This article is disgusting neoliberal disinformation because it hides this simple and easily provable fact. Probably frames it as a debate with pro and contra. But it's fundamentally moronic.
The speed of light in fiber optic cable is ~66% of what the speed of light in vacuum is (or radio signals in atmosphere). Signal first has to go up but then travels faster than in fiber optics cable and arrives faster. Hence faster ping.
Well with the new hollow optic fiber you would be right.
Average ping time between Europe and US is 100-150ms, which is high for e.g. gaming. Satellite constellations could cut that down by 33%. Which was a huge promised benefit of starlink, even just for HFT stock trading which is like cheating and mining gold.
But yeah with hollow optic fiber being able to do the same, much of the value of Starlink should be wiped out! SpaceX stock should take a massive nosedive lol!
Afaik you're wrong about overhead with atmosphere and dish.
The only value internet constellations now provide is universal coverage. But that could be achieved cheaper with a higher orbit of 2000 km instead of 500km. Coverage goes up to 12% instead of 3.6% so you need like 9 times (square) less satellites? I think? And the ping would be worse but still acceptable like 200ms between EU and US if you live somewhere off grid or on the ocean.
Hardware compatibility is the major problem with alternative android. Basically I have to buy a 10 year old used phone as is. Would this only make this worse?
Anyway, maybe AI code generation could actually help with things like hardware compatibility. Things like an AI agent could iterate on reading about a smartphone model and testing various configurations and patch drivers to make it compatible for many more devices. Not sure if AI is suitable for that, but you should be able to define stringent test cases for this.
What does it for me is that these companies were unwilling to pay creators to use their work in the training data
I believe it was logistical impossible. Many books used will probably be scanned and not even be available as ebook or drm protected or out of print. And e.g. Anna's archive has 64,416,225 books and 95,689,473 papers. Too large to even say what is pirated or nor, or buy every book in a lifetime. And if every book costs you ~$10 that's close to a billion dollars upfront. Basically creating LLMs wouldn't have been possible without piracy (or maybe the datasets aren't actually that extensive).
It's hypocritical, but ultimately the same argument for piracy that individuals use: IP laws creates unreasonable restrictions that prevent people from learning (or enjoy culture at a sensible price).
(I assume you're not saying you would need a negotiate a specific license to use a book or a public comment or article for machine learning).
Kinda reminds me of Year Zero by Robert Reid. The whole galaxy full of aliens loves Earth Music but only recently figure the concept of copyright. And how much quintillion moneys they now owe Earth lol.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Just hold a lottery for the senate / house seat. No politics, no filtering.
So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you're in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
Would a hard fork not splinter the software support, killing the ecosystem? E.g. some devs only support that hard fork, others only the android compatible version.
Artificial paranoia lol. "False positives" and overreactions might be possible, but probably less so than now. Today a dictator might get suspicious and think "I'll have to watch that guy... but to be save, I better kill him now". But an AI could watch them and everybody else 24/7, every word someone says or what he does. Then he has the "luxury" to trust in the total surveillance and not have to overreact and create chaos.
I believe that hallucinations are less of a problem when you tell an AI to sift through and summarize and analyze existing data, compared to generating new text.
Anyway, I believe it's a real world application that could dramatically change the "Rules for Rulers".
I'm honestly curious. I generally agree with everything you said except the IP argument.
I see a conflict between the argument that training LLMs on publicly visible comments (or books or articles) is stealing, and open weight LLM models. If intellectual property is interpreted like that, it will make free LLMs illegal to use, since the original creators of the training data have not licensed this use (even though this data is publicly readable on websites).
I would consider it the worst possible outcome if only the AI corporations would be able to profit from the global treasure of our accumulated knowledge. And I suspect that is what is going to happen because they can lobby for some kind of broad licensing deal and pay them off, but for open source it will not work. I believe that is how they will monopolize AI. Then they will truly have stolen it, because they have taken it away from everybody else.
Do you believe we should be allowed to run open source / weight LLMs like deepseek locally, for our own gain, even though they too have been indirectly trained on our comments / articles / copyrighted books?
LLMs probably have applications for dictators. Instead of solely relying on their "keys of power" and a huge hierarchy filtering what the dictator knows and sees, LLMs could sift through and filter vast amounts of data to spot potential threats to his power. This plus security droids is probably the wet dream of the techbros.
It's a futile and stupid effort funded solely by Bloomberg: The destruction of 3D printing: Bloomberg is behind it - YouTube
This article is disgusting neoliberal disinformation because it hides this simple and easily provable fact. Probably frames it as a debate with pro and contra. But it's fundamentally moronic.