I believe what they're saying is that the 2015 measurement was also zero. So this year's measurement isn't the "second-lowest", it's the "second equally lowest". That's the only way I could interpret it.
> it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.
My teenage daughter is really into this genre but has never actually been in a mostly abandoned 90s mall or fluorescent-lit business park office space herself.
But don't underestimate how much history bleeds forwards in time in various bits of cultural ephemera that can still be absorbed by younger people. She doesn't have much first-had experience with spaces with this vibe, but there is ample second-hand media of it and enough bits and pieces of it still in the real world for it to be both somewhat familiar and enticingly exotic to her.
This is what I was thinking too. Just do a single unification pass, but track the provenance of each type assignment. If an error is needed, use the provenances of the colliding unifications to decide which context locations to prioritize.
> I want to see the United States of America and its very loud citizens get a taste of humble pie in this self-inflicted crisis of idiocy with global ramifications.
I sympathize with the sentiment even though I am American. The problem with this is that Americans are not a uniform cohort.
The people who deserve to eat humble pie in this scenario are neck deep in propaganda and their own inflated egos and will never learn any rational lesson from this despite how catastrophically it might go. The Americans who are paying attention and will understand the harm of this operation already know it's a fiasco and wish the country was doing anything but what it is doing.
> The people who deserve to eat humble pie in this scenario are neck deep in propaganda and their own inflated egos and will never learn any rational lesson from this
They will turn on someone or something they can blame.
> This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow.
The article says:
"Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"
"Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind."
That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state of your implementation.
And it's not just that the execution is faster now. The competition saw the "outer shell" of your idea. But LLM platforms (the forest) - they see the internals, if you used them to explore and develop it. They also see all similar ideas across the globe.
And they own - not rent the compute and models - as you do from them. If we want to extend this, they could "pre-cog" your idea and build it even before you do.
I'm not talking about what is happening now, I'm just playing out the thought experiment.
I am not arguing against sharing. Sharing can be for the greater good.
But as you note, things have changed. We could reasonably assume a genuinely significant good idea, set free, might go in the direction we shoved it for a minute. Or fade into inaccessibility.
One of the fundamental problems if humanity is that the majority of people will happily contribute to the public commons and share with everyone, enriching us all. But there is a minority of avaricious people who will do everything in their power to claim the commons for themselves.
This problem is intractable because the more people are good faith actors sharing the public good, the more valuable that commons becomes, and the more it incentivizes people to try take it.
Even if you're a small vendor. You created an innovative product, and you tried to sell your product to a large company. Before you can be destroyed by simply showing the product to a multi-billion company. But now even medium sized companies can destroy you.
I would argue this mantra says more about the person repeating it. It simply means the person has no good ideas and is bad at execution.
I've not met many but I'm sure there are many out there who are scary good at execution. Something like 1% transpiration, 99% experience. I can have a designer do a 100 euro design, hire someone to write nice code, rent a factory or an office, I might even be able to buy the machines at a good price. What I cant do is spin the rolodex and (in 20 minutes) land enough clients who would absolutely love to work with me again. I cant find those private meetings and wouldn't be able to extend my reputation with the new project.
People with good ideas don't talk about them unless it is required. They don't talk with "ideas are cheap" people, it's pearls for pigs. You can spot some of them if they did bursts of multiple unrelated complex patents. My favorite are the rube Goldberg type of machines that combine well known things in ways that exceed the sum of the parts. Something like step 5 uses the vibrations from step 1 while step 3 uses the heat from step 6.
To have good ideas you need many of them but you also need to know execution or you end up thinking the easy stuff is hard and the hard stuff is easy. Improvement is unlikely from there.
I hate that they own it. The case for antitrust is less than in the case of Whatsapp (though with Instagram Zuckerberg had to hasily backpedal in an email, probably because his lawyer furiously told him not to say certain things about buying up the competition) but they tried merging all the backend systems for messaging once
Instagram doesn't make Zuckerberg "successful". He's a black hat that deserves jail
This isn't about regulation. Regulation would be welcomed because you can follow it and avoid liability.
We are now saying Meta, YouTube, Snap, and nearly every major media app (maybe Netflix and HBO next!) are liable retroactively for the past when people got addicted to the content on the apps despite that the companies did not violate any regulations at the time
> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.
To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.
Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.
50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.
The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
Do you really want your labor enriching someone you think is a bad person? Do you want someone whose values go against yours being in a position of power over you?
Not wanting to work for someone or not wanting to hire someone is not equivalent to wishing poverty on them.
My daughter thinks shrimp are adorable little animals and doesn't eat them. That's a moral choice she has every right to make. She is not saying anyone who eats shrimp is a terrible person or trying to outlaw it.
I believe what they're saying is that the 2015 measurement was also zero. So this year's measurement isn't the "second-lowest", it's the "second equally lowest". That's the only way I could interpret it.
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