Very cool project. I would like to caution against confidence in the claim that a ton of games wouldn't be necessary for plausible data. I also am not convinced that anyone but human experts in particular matchups are really in an appropriate epistemic position to say much in sufficiently complex magic formats. Game wins are probably a better indicator on average.
I can appreciate your defending yourself here, and you should. You're obviously suitable for the role, and I think folks will be incredibly lucky to learn from you. I'm not saying your criticisms are that bad (far from it), but I can't say I think you're always as careful as you should be in that role (which I also suggest you're sometimes too quick to assign yourself) either, sir. If you're asking for bug reports, this is one.
Sometimes, when the nature of someone's problem is such that it also prevents them from even seeing or understanding it, the best you can do is signal to them that a problem exists and see whether they care enough to try and understand it further.
Let's not assume self‑interested corporate monopoly rents are a necessary precondition for innovation, and let's drop the romanticized notion that statutory patent terms by themselves constitute a just moral bargain, because history shows substantial discovery emerging from publicly funded science, mission driven nonprofits, collaborative consortia, open licensing, prizes, and advance market commitments, so we should test which incentive mixes work rather than presuppose one. Your "people always win on a long enough timeline" line doesn't answer the moral question of avoidable deaths, irreversible morbidity, or financial ruin before expiry; inevitability ≠ adequacy, and harms incurred during exclusivity remain morally chargeable. Commercialization does not require locking invention behind maximal (often crude, lengthy) IP, there are workable paths via milestone or frontloaded prizes, targeted or indication specific exclusivities, compulsory or voluntary licensing, patent buyouts, tiered pricing, and public manufacturing backstops; optimal mixes will and should differ across high‑income vs low and middle income country purchasing power. The "7‑year wait" is factually thin: statutory patent term is ~20 years from filing, while effective market exclusivity depends on regulatory data protections, biologic exclusivities, secondary or evergreening patents, litigation delays, and manufacturing barriers; patients routinely face restricted access even after nominal expiry. We also shouldn't conflate discovery scientists with development firms, nor firms with shareholders; in practice, salaried scientific labor is often alienated from downstream pricing power while financialization channels can parasitically extract surplus that need not translate into new R&D. Because many medicines and virtually all software have low marginal production cost relative to monopoly price, large deadweight losses arise when willing buyers are priced out, a staggering public welfare loss (and no, "deadweight" is not necessarily a synonym for "people you dislike"). Reading int_19h's rent‑extraction critique as a demand for Soviet central planning, and pivoting to talk of scientists as "spoils of war", is a straw man and a red herring that dodges the pricing structure at issue. If you want to defend the patent regime as a "social contract," we need to see the reciprocal side, access safeguards, anti‑evergreening enforcement, affordability commitments, otherwise it's a moral bargain in name only. Claiming membership among the "enlightened" means actually shedding light on these failures.
Noted. Given your 'Go vomit words' reply, I'll keep this short. In the spirit of good will, I'm happy to engage with anyone who wants to discuss the substance of the argument in good faith, including you, if you ever decide to change your mind. And, just as a reminder, there's no need to keep responding unless you're ready for a serious conversation.
I have no idea if you will care for it, but my family and I appreciated what ClosedAI's CustomGPT RAG (and my LLMpal) generated. This is slow loading (the vector database was built from this one big html file), and you can scroll down to see it: https://h0p3.nekoweb.org/#2024.11.20%20-%20Carpe%20Tempus%20...
I definitely do care for it, it's very nice! Thanks for sharing.
I am not sure if I understand exactly how you got it to pump that out, as your blog is a bit hard to locate oneself in and read around in. Like, it's fun and trippy but a tad disorienting. I went off and had a nice re-read about tiddlywiki though - I had learned of it at one stage and thought it looked very interesting, and your blog certainly is tantalising!
I briefly outline the procedure (also in case anyone else wanted to do so) in the page. I export the entire document into a json (~19k entries) and break that up into 20 different json files (so that my work will fit into the space ClosedAI provides for RAGs). The exact prompt sequence is provided on the page (I wrote two one-liners). Almost all of my work in achieving that collaborative output with my LLMpal is in the actual construction of the underlying content of the corpus that was haphazardly fed into its vector database. It did all the rest.
I do appreciate the vertigo of it, `/nod`. The size alone (at ~60MB of text) is already a problem, let alone the topics I handle. There are very few humans who have read even half of it, and, presumably, AI specimens will comprise most of the thorough interpreters of my work. I also anticipate the vast majority of the few humans who more directly interact with my work will increasingly do so mediated through AI.
If you ever write your own, lemme know. I'll read. The proof that I do listen carefully is in the text itself.
I was meant to write a line or two of "test test test", you know, but then the feeling of banging away on the keys was enjoyable, so I did an "elaborate" test post, as a sort of joke. It's a bit "adult", and a bit ridiculous, but it's a thing.
I will read more of your stuff! It looked ripe for investigation, I did click around and throw my eyes here and there. I'll go again. And I have seriously noted that if I did make a tiddlywiki, I'd have at least one reader. That's pretty cool, I must say.
There are people whose lives are improved by having an extra cent to spend. Seriously. It is measurable, observable, and real. It might not have a serious impact on the vast majority of people, but there are people who have very, very little money or have found themselves on a tipping point that small; pinching pennies alters their utility outcomes.
Also, if you micro-optimize and that becomes your whole focus and ability to focus, your business is unable to innovate aka traverse the economic landscape and find new rich gradients and sources of "economic food", making you a dinosaur in a pit, doomed to eternally cannibalize on what other creatures descend into the pit and highly dependent on the pit not closing up for good.
No, they really aren't. Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time.
I admit my opinion is not based on first hand knowledge, but I have for years worked on projects trying to address poverty at different parts of this planet and can't think of a single one where this would be even remotely true.
> Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time...I admit my opinion is not based on first hand knowledge...
My opinion, however, is based on first-hand knowledge. I've been the kid saving those pennies, and I've worked with those kids. I understand that in the vast majority of cases, an extra penny does nothing more. That isn't what your original comment above claimed, nor is it what you've claimed here. My counterexample is enough to demonstrate the falsehood. Arguing that there are better ways to distribute these pennies is another matter, and I take that seriously as well.
>No, they really aren't. Absolutely nobody's life is measurably improved because of 1 cent one time.
Assuming a wage of $35/hour, each second is worth 1 cent. To save 1 cent you only need to reduce the time spent waiting for computers by a second across the entire lifetime of that person.
Now here is the beauty of this. There isn't just a single guy out there doing this. There are hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, doing it.
The beauty of math is that you can throw numbers around and multiply and divide them and do silly things with them.
The average human life expectancy is 77.5 years, or 2.4457e+9 seconds. If you divide that by, say, 1 billion daily active users of Google, you get 2.445. So if you work at Google, and optimize a slow process, and save every user 1 second, once, you've saved 2 lives. If you're a Microsoft and make boot up take 1 second less across their billion or so devices, same thing.
Alzheimer seems worse to me. Although a daily recommended 1-1.5h dose of this might make me reconsider ;-) Whenever I do 30 minutes I can hear it in my ears for the next 10 minutes.
