I first learned from self studying Finkbeiner’s “Introduction to Linear Transformations and Matrices” which I thought was very good. Great exercise's. Dover still prints it for pretty cheap.
He does a cool thing introducing all sorts of theory of linear transformations, then later showing that matrices are the way to encode them once you chose basis for domain and codomain. I liked that a lot, felt like it removed any magic from matrices.
Also a fan of Axler though.
There's another even more abstract liability on the balance sheet here for "deprecated LOC" or something, where the thing they built gets scrapped because no one wants to untangle the rat nest, or the "documentation" was so incoherent that it all had to be rewritten and reviewed.
Coming from legacy enterprise I am using claude to do exactly this for some of my team's more bizarre and poorly documented "inventions" that started out as their pet project and then became part of our official workflow.
These are private websites accessible over the public internet, to be clear. Also, there are known relationships between the intelligence community and the big platforms, lets not pretend they have free reign.
Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations? If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security", what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?
I agree that its better to find solutions that involve protections instead of restrictions though. I think it means forced decoupling of indices/curation from advertising. This would make advertising funded addiction feeds compete with paid feed applications.
Not true. Speech and reach are obviously different.
It is entirely conceivable that Americans wake up to the absurd power and manipulation behind algorithmic feeds, and decide to intervene in the hypno-addictive horror-show.
Also, I've been thinking about how curation at the scale of the modern internet is much more analogous to speech than it ever was before. Whatever you want to say, just find someone else who's said it-- or just astroturf via 3rd party and beam it into the skinner boxes. In this frame, freedom of speech actually demands open access to indeces and content. Is it acceptable that network-effect-fueled cartels are the only ones that get to speak through algorithms?
In times long ago, those who owned a very expensive printing press and distribution networks had a significant advantage in reach. As did those with the money to pay writers and staff.
Regardless, this doesn’t change anything about the first amendment, because changes in technology and their consequences don’t alter the Constitution. If you think free speech needs a separate concept of “reach” then you need to pass an amendment.
Right. Five years ago the idea was you needed the capitalism to fund compute/training. Now, its clear that open weight models could be a public good. If my PC takes my job I'm still empowered and can still capture that value, so if Anthropic were pursing that end it wouldn't seem so hypocritical.
Yeah, even though I like 'craftsmanship' here, stakeholders don't. I think "durability" is pretty good. 'Engineering standards' perhaps. I think we'll start to see the groundwork laid for software engineering as a proper engineering field, where specific performance characteristics are required for certain stakes.
Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it, it becomes like a residential structure subject to building codes and inspections. I shudder to think of how this would play out it our oligarchic, anti-competitive environment though.
Because why would they? Most stakeholders don't have long term incentives, only short term. So the incentive is to buy low, cut corners, sell high. What's more incredible[0] is that the aggregation of this somehow makes long term growth.
Hah. What a dream. Instead they’ll hire a team of what is essentially interns and have them deploy mass amounts of minuscule features with 0 guidance because, “hey - it’s cheap as hell and does 75% of what it’s supposed to do.”
A license to operate the code, what a trip.
To be frank, most other business units that are not tech or tech adjacent do not care about the code in the slightest, or the maintenance / security / durability of said code. It’s a tough world to live in. We understand the value of good code, maintainable systems, and proper design across the board. Relaying that to leadership who does not see the value is time wasted.
“What do you mean we need to rewrite it to adhere to engineering spec? It already works. Just deploy it to production”.
I don’t think we’ll ever be treated as engineers. We just had a non-technical person spin up a vibe-app that is now in production, real (measured, methodical, secure, spec driven, efficient) development is actively being devalued at my company and probably across the board…
Rant over. You propose a good solution I just can’t envision a future like this, there’s too much value in “barely good enough”, but perhaps the ramifications of that will eventually bring about your proposed future!
Not foreseeably. As others have mentioned, DMA requires AI integrations to accommodate competition. To my mind, Apple's Webkit-only playbook is the prototype here. Waaaay too much money to be made as a GEO broker. Namely by selling position/advantages in the harness, or just use it to maintain ecosystem lock in.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
Is the end state that countries regulate app stores and approve apps? Apple has legit concerns. The majority of users would happily sell their own data for some tiny benefit. However, like you say, Apple has a perceived or real conflict of interest. Are Apple being benevolent or acting in their own interests?
That’s how I read this too - I specifically use Apple because I can get what I need to done with little hassle, I can routinely use the same phone for _years_ and not even think about upgrading (my last upgrade was “forced as my iPhone was stolen), and I have a much higher confidence in Apple not being crappy with my data vs Google.
I know there are alternative phones that are more open, and I recognize that the level of ease and comfort I get from a big name phone requires some of those trade-offs. Linux was my desktop of choice and probably would be again if my employer allowed it, but I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the tiny sharp edges of Linux on a mobile device.
I think you undervalue the contribution of internet-scale data to foundation modeling, and because LLMs can obsolete the content they required, I think its fair to characterize it as theft. Obviously RL contributes a lot to capabilities, but the judgement that an LLM uses to 'synthesize information' is born from the training data. The scale of the data really is beyond intuition. books3, for example, would 230 yrs of continuous reading
I actually think the "proprietary non-determenistic database of the free internet" does a lot to characterize the capabilities and effects to a lot of people. Obviously coders are more in tune with how well agents can work, but that's also due more to the RL breakthroughs than foundation modeling.
Can you steal something that is free and openly available?
I just don't understand this argument. "Theft" feels like a nice, heavy, moral accusation to toss at those you're debating with, but the actual prerequisites for theft don't even exist in this situation.
It is a lot more complicated than that. Your content is not simply used, copied, or even just simply distributed. The very terrain that you produce, distribute, represent your content has shifted due to the mechanics of it. Anything you produce is grabbed into AI summaries. They're grabbed into the training data. Humans produce free/open materials for many reasons. A lot of them don't have room to breathe and gain structure due to AI siphoning the entire atmosphere of web; eg communities
I mean, not that I'm a huge fan of IP laws, but yes?
Like I said, if you provide an alternative to all these blogs and forums (because you trained on them or because you scrape them for RAG) then you are stealing their traffic. Search engines were/are already doing that, but the foundation training
