Well theres at least two different buckets of this.
First is the scraping of the open internet.
The second is the paywall bypassing, YouTube audio recording, and pirated content training that the labs have basically admitted to in one form or another.
Content from both gets served back to us, in exchange for watching ads/paying a subscription/paying tokens.
The second is more immediately hypocritical because they are license/copyright/DMCA violations that the little guy could get sued for while the labs get $2T valuations for. The automation of crime at scale, which is a common VC pattern.
There's a lot of magic & handwaving from hyperscalers like AWS about redundancy. I always wondered about some of the engineering to make this absolutely (and literally) bullet proof. At the end of the day most of their answers when you push hard enough involved paying 2-3x to run everything across multiple zones/regions, and lots of awareness in your application to handle this.
In any case, I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.
> I think it's good that when a data center blows up the data is lost. Noteworthy for future skynet situation, etc.
Doesn’t really apply, because the only reason data was lost is because customers chose not to replicate it to other regions, either because of legal data residency requirements, cost, or just not bothering.
If Skynet wants to make sure it’s backed up, none of that prevents it from doing so. Although it would be amusing if Skynet was stopped by a billing alert when it tries to copy itself to another region.
You'd be surprised how many customers are lead to believe this by a combination of opaque marketing, aggressive sales, and willful ignorance.
I worked at a 2000 person shop where the CTO moved us from 1 on-prem dc (we were begging to add a secondary site for years due to outage risk) to 1 AWS region.
It's not exactly straightforward to run multi-region across an alphabet soup of AWS services without decent configuration / application awareness, paying at least double.
S3 is advertised as having 11 9's. That means in the entire history of S3 they've only lost a handful of objects, and will continue to lose objects at this same rate.
You are confusing the concepts, and applying the 11 nines to the wrong problem.
Durability is about: "If I successfully store an object in S3, how unlikely is S3 to permanently lose that object because of storage failures?"
It does not answer: "Will I be able to access that object, after a rain of Shahab-1 or Shahab-2 burn all data centers in the 3 availability regions across which my S3 bucket is spread out..."
Eleven nines covers ordinary infrastructure failures, not acts of war that physically destroy the underlying facilities.
It's similar to any engineered artifact, like a skyscraper. They have a structural safety factor that defines their resilience to failures that the system is designed to tolerate, it doesn't make them immune to missile strikes.
This is a normal failure mode in American military facilities in the Middle East. Whoever designed an American military facility in the middle east and did not intend for it to withstand missile attacks was incompetent.
AWS has a history of making hand wavy explanations on the robustness of its infrastructure that were misleading at best. See comments about how regions are truly independent only for everyone to find out if us-east-1 goes down you could still be down even if you built in other regions. Those dependencies were not well documented and previously hand-waved away by AWS when it boasted about how its regions were truly independent.
Similar here, there’s a lot of detail that got hand-waved away by a sloppy “yeah we good” puff PR answer.
A lot of this stuff again seems like labor augmentation not replacement, like in this article. She wasn't using professional paid artists previously, but a mix of her own extra labor (which she had less time for with a baby) & a barista who drew well (but had recently left). Most small businesses are like this.
I'm not an AI booster, but I think GenZ particularly have really lost their mind with the anti-AI rage.
I was handing out flyers at a fundraiser, for a charity to promote their next event. The flyers were made by a staff member using some AI art.
Some GenZ kid started ranting to me about how the flyers were AI slop and how some artist would have been willing to do the job, blah blah blah.
Kid, its a charity event that I'm volunteering for on a beautiful sunny summer weekend day for.. it's gonna raise like $10k if we are lucky.. no artist was going to paid with or without AI.
> “a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
I also find this whole "its so good, its scary" flex a little less impressive when you consider they access to millions of GPUs?
The AI buildout has been one of, if not the largest, focussed capital investment in history. The 2 big AI labs are the final customer for something like 20-33% of all datacenter compute in the pipeline.. up to 70% when you look at hyperscaler "AI revenue" from the big 3.
I don't think any single entity has had remotely this much compute available in history.
IIUC it's an open question whether they have the electricity to actually run all the "compute" they own on paper.
That aside, I'm not sure why it's particularly interesting they have all this "compute" (let's just assume for the sake of argument it's all "live"--that is they can actually run workloads on all of the "compute" they have on paper). So what if it's the biggest amount ever? Why would that be meaningful? Is there some economically viable problem you're aware of that is somehow dominant in that way?
Well yes, we used to talk about "supercomputers" in the hands of state actors for cracking into enemy systems and places like science labs for working on big hard problems of DNA, the universe, and the like.
So I think part of what is going on now is not just the method (LLMs) but the means (supercomputer levels of compute) at unprecedented scale of concentration.
However, if I put my sci-fi hat on for a second, it's not so far fetched that we figure out a way to compress models to a size where it wouldn't need all that compute.
I umpired baseball in my early teens and even 30 years ago it was bad.
Grown men getting into the face of 14 years old umpires over calls, at games for kids barely out of tee-ball. It just doesn’t matter that much.
I remember a coach who would flip over 20 gallon coolers and send ice and drinks flying in the dugout.. in front of his team of 10 years old umpires olds.
In Texas, there's an association, TASO, that is in charge of referees for all sports. There is no requirement about having experience in officiating at all. You attend a few meetings, pay the fees, and start officiating. The crazy thing is that once a TASO member, you can move from sport to sport. It's easy to see officials that are definitely out of their depth. As a player, it is insulting that they can't play their sport because the one in charge of the match is not very good. As parent, it's aggravating because their kid and teammates are getting boned. After personally experiencing the literal "inside baseball" of Texas high school officiating, they bring some of the flak on their officials in their attitude on who can be an official. I knew people that just slid from one sport to the next based on season as a source of a fairly decent income. Volleyball refs just sit in a chair, so physical fitness doesn't really limit how good of an official they can be. Soccer refs on the other hand...
That's the association's problem, not the referees. When I refereed basketball in Australia, referee grading was done according to FIBA standards and you had to be evaluated before any promotion in your referee grade and that could be (at the lowest levels) 3 games on 3 occasions through to 10 games or more. And when we got to a certain (albeit relatively high) level, we'd have every game recorded and reviewed.
No disagreement, which is why I said that the association is to blame. If a ref isn't good enough yet they still continue to be assigned games, then the org allowing that to happen is at fault. The immediate response is that they don't have enough officials to to start sitting officials based on performance/ability. That's just further indictment to me, but "it's just a kid's game" blah blah.
Baseball in particular has a problem with anger is the arguments. Like there is no argument without a hostile tone. Players/managers never seem to merely appeal a call -- they jump straight to harsh yelling.
Compare it to soccer where there is also a lot of whininess in the complaining about calls.
It's become accepted that vulgar, angry, disagreement is acceptable until it goes "too far".
Tantrums are just socially accepted in baseball, and some other sports.
Probably being born from public schools, and teachers being the referees, they don't have to take any nonsense from players and can take the ball away from you, lose you ground you have gained, or card you if are abusive to the referee.
Abusive parents on the sidelines can result in sanctions on clubs.
Even if you think the referee made a bad call, it is never acceptable to be abusive to match officials.
It blows my mind the things I see in football they allow people to get away with.
I love how in rugby if two guys are going a little two hard at each other the referee will call them over along with their captains, and address the captains while these gigantic players stand there like children.
One other offshoot of rugby officiating is they will admit wrongs and they'll say things like "I didn't see that." Compare that to the NFL where the refs make a bad call and the league will back them up to the point of being ridiculous by reinterpreting the rules to make the officials right (see "not a catch").
Anthropic happily paid billions to settle a lawsuit for pirating books. It's a trivial cost of doing business. If you're lucky you'll get a pittance after the fact by suing them, but a contract doesn't prevent them from doing the thing you don't want them to do and that they are obviously going to do given their past behaviour.
Lucky for us Apple is already alleging something to this effect in their trade secret lawsuit, so you know they'll make sure discovery turns this up if it exists.
9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.
Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.
This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.
I began and ended many hobbies in the novelty phase by endlessly reading about them, shopping, comparing features, etc. that I eventually became bored with them before spending a dollar. I got (almost) the whole novelty phase for free.
I've also found new hobbies sometimes allow cheaper gadget purchases / higher enjoyment-per-dollar than buying more junk for longtime hobbies.
The logical mechanism for me was - a hobby I've done 30 years I have probably upgraded through various classes of equipment such that anything left to buy is expensive. For a new hobby I am back to buying little $100 gizmos again.
Doesn't work for some hobbies that have a higher cost of entry.
HeisenShop sounds like a great app idea for shopaholics -- automatically don't buy / cancel random or exceeding-monthly-budget items without telling the user.
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