But yes, I intend to support several models, to handle the overload situation (automatic failover). And switch to a cheap paid plan, though it seems like that'll mostly improve rate limits, which barely matters for my usage.

Faster is always good, though. I do care about latency.

You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me.

(There are also reasons why it's significantly worse than Safari, which has special privileges, so your question is valid.)

(I guess the only relevance here is that if your problem matches a model's strengths, then you can do fine with a model that is several generations out of date.)

Computers are in the cloud -- so, nowhere and cost nothing. The AI-assisted search result is on a web page and only costs a little bit of screen space. Amazon may have eaten retail, but at least it ships stuff to my door, has a great selection, and employs people.

Data centers are big, noisy water guzzlers that don't do anything and don't employ enough people to matter. They don't answer questions. They don't write code for me. They don't recover my data if I lose it. If I want to take some computer-mediated action, I go to https://... not data-center://... so why do I need the damn thing uglying up my community?

To be clear, I am not saying that these are stupid or naive opinions or arguments. I'm just trying to point out the visibility aspect. There are cogent arguments why allowing a data center would be a net negative to a community even after you factor in the actual benefits it provides (which are often enjoyed by Other People Who Don't Live Here).

It is natural for us to want eg utility-style AI on tap and also not want the planet destruction that data centers bring. (Nor the brain destruction that AI brings.)

A bit of an odd thing to say, since "everywhere" implies there are multiple places to be, and at the instant of the big bang, there was only place to be. So it was both everywhere and at a single point: it was at all of the single place there was to be.

But your point (sorry) about expansion being from everywhere isn't specific to the big bang; space was expanding well after the big bang and it doesn't seem like the expansion ever had a "center" (at least, not since not-center places existed). It's expanding from everywhere. (But evenly everywhere? I have no idea. Hey, maybe black holes are like buttons in cloth, and it expanded everywhere except for where the buttons were holding things still at a rate relative to distance from the button. A brilliant hypothesis that explains exactly zero unexplained phenomena, at least none that I know of.)

[1] This is just gravity, nothing specific to black holes, so the analogy isn't doing a lot of work here.

Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.

I'm wondering if your description could be an example of migrating a goal or practice to a value?

Some of the others have natural pairings too (eg momentum/inertia). Perhaps there's a taxonomy struggling to get out, where there's a bright and dark side to each? Though it kind of depends on the aspect you reflect them on; activation energy's "opposite" could be compound interest or nihilism.

Clearly I need to write a game in the tradition of Ultima IV, where different groups/races/species represent the extreme of each model, and perhaps its reflection....

Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the threshold.

They are sadly opposites. When used to describe a person: are they high activation energy in that it takes a lot to get them going, or are they high activation energy in that they frequently do things that are hard to get started on?

Or closely related: I'll call it inertia. The belief that anything I do will only provide benefit as long as I keep it up, and the minute I lose vigilance, the benefit will drain away.

Another: certitude. I am fundamentally a godlike being and whatever I choose to spend effort on is the Right thing, whether I understand why or not, and therefore whatever I am doing is critically important to keep doing regardless of actual or perceived benefit.

Another: diminishing returns. Initial effort brings outsized rewards, but later effort becomes less effective over time.

Another: compound interest. 10% effort initially doesn't achieve much, but the longer I keep at it, the more the benefits compound. (This one is interesting, in that it can lead to positive behavioral changes yet is, in a way, the opposite of the activation energy model.)

Another: behaviorism. Effort doesn't matter, only observable outcomes. There's no point in doing things that have no short-term visible effects.

Related: momentum. (Also note that it's a synonym of inertia!) I need to do things where I can feel the success, in order to fuel the next thing, and then the next.

Meta-model: optimization (aka desperation). There is no single right model, and so I need to choose a different model for each situation, and it's critically important that I choose the best one.

----

I doubt the activation energy model dominates[1] all of the above, but it very well may be the best one to focus on. At least for a time, as the author suggested at the end of the article.

[1] Is better in all circumstances.

> Anthropic is crowing about this achievement because they are afraid of the dirt cheap AI models coming out of China and eventually other places impacting their valuation. Full stop.

It's the "full stop" that I'm disagreeing with. Yes, you can make valid arguments about the motivations behind this, or the effectiveness of it, or whatever. You can even conclude that it's a net negative. That's my current leaning. But "computers are tools that exist to serve" is an excuse, a conscious decision to abandon responsibility. Hammers, nails, social media, biological weapons, and date rape drugs are tools that exist to serve.

[1] Ok, fine, at least one started out as a sleazy way to talk about people's physical attractiveness and behavior anonymously with repercussions, in a way where the victims would have no meaningful recourse. For the sake of my argument, pretend we're talking about Friendster instead of Facebook, please?

Describing it in terms of a word-by-word choice is simpler, but writing quality is dependent on the interplay between words.

"The weather today was cold and {grey,overcast}." If the next sentence is "I miss yesterday, when it was {bright,sunny}." then the choice between "grey" and "overcast" is no longer neutral. "grey" and "bright" pair together, as do "overcast" and "sunny". Or if you disagree with my aesthetic sensibilities, consider:

    The weather today was cold and {grey,gray}. The {color,colour} of the sky matched my {humorless,humourless} mood.

You can't just destroy some signal and handwave that you'll make it up in some other way.

(If you don't like calling it a distribution when it's at 100% for the chosen token and 0% for all others, then look at it as an output distribution across all possible prompt inputs, or perhaps just the cluster of prompts that achieve whatever you're trying to accomplish.)

The part I agree with:

It is true that watermarking can be done by "just" swapping one PRNG for another, and it is even true that with today's LLMs, it is possible that this will not degrade the output. But it has a cost, and as things improve, that cost will matter. You are intentionally reducing the degrees of freedom in the output, and using those bits of entropy for a purpose that does not improve the quality. If you maximize your tradeoff of bits for quality, those extra bits lower the ceiling of what's possible. It's a very simple information theoretic argument, and the only plausible argument against it (that we're using those bits so inefficiently now that the new PRNG is no worse than the old) only holds in the short term.

I also agree that having TOS that forbid removing the watermarking is deeply, deeply problematic. Hell, the whole essay is well-written and persuasive, and gives good reasons why this is a poor approach.

What I disagree with, and the reason for this comment, is the entitlement.

> The idea that anything other than my needs should factor into the generation of text for me is patently offensive.

This attitude is what is patently offensive for me. This is the argument that the world is beholden to my interests. It says that worrying about negative externalities is immoral. It's another form of certain people being above the law, shareholder profit maximization über alles, might makes right, we have to do it or someone else will, "we just help people connect", {code,a gun,roofie} is just a tool.

So I agree that the watermarking has a cost. But you can't leave out that it is an attempt to reduce negative externalities of AI. Whether it's a realistic or worthwhile attempt is a whole other debate (and Gruber does a good job of debating just that in the latter part of the essay), but saying that the user's needs are the only thing that should ever be considered is reprehensible.

Then at some point it "clicked" and I was suddenly unable to not see it. Articles that I had thought sophisticated now came across to me as if they were written in crayon.

Enjoy it while you still can!

(And yes, the article here is very clearly AI written. Great content, written in crayon.)

I'm not sure if that's right. I only just recently learned that the "snapshots" (aka cached tokens) necessarily contain the entire context history, not just an image of a "state as of the final token" (well, it is the state as of the final token, but that state contains the whole history). So I'm not confident of my grasp of the structures here.

Police stalking women with Flock camera data. Period/pregnancy data used by ex- and current boyfriends or law enforcement. Near Intelligence designed Planned Parenthood as a trackable brand, enabling location-based targeted harassment of those who visited a clinic. (Or more innocuous data leading to the same thing, as with Target predicting a pregnancy and revealing it.) Telecom location data used for roadside assistance -- as well as bounty hunters, stalkers, and bail bond companies. Grindr sharing HIV status. Cambridge Analytica. Avast selling browser histories, and buyers de-anonymizing it. (That data ended up all over; I haven't looked to see what explicit harms it caused.) Equifax data being used for identity theft.

What exactly needs to happen for it to be a concern? Personally, no, there's nothing too bothersome to me about McDonald's having my purchase history. But I don't want anyone else to have it, and since nobody seems to be able to successfully prevent exfiltration, then actually I don't want McDonald's to have it (or store it, at least, and associate it with me). Oh, and I'd prefer restaurants to compete for my business on the basis of their food, not their IT departments.