metric, they are lesser options to something more local and accountable.

I’m sure, back in the day, rural folk took umbrage at having to ride their donkey to the local town just to be able to throw cowpats at their despised burghers. We of course can do it on TikTok nowadays but nothing beats yelling in person.

I’ll be the first to admit it seems ambitious / implausible to try to (1) undercut the megalabs (2) move everyone’s focus back to tweets and then (3) profit.

A bit like handing out free horses to undercut Standard Oil so that you can go back to reaping the profits of your wheel tapping business.

The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket.

Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.

(I’m a big Firefox fan and idealist.)

I have three machines now: two laptops that syncthing to a mini pc that sends snapshots offsite. Losing access to one laptop is no longer a day-ending, world-stopping event!

As such, the safest ground state for any machine is to be sync’d then powered off. I do it after every “session”: before lunch, at the end of the day, and often in between if I’m at home and just using the machine for 45 minutes to e.g. buy a mattress before going back to the garden.

Similarly, with my work machine, I push everything to the central repository at the end of every day and delete all my local branches. They are more prudent with spending so I don’t have a hot-spare second machine like I do at home. The next best thing is to be prepped for catastrophic data loss at all times.

I often think about why I only have one phone. Losing that would suck but it’s harder because it’s iOS and I’m less knowledgable about how to automate it as a cattle phone, not a pet phone.

The article is saying a good, homemade breakfast is important. Robin Williams is a packet of store bought pancakes. ChatGPT, particularly in the sense that it is made from ground up and reconstituted humanity, is Soylent Green.

Thank you :)

With apologies to Affabeck Lauder

The journey from Y to Z might feel more tiring than the journey from A to B, but only if you do them all in one day :)