Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose a cloud provider from a European country with higher data protection than their home country, they can send a message to their own government.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and tried to print their way out of the crisis.
Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the world.
If a debtor can't pay their debt, you don't just get to wipe out the bond holders. There is some kind of negotiation to try to restructure the debt and see how much the bond holders can still get. Simply wiping out the debt would create a terrible precedent with terrible consequences for the credibility of the whole eurozone. Who would want to lend money to an EU country if they just get wiped out when things get bad? It would've also had bad consequences for the financial system and potentially caused some institutions to go belly up. The way that countries typically get rid of their debt is by printing money to serve it and thereby inflating it away. But that is obviously not popular among the remaining EU countries. It was always clear that the Euro comes with this constraint that you can't just inflate away your debt.
Europe was able to impose policies to Greece because Greece was requesting loans from Europe. Those loans were required because other investors were unhappy that Greece had hidden the real state of its finance in its reports.
Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?
> Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on their behalf during the EP voting process and other legislative matters, such as electing the President of the European Commission
I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.
I'm looking for a language optimized for human use given the fundamental architectural changes in computing in the last 50 years. That way we could skip both the boilerplate and the LLMs generating boilerplate.
That's probably why a boundary (like MCP) is useful. Imagine maintaining the critical application logic the "old fashioned way" and exposing a MCP-like interface to the users so that they can have their LLM generate whatever UI they like, even realtime on the fly as they are engaging with the application. It's a win-win in my mind.
>Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does?
Obviously not, since those are just producing output based 100% on the "sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input" (i.e. the data set).
The parent's constraint is not just about the output merely reiterating parts of the dataset verbatim. It's also about not having the output be just a function of the dataset (which covers mathematical and statistical inference).
Intelligent living beings have natural, evolutionary inputs as motivation underlying every rational thought. A biological reward system in the brain, a desire to avoid pain, hunger, boredom and sadness, seek to satisfy physiological needs, socialize, self-actualize, etc. These are the fundamental forces that drive us, even if the rational processes are capable of suppressing or delaying them to some degree.
In contrast, machine learning models have a loss function or reward system purely constructed by humans to achieve a specific goal. They have no intrinsic motivations, feelings or goals. They are statistical models that approximate some mathematical function provided by humans.
In my view, absolutely yes. Thinking is a means to an end. It's about acting upon these motivations by abstracting, recollecting past experiences, planning, exploring, innovating. Without any motivation, there is nothing novel about the process. It really is just statistical approximation, "learning" at best, but definitely not "thinking".
Again the problem is that what "thinking" is totally vague. To me if I can ask a computer a difficult question it hasn't seen before and it can give a correct answer, it's thinking. I don't need it to have a full and colorful human life to do that.
But it's only able to answer the question because it has been trained on all text in existence written by humans, precisely with the purpose to mimic human language use. It is the humans that produced the training data and then provided feedback in the form of reinforcement that did all the "thinking".
Even if it can extrapolate to some degree (altough that's where "hallucinations" tend to become obvious), it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".
> it could never, for example, invent a game like chess or a social construct like a legal system. Those require motivations like "boredom", "being social", having a "need for safety".
That's creativity which is a different question from thinking.
I disagree. Creativity is coming up with something out of the blue. Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion. LLMs so far are not very good at the former but getting pretty damn good at the latter.
> Thinking is using what you know to come to a logical conclusion
What LLMs do is using what they have _seen_ to come to a _statistical_ conclusion. Just like a complex statistical weather forecasting model. I have never heard anyone argue that such models would "know" about weather phenomena and reason about the implications to come to a "logical" conclusion.
I think people misunderstand when they see that it's a "statistical model". That just means that out of a range of possible answers, it picks in a humanlike way. If the logical answer is the humanlike thing to say then it will be more likely to sample it.
In the same way a human might produce a range of answers to the same question, so humans are also drawing from a theoretical statistical distribution when you talk to them.
It's just a mathematical way to describe an agent, whether it's an LLM or human.
They're linked but they're very different. Speaking from personal experience, It's a whole different task to solve an engineering problem that's been assigned to you where you need to break it down and reason your way to a solution, vs. coming up with something brand new like a song or a piece of art where there's no guidance. It's just a very different use of your brain.
I guess our definition of "thinking" is just very different.
Yes, humans are also capable of learning in a similar fashion and imitating, even extrapolating from a learned function. But I wouldn't call that intelligent, thinking behavior, even if performed by a human.
But no human would ever perform like that, without trying to intuitively understand the motivations of the humans they learned from, and naturally intermingling the performance with their own motivations.
Exactly. Lightning minimizes the use of the globally consistent ledger, which inevitably has to make trade-offs due to the "trilemma".
You set aside some funds on the global ledger and then you can use those funds to transact in a much more efficient, truly p2p manner, without touching the global ledger. Eventually, you net out everything and settle it all at once on-chain, utilizing its features to resolve any conflicts.
I think it all comes down to relativity and the speed of light.
There is no single, universal, true ordered state (ledger/db). Participants need a conflict resolution mechanism to figure out whose truth is correct. One must rely on a localized consinstent state of some authority (leader/consensus).
The fact that every human society ends up with some kind of centralized oligarchy is probably also due to this effect. Something has to resolve disputes about the state of the system.
A solution that somehow goes around these limitations could have implications beyond computing. It could enable “headless” large scale cooperation. This would be a fundamental innovation in the evolution of intelligence generally.
Proof of work is the only one we have that kind of works and it’s massively expensive. You could argue that it’s just a way to make economically irrational or short sighted collusion prohibitively expensive rather than a true solution and might only work in a domain like a currency where there is a direct mapping to cost.
Proof of work essentially allows for a periodic leader election, where the leader has sufficient time to propagate its state update along with a verifiable proof of authority in a permissionless decentralized system.
Decentralized cooperation in society likely wouldn't be permissionless, in most cases you would probably want to assign some voting power per human/citizen/share certificate/whatever. I'm also not sure if decentralized, verifiable randomness is easier to achieve outside of computer networks (for example, source some verifiable randomness from the universe based on a pre-defined algorithm).
> if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising
Yes, please. Both online and offline. Advertising is probably the most useless, annoying and wasteful industry out there.
We could have pull-only databases of businesses, products and services instead. Ideally, with independently verified, fact-checked information and authentic reviews. Realistically though, this kind of objectivity would probably be infeasible to enforce and maintain. But even if we allow for misinformation, paid rankings and whatnot, the point stands: any such database should follow a pull-only model, users access it voluntarily to search for products and services and it's not an unsolicited broadcast to everyone everywhere all the time.
Ideally governments would provide an index of registered businesses with some basic filtering (e.g. location or category of services provided) with a name, address, phone number, and url. Present in random order to be fair.
My state seems to have a search tool, but no list. It also only has name/address (so presumably it's more for serving legal papers or whatever).
If I want to find a plumber, I should be able to ask my government for a list of the licensed plumbers in my area.
Intelligent beings in the real world have a very complex built-in biological error function rooted in real world experiences: sensory inputs, feelings, physical and temporal limitations and so on. You feel pain, joy, fear, have a limited lifetime, etc.
"AI" on the other hand only have an external error function, usually roughly designed to minimize the difference of the output from that of an actually intelligent real world being.
Yeah, that's exactly my thinking man. We have to root intelligence in the real world, otherwise it will endlessly spin in these abstract loops.
Akin to how logic -- untethered by emotion, intuition and experience (wisdom, maybe if you want? Understanding? Sure) -- can justify any obscene conclusion, and can not discriminate between morality.
Reward functions or a system of values -- these things are rooted in real world experience. Logic is required, sure, but insufficient. At least alone! Haha :)
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