Not the OP but I get it. We don’t produce anymore.
What we do is produce ideas, then sell the idea to a few wealthy groups; which has lead to a very distorted economy.
It’s also no secret that “wealth extraction” has been an ongoing best practice for the past decade or two by those in this circle, and the financiers are eyeing ways to get to the retirement accounts legally.
We already see this with cryptocurrency “normalizing” as investments and SpaceX bundling itself with questionable AI companies pre-IPO (index fund manipulation).
Saying this about a compute rental service is hilarious
They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol
There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
That's not an ideal tone for here. From my perspective the most incredible thing is the concentration of IO. I might like at some point for elements of my computer usage to remain private, it would be nice if that ability were preserved. A bit hard to accomplish when 1 out of 4 bits processed globally all run through the same network
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted? Did you forget that already?
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.
I see. So your brilliant logic is to reduce the actions and impact of multi billion dollar institutions down to simplified versions of the technical solutions they offer.
“You don’t need to worry bout them Palantir boys, they just make simple harmless dashboards. Don’t worry about the deep involvement in government surveillance, military targeting, and immigration enforcement.”
“Amazon just provides simple VMs. Ain’t no need to be concerned about worker treatment, anti-competitive practices, tax avoidance, and environmental impact.”
When their customers start using those buildings with computers in them to autonomously determine who to kidnap and execute, I suspect you might understand their point. I’d also note we are one refusal away from the US president declaring DPA control over frontier model providers and their infrastructure a national defense necessity and under his personal control.
Governments are companies that have accountability to the public, wherein the public has direct influence over their decisionmaking, unlike regular corporations where people have no influence whatsoever (without lobbying the government to regulate them, anyways).
To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
He is politically accountable. The majority of the voting populace voted him back in and also voted for a majority of legislators whose central policy was worshipping the ground on which he stands. America is getting exactly what its people voted for, if you have a problem with that you have a problem with democracy itself.
To be clear, political accountability doesn't mean "you, one person out of over 300 million, get your desired outcome". It means the over 300 million people collectively decide what he is accountable for and what happens to him.
He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there.
He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.
Maybe worry more about the organizations that actually have the power to do bad things rather than speculating about something that might happen at some point lol
AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.
It's downright evil.
Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.
The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.
That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers.
Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time.
That's false.
There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies.
There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter.
What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
> What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then?
Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.
> There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy.
TikTok creators earn 70-90%
Twitch creators make 50-70%.
Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
> Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla).
This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire. It's the starting point of the funnel Google makes all of its "search" revenue from. (I say "search" because when I type in "openai", I know what I want, but Google gives me something different and forces that player into an expensive bidding war.)
Google didn't build the browser. That was originally KHTML and then taken over by Apple. They lifted it, used Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, and launched a tracking/search ad funnel/anti-adblock empire.
Every google search result compels you to download Chrome if you aren't using it. It's the default on Android. They warn you if you're using Firefox.
When you can spend billions to dump on the browser market you can do things like this. It's especially heinous since they reinvested their ill-gotten ad dragnet gains back into the engine that powered their empire.
Google needs to have Chrome stripped from them. Period. They cannot have a browser now or ever.
Firefox is their antitrust litigation sponge. They happily pay the stooges there to chug along and waste money.
Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
> What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them.
Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
> Are the free Maps alternatives good?
Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
If Google is forced out, there will be lots of competition.
I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Google is highly anti-competitive and drastic measures need to be taken to restore a cutthroat capitalist environment that is maximally beneficial to the economy.
>Make Google give up Android (which is Linux based) and watch an entire industry pop up.
I guess that would be when Apple takes over smartphones entirely.
>TikTok creators earn 70-90%
>Twitch creators make 50-70%.
They don't get that revenue split from ads. They either match YouTube or give less depending on the size of the channel.
>Split YouTube into ten video websites and watch a robust, de-consolidated economy sprout.
We had 10+ video websites simultaneously before YouTube. The videos were all lower quality, limited in length, and obviously no revenue share. Only YouTube grew out of them to become YouTube and it was because of a superior product.
>This is the most heinous of all because it's the insidious linchpin behind Google's evil empire.
Google didn't make me switch to Chrome, Mozilla did. One day they decided to rework the UI, which broke my add-ons. And then they decided that I'm not allowed to use my own add-ons without permission from Mozilla.
Using my own add-ons with Chrome (or chromium-based browsers) was no problem.
Also, Mozilla mucked up the mobile browser thing themselves. Their scroll felt extremely wrong to use for years. Every other application on my phone scrolled in one way, but somehow Firefox did not. Eventually they fixed it, but that took a long time.
I'm not opposed to using Firefox, but they themselves pushed me away.
>Brave can and will easily fill this void when Google is forced out.
You think Google is going to continue building Chromium if they can't have Chrome?
???
>Microsoft, Yahoo. You used to be able to run your own before Google platformized email.
So one tech giant instead of the other? What's the difference?
>Yes. Apple Maps is shockingly good. Turns out competition is good.
Great if you're in the apple ecosystem, I guess, but that's, again, switching from one tech giant to another. In this case it would be switching into a company known for building walled-gardens. I don't see how this would improve the situation at all.
>I don't expect consumers to understand this, but I do expect regulators to get it. And I want more regulators to take up the mantle against Google.
Get what? That regulators should go after one tech giant so that their customers are forced to swap to the products of... other tech giants?
I'm not here to defend Google, but I feel like you might want to think about this some more. Your answers basically just suggested other tech giants or Brave (which relies on Google still contributing to chromium). Being stuck in Apple's walled garden doesn't sound great to me considering how expensive all their stuff is.
"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?
I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
Yep. They can make every mistake imaginable and not work as hard but still win. It’s the power of concentrated capital and monopolistic behavior and what people call “moats” but really is just an unfair advantage. Why should Google or Apple be allowed to copy everyone’s AI tech and just win because of distribution through Chrome or iPhones?
We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
Gemini is a copy of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was a product invented on top of many previous ideas. The fact that one paper among many was written at Google isn’t relevant to my point.
Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products.
And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read.
Not that I'm opposed to new laws, but just having enforcement of the laws we already have would go a long way to fixing the problems.
The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement.
It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either.
Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
The current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.
I will preface by saying that someone with Lina Khan is sorely needed; Big Tech and other monopolies have gotten way too Big and seriously need to be reined in.
That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive.
That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side.
Her lack of political support from certain factions on the Democratic side was obviously because the big donors involved in the VC world want the option to continue to unload the startups they've invested in off as acquisitions to google, microsoft, et al.
Nothing noble about that stance, that's continuing to feed the Big Tech monster.
They are very much part of the problem that needs to be solved and they didn't like that she was starting to push for the solutions.
If you look into how she ran the agency, there were a lot of parallels with how the current US adminstration is being run. (Ask any AI for an overview and see the parallels pop up.) Regardless of your political leaning, I think generally we agree that is not how government institutions should be run. Even if the donor class hadn't made any noise, the Democrats were right in not supporting her tactics.
Everything it’s building now - Gemini in its various forms, and all the other AI products - are copies of other products. If they weren’t Google but another startup with the same products, they would be irrelevant and ignored. It’s their capital and anticompetitive practices that let them get away with missteps that no one else can survive.
The above two core properties make it possible to more or less reliably reason about bit SE/CS systems from first principles. The complete absence of above two in medicine means you cannot do the same there.
I'm a doctor as well and I think your statement here is too broad. Plenty of specialists such as cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, radiologists, etc are able to reason things from first principles. The issue is that many non-doctors may not know several key details about these systems that would let you reason through them. And even many doctors well versed in one specialty would be unable to reason about another specialty since they may not know in detail several key pieces of information from that other speciality.
I'm a doctor who used to be an engineer. Deriving things from first principles in medicine is a lie we doctors tell ourselves.the truth is this.we have some really good understanding of syne things at molecular levels that we then correlates to things that happen clinically at a macro level, that correlation is very very handwavy. But we teach it as if we know for sure. We don't.
The few things that we think we have a somwhat good correlation for, we often test on our exams, but even for most of those things, it's some handwavy link
I recall being an engineering classes, armed with just calculus and linear algebra and newton laws, I could attack just about every problem from first principles from my entire undergrad. Every. I didn't have to take into consideration real life presentation of the problem. First principles were enough to get me nearly there
Medicine is fundamentally not that way. Yes we learn the biology, but if you reason solely from biology, you will quickly end up in the wrong places. to become a doctor, I had to learn that hard way that yeah a disease doesn't just present this way just because the underlying physics and biology suggests it should. You separately have to learn how the disease presents, then try to tie it back to our extensive but still very very limited understanding of the possible biology.
I have problems with doctors that don't acknowledge how tenous that link is and despite how much we know, we still know so so little. We are far more useful than what we know.
I understand to biology majors, the few things that seem to follow physiologically from moelculqr biology dupes us into thinking medicine currebtly derives from first pricinples. But it doesnt.
The hospital my wife first gave birth at were very accommodating with her request. I think education of the individuals is a bigger issue than the hospitals (who have probably send and done all different ways.)
Hospitals are starting to bring midwives and doulas back. Of course, educating women and families about their options and pushing back on inducing labor and c sections would help as well.
They already tried pushing back against c-sections, turns out giving overly opinionated options to women that discourages things that are medically beneficial in a large portion of cases is not helpful and caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and some deaths, now that policy is thankfully long gone, though the opinionated attitude it generated in some continues on sadly.
my wife had a particularly large first baby, natural birth might have worked, but would have been risky, rather than being given unbiased options, she was pressured towards induction over c-section since it was “more natural” (I suspect mostly because it would have looked better in the hospitals stats to keep the c-sections down). The early induction failed after days of suffering (as early inductions usually do, turns out), and then she had a c-section anyway (which having reviewed the options was her original preference, but was pressured out by the doctor), the c-section was vastly more successful, as you’d expect from the statistics (and a lot less suffering, which doesn’t show up in the stats but is obvious once you concider the process).
Im willing to agree neither should be recommended in most cases, natural births are safer in most births, but the best thing anyone can do is give the facts as they apply to the person giving birth (and keep their opinions well out of it).
I fully admit that personal experience has biased me strongly in favour of c-sections, but only when the stats support them, which they often do.
Dr. Atul Gawande† reported 20 years ago how obstetricians standardized on c-sections because the suppposedly-better alternative, forceps, (i) was very difficult to teach and supervise, and (ii) used incorrectly, could result in horrible injuries to both baby and mother:
<QUOTE>
The question facing obstetrics was this: Is medicine a craft or an industry?
If medicine is a craft, then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills—the Woods corkscrew maneuver for the baby with a shoulder stuck, the Lovset maneuver for the breech baby, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big.
You do research to find new techniques.
You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands.
But if medicine is an industry, responsible for the safest possible delivery of millions of babies each year, then the focus shifts.
You seek reliability.
You begin to wonder whether forty-two thousand obstetricians in the U.S. could really master all these techniques.
You notice the steady reports of terrible forceps injuries to babies and mothers, despite the training that clinicians have received.
After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble.
They found it in the Cesarean section. [0]
</QUOTE>
(Formatting edited.)
† Surgeon, Rhodes scholar, MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of The Checklist Manifesto among many other things.
If the water actually broke, inducing labor can be important to reduce the risk of infection though, since bacteria can easily get into the amniotic fluid. If the water didn’t break yet, then at least where I live they don’t induce unless you go so much over the expected birth date that there is a high risk you’ll need C-section if you wait more (in Northern Europe they generally don’t offer C-sections unless medically required).
Midwives provide most of the care for most births in hospitals in the UK AFAIK and have done so for decades (certainly where my older daughter was born).
In the U.S. at least the incentives are perverse. Probably what would actually move the needle is a test trial with results showing it's more cost and resource effective
I wonder how different things would have been if Germany had increased rather than decreased the reliance on nuclear energy.
After all so much of Germany’s energy now comes from natural gas which is bad for climate change and, in the case of Germany, the natural gas comes from Russia. Helps feed the war machine, etc.
Germany, and the rest of Europe, nowadays would have been less reliant on Russia and have contributed less to climate change if they had used more nuclear energy.
Like many things in the US, there's no centralized authority that mandates this sort of thing. Some states have laws around this some don't. For those that don't, some counties or cities might have laws around this. Belgium of course has a stronger central government, small land area, and a small population, so I'm not surprised that something like that would be done country-wide.
The shelter in my city chips every animal before anyone can adopt them. It's honestly bonkers to me why anyone who has a pet wouldn't chip them. It's cheap (especially when considering the cost of a regular vet visit), and can save you from lots of heartbreak later on.
Coloradan with all chipped pets for decades. Not sure where you're coming from. Our friend was reunited with a cat with a chip that was lost for a 6 months. Shitting on the US is great for karma these days
Did your state chip your pet or was it a private company? I think they are saying that there are no centralized authorities and you depend on private companies
That is upsetting for what could almost certainly be run from a SQLite database on a garbage-tier host. Presumably 99.9% of all animals are registered one time and never again queried. Could be near zero operational burden, but of course, capitalism.
Yeah, I moved to the US and I also thought it was weird. Same with vaccination stuff for dogs. You need to carry paperwork if you want to cross the Canada border. It's a throwback to the last century I guess.
I had moved into a new place, and it had a little garden, which attracted stray city cats. A kitten found my garden and adopted it, just moving in and living there. I invited her inside, fed her, took her to the vet, made sure she was okay. She had no chip, was definitely a stray.
So I adopted her, got her chipped per the law, and she grew into a fine cat who loved her place with me - she was great.
One time she got out, and I got the call. But it wasn't to get her back, it was to come get her corpse from under the car that had flattened her some distance from our home.
In many ways, I wish I'd not gotten the chip, that was a really traumatic event which I'd probably have avoided, at least not knowing what had happened.
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