I cannot bring myself to care about distillation, when these companies have built their empires on top of everyone else's stolen data, while at the same time telling the world they're out to replace us all.
"frontier" as in the frontier of using everybody else's code, books, art of everyone else for a specific purpose that was never intended to, as in, not even open source projects ever imagined LLMs becoming a thing and their licenses reflected as much.
Not saying we shouldn't be careful with AGI. But the glib tone of "who cares if these companies die?" is where one needs to consider the consequences of AGI not happening or being delayed.
I struggle with the idea that AGI (which I don't think is coming via LLMs, but sidebar) will improve the outcomes of lives and not end up as a tool of privilege and control.
Pitch me on this utopian outlook, because nothing about any of the Frontier companies points away from dystopia to me
- you are assuming that an AGI will prevent more deaths than it would cause
- you are assuming that AGI is just around the corner and that scaling up language models is the path to get there
- you can make this argument about basically anything (nuclear power, tuberculosis medication, free healthcare). I’d say the burden of proof is on you to back up your extraordinary claim with extraordinary evidence.
I thought we gave up on AGI and turned into making sex chatbots and simulated porn instead. Wasn't that what Sam was pushing for all along when he went all in on Sora and the erotic modes?
> every delay to AGI results in deaths that AGI could have prevented
Sure, that's what AGI would be used for /s
In other news, we are not even close to AGI and even with the current experimental technology, frontier AI model companies are already fighting to help departments of war, which actually results in the most deaths. What makes you think AGI would be used for not leading to the same millions of deaths?
Tbh, I think distillation is happening both ways. And at this stage, "quality" is stagnating, the main edge is the tooling. The harness of CC seems to be the best so far, and I wonder if this leak would equalize the usability.
more likely, they would parse them out using simple regex, the whole point is they're there but not used. Distillation is becoming less common now however
This was my favorite bit, "We're going to steal countless copy righted works and completely ignore software licenc... wait, what? You aren't allowed to turn around and do it to us! Stop that right now!"
Imagine if we had passenger rail like Asia does, it would be amazing. But sadly it's all a matter of political will, the US simply does not want to create such a rail system where we can take bullet trains from NYC to LA.
There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.
Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
Denver is too far away from any other large city to make HSR work. At the distances involved everyone will fly. Maybe you can make it work within Denver, but not to get to any other state as there is no city of any size anywhere close.
Zoom isn’t a replacement for in-person meetings all of the time but it’s pretty good for a lot of purposes. I’m on a non-profit board and we do have a couple meetings a year when we ask people to try to make it in person but the rest is planned to be virtual.
I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.
But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).
No, it was definitely the cost to operate it and the sonic boom associated with flying at that speed. The company operating the Concorde never made a profit.
The thing that killed the Concorde was a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.
The thing was already losing money because it guzzled fuel and was horribly loud and uncomfortable inside, while still costing a fortune for tickets. Not many people really wanted to pay 1st-class fares for worse-than-economy comfort just to shave a couple hours off the flight. Also, the plane could only operate at supersonic speeds over the ocean, so when it flew to/from Texas, it had to operate at subsonic speeds (and guzzle even more fuel because it was inefficient at those speeds), and the average trip time wasn't that much faster than a regular jumbo jet. It had been going downhill for a while, but that fatal crash was the end; they stopped all operations after that.
Sure, better communications might have contributed to its downfall, but that would have affected all air travel; just comparing like-for-like, the Concorde really wasn't a great alternative to the subsonic jumbo jets which became more and more prevalent for transcontinental routes.
> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards
Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City
It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.
Last time I had to work on just my laptop screen (16”), I actually found Stage Manager pretty useful. On a larger screen, or for more casual use, I do not.
If Tesla making the service manuals free is due to the Massachusetts right-to-repair law, then how do other manufacturers (eg: Ford) still get away with not doing so?
I don't think there's a requirement that they give access for free but they are alone i think in doing so.
Here in the UK (where i also have free tesla repair manual access) i have to pay a daily rate (there are annual subscriptions available) for other marques and i would say it's not cheap.
For example, ford charges me £20/hour or £75/day for access to manuals, wiring diagrams, online connected diagnostics (which sounds more impressive than it is, the UI will show vehicle status like fuel tank level or error codes reported by the various ECUs, without physically connecting to the vehicle, i.e. it's done over the vehicle telemetry link), and the ability to connect via a data link connector device for diagnostics and some reflashing activities. Security activities like key coding require a further (chargeable) registration).
The same setup is available by at least VAG, BMW and Fiat Chrysler (the latter has an annoying extra device registration step the others don't). All chargeable.
> "Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles"
It really isn't. Unlike John Deere, Tesla is actually pretty good on right-to-repair. All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone. The service/diagnostics software ("Toolbox") is also available to anyone, albeit for a (not entirely unreasonable) fee.
(There is also a service mode built in to the car which can do many basic diagnostics for free)
> All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone.
That should be the bare minimum. Ford charges you 40 dollar an hour for it and unless you know exactly what you are looking for you will spend several hundreds on it.
Too bad ford killed their old site, the print form was unauthenticated and you could print the entire schematics to pdf if you knew the internal model number. Or do what I did and run a script to dump it to higher res PNGs.
charm.li covers Fords and many other makes too up to 2013 ish. It is a pirate archive site holding workshop manuals for thousands of cars. Very useful. Very free. Long may it stay hidden.
More legitimately, alldata.com has repair data, workshop manuals for most marques up to today and will sell you either single vehicle (called "DIY") or a package aimed at independent mechanics where you can access anything. Same manuals either way, but you pay per vehicle with DIY (and have to contact support to switch.)
I love whoever is behind charm.li very much- after the bad old days of Haynes manuals and broken PDF links on make-specific forums, it's a breath of fresh air to have one repository like that.
I didn't know they had shop manuals. That's been a pretty big limitation of my spouse's Buick is that there isn't any information or exploded-view diagrams of anything so we basically have to pay an hourly for someone else to change emissions parts in response to trouble codes.
ETIS is dead and Ford finally pulled the plug, though since the current backend is some semi-custom IBM bloat I would not be surprized if you could get by that without too much hassle (took them three years to find out I was downloading all my car's travel and charging logs before they banned the dummy account, but now they track it and discontinued most of it anyways).
I won't go into details but searching around with the "forum" keyword and etis might get you somewhere (at least that did the trick a few years ago, now with LLM slop I don't know, and what the other person posted).
This is a misconception. The Massachusetts right-to-repair law didn't force Tesla to make their manuals free.
As others have pointed out here, other manufacturers like Ford and Toyota still charge for access to their manuals, even in Massachusetts. Tesla gives free access to anyone, worldwide.
This sounds rather similar to the form of scientific fraud where you first create a conclusion, then invent/manipulate the data until it supports your conclusion.
> ”Sorry, HOW?!?
How can a company like Epic games … be losing money with a product that is so mature?”
I’ve been playing Fortnite a bit lately, after my nieces got me into it.
One thing is that although the player counts are high (always hundreds of thousands of players online, just in the main Battle Royale game), the average revenue per player can’t be that high.
For one thing, once you’ve bought the $10 battle pass once, you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn enough vbucks to buy the next season’s battle pass with vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just begging their parents/uncles to buy them stuff in the game rather than spend money themselves because they don’t have credit cards to link to their Epic accounts.
Compare this to something like Hearthstone which is similarly mature. They have a similar battle pass but there’s also a strong incentive to pay real $ for extra card packs and cosmetics. And there are clearly plenty of adult whales buying this stuff. For example, there’s a new mythic Deathwing skin on a gacha wheel that costs, on average, about $200 (!!) to get. It’s only been out a few days and I’ve run into multiple players who have it.
Hearthstone battle pass isn't really comparable to Fortnite cosmetics. Hearthstone is pay 2 win where the majority of new cards are better than old ones.
> you only need to average maybe 1 or 2 games per day to earn enough vbucks to buy the next season’s battle pass with vbucks. So if you stay active you can pay once then play the game free forever and still get access to a huge amount of free cosmetics. And much of the player base is kids who are just begging their parents/uncles to buy them stuff in the game rather than spend money themselves because they don’t have credit cards
I lack the vocabulary to describe how fucking shit this is. Poor kids that have been sold into this versus the games we had that didn’t outright exploit.
Kinda shame on you for contributing in to this. It’s gross.
Honestly, Fortnite is run pretty responsibly. It's not bad at all compared to some of the other nonsense that's out there. Everything in the store is straightforward and fair. No gacha/gambling mechanics, no “pay to win”, no insanely priced super rare items.
Gravity. The aircraft is heavier at the back, where the engines are. With the nose severely damaged/missing, the centre of gravity has shifted aft, so what’s left of the nose is sticking up in the air.
> "Spending time and money to acquire a calendar scheduler shows just how badly they have lost the plot."
It sounds like Clockwise was pretty good at what they did, perhaps even the best in its class. Salesforce presumably sees a need for these advanced scheduling features in it's own products, and they figure they can get them more quickly, more cheaply, and with lower risk by acquiring an already-built technology and team. ie: it's an "acquihire".
But it's not like this is a one off. Salesforce has spent over $10 billion on acquisitions in just the last 6 months!
Globally, 50-55% of all Teslas sold are manufactured in China, and a further ~10% in Europe. Only around 35-40% of Teslas are made in the US.
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