Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.
It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.
It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.
This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.
Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?
That seems a question that we should have an answer to.
Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.
Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.
Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?
As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.
> As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.
> age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
This should be easy. Just in one of dialogs ask user to create a file 'me_age.txt' with age inside. No changes to OS at all. This will be the 'interface'. Any program can read the file. As far as I understand that's all California law requires (or will require).
Not sure about other versions. Strict verification would require binding to property software/services. Which is equivalent of reporting every user on every install.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised. They are absolutely negative player. But I'm kinda confused how this could even pass and what is the functional reason for this? Because "think about the children" it absolutely isn't.
You can of course chain child to the radiator and let him out but that's obviously not an protection.
I believe the demoscene is still ongoing, especially in France. Would love to understand why that is (French tech: parallel early teletype internet, high demoscene, more open approach to UFOs (GEIPAN) - French don't seem obviously "that different" to Americans, but there's obviously something different going on).
To me demoscene is kind of synonymous with the Amiga, so I would argue that peak demoscene lines up with the rise and fall of the Amiga brand.
So I think that's maybe the other differentiator between web experiment and art, because demoscene has a very distinct but difficult to describe cultural element that makes me identify it as art.
I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.
ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.
Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
I'm not sure if that's true. The Renaissance was peak creativity, but also high inequality - from peasants to the Medicis. Chinese and Japanese art seemed to flourish during wealthy imperial times, but decline during war, where the blender of chaos made people much more equal. Chinese art surged back in the last two decades in new modern forms.
Basquiat thrived during peak 1980s New York, and had a rags to riches trajectory, I think. Art is not generally something people get to "as a hobby" when they have time among normal life. The artist mindset is different: you need to do it. It's survival. Not about money. You have to express and create. You probably don't choose like other people.
The true creatives find a way with what they have. This is not to denigrate people who take up painting or photography as a hobby and often produce high quality stuff. It is to distinguish separate experiences. It's also to highlight that "great creativity" comes from a psychic imperative and visceral drive on part of the people who do it.
Investors are not investing in small startups much, perhaps due to high interest rates.
Now is a great time to invest in small startups applying ML to realworld problems, and will result in a lot of useful new tech being built.
Id make a lot of small bets on early stage startups of this kind - and perhaps top up when they get a POC and at MVP / early traction stage.
It would almost be worth buying a building in Danang Vietnam, and hosting small teams for 3m at a time to get more bang for your buck - ie. rent arbitrage / quadruple the effective runway due to low cost of living.
One of my many side projects was a thing called ODO .. linux box hooked up to the TV, running a web browser provided and intranet web page where you can browse media and files tree and thus share files.
Could also use it to play media - so a phone or tablet could act as a remote control from anywhere in wifi reach, and play music on the main TV screen / speakers or on the local device.
Was pretty cool, but didnt have the funds to commercialize it.
I feel the same frustration, seen from another angle : I think we can use current ML techniques to solve 3 or 4 hard problems in 3D reconstruction, and doing so would unlock a vast amount of value - we could turn lidar scans and photos of buildings and industrial plants into accurate 3D models automatically.
BUT I think the bottleneck is _funding_ of small early risky startups to do the needed engineering work.
LLMs, GPU datacenters attract all the big money, and the med and small VCs seem to be leaving their money in the bank earning high interest rates, unless there is a slam dunk opportunity with guaranteed traction and MRR growth.
We seem to be betting that only the large companies will innovate, when historically this has not been the case - Deepseek is a recent counterexample.
My take, after working on some algos to detect geometry from pointclouds, is that its solvable with current ML techniques, but we lack early stage VC funding for startups working on this :
It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.
It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.
This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.
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