The business model was you could sell books over the internet at a much cheaper cost compared to Barnes and Noble or Borders because they weren't paying for physical locations and there was no sales tax on the transactions because it was on the internet.
The great news is we can break the internet if needed. It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
> It will be torn down and chopped up into moderated walled gardens, it's inevitable. Algorithmic rage bait and echo chambers are incompatible with a functioning society.
I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
I figure our "great firewall" will be in the form of cryptographically origin-attributed routing, and making proxying while stripping that info illegal in most circumstances. Won't cut it to zero, but will make mass anonymous propaganda campaigns a hell of a lot harder. The protocols are already under development, as I understand it.
BGP route origin validation is already partially deployed in the wild, I believe. I recall reading about BGP replacement protocols years back that were being developed to include even stronger route-signing. Once you have that kind of thing in place, you basically have everything you need for a decentralized, origin-focused great firewall, it's just a matter of activating it.
> I've reckoned a free global Internet's incompatible with functioning democracy (or most other forms of government) for about a decade now.
Alternatively, the internet enables "true" democracy and we're finding out that we don't really like it. There is probably a good reason why our formal "democracies" are more like semi-frequently refreshed dictatorships.
> It's a common use of the term by experts in the field.
Sure, but it's clearly something different than people assembling in the town square to flesh out their issues with each other, as democracy was originally seen. Semantic arguments are dumb.
In theory, which is why the name is as such, it need not be any different as the elected employees are only supposed to take the message from their local town square to a central meeting place where, with all the other town square results, things are compiled – to be tarred and feathered if the message changes in transit – but in practice nobody shows up in the local town square and leaves it upon the employee to make guesses about their wishes, thus becoming dictators out of necessity.
> I don't really see how the Internet has changed how our voting works or the structure of our government, anyway.
Why would it? As before, it has reminded us of why we resorted to picking (and maybe not even that) employees to tell us what to do in the first place.
I'm optimistic, if you release enough bots into that ecosystem it is unlikely to survive. It is one of those things where effort is rewarded but also a condition for the game to function. YouTube is already full of videos that seem to have a single line prompt. Those can't generate enough rage to sustain the formula.
When a car moves over the ground, we do not call that running, we call that driving as to not confuse the mechanism of the output.
Both running and driving are moving over the ground but with entirely different mechanisms.
I imagine saying the LLM has thoughts is like pretending the car has wheels for legs and is running over the ground. It is not completely wrong but misleading and imprecise.
To fly means "to soar through air; move through the air with wings" (etymonline)
That is pretty much an accurate discription of what planes and birds do.
To plan means "to reason with intent".
That is very much not what LLMs do, and the paper does not provide evidence to the contrary. Yet it uses the term to give credence to it's rather speculative interpretation of observed correlation as causation.
Interestingly enough there is no definition of the term, which at least would help to understand what the authors actually mean.
I would be more inclined to take a more positive stance to the paper if it used more appropriate terms, such as call observed correlations just that. Granted that would possibly make for much less of a fancy title.
I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago.
To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday.
There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.
There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program.
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
