Am I to understand that it’s legal and okay for LLM providers to profit massively from training commercial models on copyrighted works, without the rights holders’ permission - but illegal, and unacceptable, for private individuals to access a digital library?
Copyright protects mainly against the distribution of works, not about consumption. It is not the access to the library the bit that is illegal here, it is illegal for that library to distribute works without the copyright holders permission. You might like it or not (I don't), but copyright laws are fairly straightforward.
Have spent too little time with Haskell, and am fairly indifferent to pure maths beyond forcible conversion to applied maths against pure mathematicians’ will - but I have an enduring love for jazz. It is freedom incarnate, and the most perfect musical metaphor for life yet known to me.
email: elliot.grinstead@protonmail.com
…………………………………………………………………………………
Data scientist, consultant, and researcher. 6 years turning data into knowledge, and knowledge into commercial automations - or plain old profitable decisions for key stakeholders - at startup, SME, and entreprise scale. Anglo-French bilingual with econ/finance & stats background. Empathic listenership user, in stakeholder requirement elicitation as in junior mentorship. Enjoy public speaking to diverse audiences of different sizes, and levels of technical understanding. Proactive approach to personal and team skill development that balances present OKRs with long-term success goals.
…………………………………………………………………………………
Reminds me of Joscha Bach’s definition of a nerd, from his Lex Friedman podcast episode:
<paraphrase>
“The definition of a nerd is someone who thinks conversation is for peer reviewing ideas.”
“What do non-nerds think conversation is for?”
“Negotiating alignment.”
</paraphrase>
A good difference to keep in mind when we want to bend parallel conversations with the alignment negotiators to intersection.
That's pretty interesting because while reading the article I often thought "that's not at all what I think/mean when I answer that". I feel like this article describes one specific conversation type
I can usually deal with English well enough but I can’t figure out what “negotiating alignment” means. How is alignment a negotiation? Can you/someone maybe describe with some more words what Bach means?
Aligning your views with someone else's may require changes to both sets of views (yours and theirs), which could involve negotiation. Consider two people planning a trip, each compromising slightly to achieve a plan they are both happy with.
Peers reviewing ideas is but one step above rubber-ducking: the peer does not (necessarily) have ideas of its own, but merely serves to verify how you've formulated yours. At least, that's my interpretation.
"Peer reviewing ideas" is a bad formulation for me.
It's about whether the discussion is general (valid for anyone) or specific (these people, here, now). The latter gives some weight to subjective arguments and arguments from authority, the former does not, and this is a big qualitative difference.
Alice: “I need you to do X.”
Bob: “OK, I’ll do X.”
Not much negotiating, but Bob has aligned to Alice’s request.
More subtle:
Carla: “Do you think we should do X or Y?”
Danny: “I’m leaning X but Y might have the following benefits…”
Carla: “I’m leaning Y for those exact reasons. Why do you think X?”
And so on, until alignment is reached. Hope this helps!
Two kinds of debate: one where the expected outcome is a refinement of ideas, another where the expected outcome is an agreement on future behaviours (“alignment”). If you approach someone who only converses to negotiate alignment, they are likely to take your seeking of peer review feedback as a mindgame designed to make them do more of what you want to do.
For me, this explains why some compulsively managerial types are incredibly averse to conceptual abstraction in conversation: it comes off as a bamboozlement attempt!
> Modernization is hard, time consuming and very expensive. These regulations are a good driver for all that, but it takes time. Having been in some of these boardrooms there is not typically a cartel of evil executives figuring out how to screw patients. A lot of the time it is a group of relatively normal people trying to hold up a technological and business process house of cards with chewing gum, paper clips and hope.
It bears questioning how, in ”the richest country on Earth”, something as important as a hospital ends up held together with spit and twine.
Inside this richest country, the richest individuals and companies have been capturing ever-larger shares of GDP. Perhaps instead of growing private fortunes, this money could have gone towards modernising these regulated industries?
This statistic is misleading. The US is only the richest country on Earth if you consider the mean wealth. By median wealth, the US is ranked 26th. The wealth gap is enormous, and if you're in the upper echelons of the pyramid your health outcomes are vastly better than the clownshoes shitshow that the rest of the country is subjected to.
The critique is perhaps not relevant here, since it suffices to say that the country's wealth can afford a health care system not held together by "spit and twine", irrespective of how that wealth is presently apportioned. The wealth gap is, as you say, enormous.
In fact, the wealth gap is but a reflection of the underlying cause of the problem: legislators corrupted to the interests of the donor class at severe cost to the actual constituents of those legislators.
The system's complexity is a feature, not a bug. Regulatory capture is real. And much of the regulatory system in health care exists to limit competition. The AMA is a cartel of doctors that limits degrees even for qualified candidates. and the hospitals also operate as geographical cartels.
The problem is that it was built by the last 50+ years of technology and regulations. The system is a product of its upbringing. A company could starts out with noble goals of doing better and slowly year by year sink into this
morass and become just another “part of the problem” before it becomes obvious to everyone that it’s now just another entity making things worse.
These kinds of reforms would have had to begin decades ago to make much of a difference.
> The problem is that it was built by the last 50+ years of technology and regulations.
So... perhaps if we'd had a better goal 50 years ago - single payer or universal medicare or whatever you want to call it - we'd have decades of technical debt that propped up a fairer system, instead of an unfairer one?
Perhaps we need to change our goals today so that 20-30 years from now things will be better then?
I wonder if it is possible to design regulations with the intent that they may change and the data may require reformatting. At least a best standards practice of how these regulations should be written should be possible.
Richest Country - RiCo for shorter - is not a sentient being that sees and controls all...
What you refer to is actually a collection of hundreds of millions of individuals, with all sorts of interests, sentiments, ambitions, sometimes conflicting ones.
There's a lot of this concept, that if it doesn't work in the US, everybody else must have failed even worse. Well, not really, many times it's actually the other way around. I won't bother with other more obvious examples but in this context, even Pakistan has a digital health system in the meantime.
You could consider the fact that many countries have instant bank payments, ipV6 networks, better residential internet, have chip & pin and 10x less credit card fraud, have better justice system (lower recidivism, verdict is not determined by your wealth, etc), don't have the 'social security number is an identity', etc..
Of course many countries are worse, but surely you want to look at successes of others and replicate them.
I honestly think it's because Americans are told from birth they live in "The greatest country in the world". In that context, it feels like trying to fix anything is not really a worthy pursuit, because it's already better than everywhere else anyway. So even if healthcare sucks, it's better than everywhere else. (Which everyone in a developed country knows first hand is simply not true)
I personally think it's a very dangerous thing to believe, because it means there's no driving force to improve, and it's a part of the reason the country has stagnated so badly.
My wife did part of her nursing program in St Kitts. They used paper records.
She also says that, of the half-dozen medical record systems she has used (here in the US), Epic is one of the better ones. (read: least bad)
I'm sure if you talked to medical professionals in Pakistan they would bemoan their medical record system too. It seems to be popular sport in the medical community.
Nope, they just use a single national health insurer instead of many private ones. This changes the problem from many-to-many (as is in the US) to just many-to-one, which is immensely simpler.
Not necessarily true. At least all my medical records in all the facilities I visited in the last 5 years were digitized and I live in an eastern European, post-communist country.
Not at all. Poor people successfully raise kids every day. And I want schools to get more of my tax money, if for no other reason than that I want to be in a world of smarter people.
(And there are other reasons, that are more important)
But it is a life choice. Other ones are to become an artist. But barely anyone says that anyone who chooses to be an artist (bad or not) deserves for "someone else" to foot the bill for their life.
Or maybe you'd be happier we me saying that yes, in the same way that you must be this net worthy to collect fancy cars. Makes it easier, sure. But nobody owes paying for your choices.
To do the work of fulfilling our most fundamental evolutionary urge, and perpetuate the future of humanity is a “lifestyle choice” isomorphic to “choosing to be an artist” or “collecting fancy cars”?
You may feel that having kids is an optional luxury; the evidence suggests this is not a majority perspective.
In general people want products that will enrich their lives in some way. Sometimes these things aren't necessities, but sometimes they are. Food for example...
I introduce a new food product, Soylent Green. It tastes great, doesn't cost much and is nutritious. It starts becoming wildly popular.
Does that mean that there was huge demand for cannibalistic products? No. There was demand for tasty, cheap, nutritious food.
If this happened in real life the ingredients label would be a list of indecipherable chemicals, proteins, and "natural flavors". What you're suggesting requires that consumers be able to understand the externalities involved in the sourcing of every ingredient as well as the manufacturing process AND then use those to override their own preferences regarding the end product.
Identifying and preventing externalities or at least making sure externalities are factored into pricing is something that governments are MUCH better equipped for than any individual.
If you don’t think there’s a huge demand for cannibalistic products, you haven’t been listening to Q. Which is good news for you. Of course confusion about the plausible goals of large actors is kind of their thing.
If you can sell a product at $5 by doing it in an unsustainable way but can't afford to go below $10 if you do it in a sustainable way, is it reasonable to expect each individual consumer to fully vet claims of sustainability and make the right long-term decision?
This is what you're pushing for, and what we have, and it's a terrible world to live in since it lets you the producer who is knowingly doing damage to avoid taking any responsibility and just push it all to "consumers."
Whatever happened to personal responsibility applying to rapacious producers too?
Consumers didn't hold a gun to anyone's head and force them to profit from environmentally disastrous manufacturing and shipping practices, or to profit from literal slave labor in supply chains. Those actually committing those actions, and profiting from them, are responsible for their actions, and it's shifting the blame to suggest that those who have no say in how private businesses are run are responsible for how private businesses are run.
No, but consumers enabled them by buying their products. And consumers do have a say, either by voting to increase regulation, or by not buying products.
Public companies are legally required to maximize profit. This will only be changed politically, or by changing what provides the company profit. Both lead back to the consumer.
Appreciate the honest description of Scott’s brutal experience with heightism - which at my 5’10” is still palpably present, so I cannot imagine what he dealt with beyond what was shared here - but the whole tone of the article is so relentlessly promotional, it comes off like the most manipulative content marketing. I feel like it wants to prime me for the experience of having the surgery by walking me through it in acute detail.
“Gosh, it’s tough being born outside the cultural norm. Why do all that coping when you could just pay this social media personality to make it all better? So get off those too-close-to-the-ground tooshes and work it, sweet cheeks! Some of us need to capitalise on your insecurities and people’s worst innate tendencies for a living.”
Not one remark to the effect that, “Hey, heightism is in the same class as racism, sexism, ableism and other unfashionable isms - so all the good folks who can’t afford the surgery, can enjoy the dignity of some cultural assurance that you are the victims of atavistic shitfuckery from people with this objectively bad belief.”
Indeed, why do the work of being a better person by giving folks shorter than ourselves the same dignity we’d demand of someone much taller… there’s a metaphor for some other contemporary macro issues… and, more generally, leaving behind this infantile judgment of others by heredity.
In a for-profit healthcare context with extreme built-in distributional inequities, I cannot see this usage as equivalent to evening up mismatched limb lengths.
Dating preference is one thing - our sexual attraction parameters are mostly out of hands - but to discredit an experienced adult human and treat them as a child on the basis of their height or weight or muscularity or whatever, then, god forbid, using that to score points on that person (e.g. by mocking them at work) is egregious and should earn you social, if not legal, censure.
It’s wrong to mock a woman for her figure, including her height, and the converse is true of a man. And it’s wrong to paywall cultural acceptability behind expensive surgeries - further interlinking height with the perceptions of health and wealth in the culture - rather than doing the collective emotional work of sincere introspection to change habitual heightism.
Feel the same as someone who dilettantizes with text-to-image synthesis - strong polarity between “how is this any different from the rest of the OSS movement which I support” and a feeling that these images are somehow gratuitous and… facile is only half the word?
But having done it myself, I couldn’t deny any human their own experiment towards fulfilment of their imaginary with these unbelievably neat little bits of maths. If art is ways of feeling, this helps me see the labels to my own world in new ways, and make new inter/extrapolations - seems legit! And the possibility for infinite subtle gradations with the interplay of model, data, and hardware is extensive.
And no longer cloistered behind membership institutions, but available to any with the noggin and consumer hardware to access it… except, expanding equitable access to those things goes through a fraught moral calculus of social and planetary justice. So, in a sense behind membership institutions for those who are excluded by the monetary cost.
Work has been exhibited, transacted in and reified for far less. This feels unfortunate, but I don’t know why.
