Thankfully, PayPal hasn't banned GrapheneOS and their app still works on it. They accidentally broke compatibility with our secure app spawning feature which has a per-app toggle to disable it along with the other exploit protections which can cause compatibility issues.
There's an overall per-app compatibility mode toggle instead of users needing to figure out which protection is an issue but it's best to figure out the minimal workaround after determining that works.
Online communities win because of network effects, members get tied to their addresses and it becomes very difficult to migrate, new members always join the network because that is where everyone is already. Democracies don't necessary depend on network effects, members of political parties can relatively easily migrate to different parties, network effects is not what keeps members part of a political party. And crucially, being part of a political party doesn't mean you'll vote for the party when you cast your ballot.
Some will say that the solution to network effects on the Web is decentralization
but decentralization doesn't scale. Because of spam, bots and
the fact that not everyone will follow the protocol there is always a need for moderators which is just another word for government and Google's main business model.
Even Capitalism is largely decentralized but it can't function without government. I believe true decentralization (anarchism) is only possible
on a small scale where everyone knows each other, very small communities. It's not possible on the global level like in Capitalism or even the Web.
Ironic that both Shannon and Turing layed the foundation for both cryptography and AI. I think it boils down to information which is related to language and text.
This is like responding to symptoms and not addressing the root cause. This is something that should be fixed by supply and demand, buyers should have a choice where to buy and sellers should have a choice how to price their products.
These problems arise when dealing with a monopoly, that undermines
the free market and that's a far worse systemic problem and the root cause of these issues. AI has nothing to do with it.
There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.
Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.
I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.
When I was at that tender age when many nerdy boys read and fall to Atlas Shrugged I read The Pearl by Steinbeck. Which has a passage I never forgot.
“It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands"
Why can companies access and share information more easily than consumers?
I get about a dozen fliers in the mail every week advertising deals that are surely loss leaders for the grocer. Then there's extreme couponing forums.
Have you worked in a large organization? I can't imagine it's easy to coordinate much less have someone make actual decisions.
When the government actively decides the price of goods and services, it becomes more and more like communism. The government should instead uphold the free market and proactively prevent collusion and monopolies that threaten the free market, this is harder to do in the US because of lobbying though.
> When the government actively decides the price of goods and services
Ok.
Can we get to what this kind of law is actually doing? The simplest version would be roughly "stores need to display prices and only change them once per day". No specific prices are being imposed.
There is no monopoly. Grocers are incredibly competitive and have low single digit margins (~1-3%)
There are things you can do to lower prices like prosecuting theft. In this case technology is part of the solution. Adding red tape and restricting technology will do the opposite.
But you already knew how to code before LLM coding agents, juniors will jump straight into using agents without learning to code by hand, hence the premise of the article.
Yes. Just like globalization created companies like TSMC, AI will do the same. Software engineers who don't rely on LLM code generators will have a moat because they can do it cheaply and sustainably.
Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, don't expect new programming languages or frameworks this means that the software engineering skills that exist today will be relevant for a long time.
I am not so much convinced by your last point, that point of new languages and frameworks. I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models.
I think engineering skills will still remain relevant due to taste and proper judgement. A model trained on everything and the kitchen sink has probably not the fitting bias for given specific problems in my project. Accepting too much AI generated code without steering the ship will result in some drift of taste and ultimately make some mediocre project like done by people without good domain knowledge and without good taste. It might even be short term a business, but it lacks the long term excellence, that sets projects with good judgement apart from the common rabble.
> I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models
But they will still rely on assembly, C, Rust, Linux, HTML, TCP/IP... Doesn't matter how up to date they are, they rely on existing code they have been trained on, they can't just create new languages without the training data.
That's not what I mean, even I can invent my own language that only I use, but if that language is not widely deployed and used by other people or LLM models, it's just a toy language.
If you agree that there is no absolute truth in complex problems, and that different parties can have different perspectives which are all true/correct from their point of view than this type of systems can be far more inefficient to make decisions compared to a single entity. It's like having multiple CEOs in a company, or design by commity.
> It's too bad these services live forever as cash cows to subsidize crazy ideas and schemes. They should graduate to public utilities once the product stabilizes.
In essence if you take capitalism to it's max you will eventually meet Marx.
