I reckon you need tacit knowledge. Experience. Luckily in the order
of 100 hours not 10000.
Build a GPT using Python and Pytorch. For a good course: Andrej Karpathy is your keyword. At $1000 his course is great value. But actually it is free which is even better ;-)
It wont take you to flash attention but will ramp you to the point you could probably read papers about it. I almost got that far then life lifed me. But I was able to implement changes to the architecture of GPT and do some “hey mum I am doing SOTA (2021) machine learning”.
But I doubt companies purposely increase their hosting costs as some kind of firewall to only include the rich. More like they just don’t care. Same reason for technical debt, everyone wants to grow and move needles.
If a company could magically make their site more available and efficient for free I am sure they would jump at the chance. But spending a million on that vs. a million on ads wont seem worth it.
That is one performance metric. What about energy use and loading search results not just the home page. I find DDG faster from a perception point of view. I imagine on sone metrics it is faster.
If all the sites tot more efficient it may also increase longevity of laptops and PCs where unsavvy people might just “need a new computer it is getting slow”.
Also applies to bloatware shipped with computers. To the point where I was offered a $50 “tune up” to a new laptop I purchased recently. Imagine a new car dealer offered you that!
I worked at a now-defunct electronics store (not fry's in this instance) in the early 2000s that offered this "tune-up" - it was to remove the stuff that HP and Dell got paid to pre-install, and to fully update windows and whatever else.
Remove the mcafee nuisance popups and any browser "addons" that were badged/branded. and IIRC we charged more than $50 for that service back then.
For the performance boost it could offer the unsavy user stuck on a HDD, it was probably worth it to many. Gross to be the middleman, but it is what it is.
Another computer shop i worked in charged $90 for virus removal, but we also eventually made it policy to just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap and fully update the OS. Prior to that the policy was "remove viruses, remove crapware, update OS", but we had a few customers that had machines with 30,000 viruses. I forget what the record was, but it was way up there in count. Trying to clean those machines had a marginal failure rate, enough that it was costing the owner money to have us repeatedly clean them without payment.
No one wants to tell a customer that they need to find better adult content sites, and that we won't be cleaning their machines without payment anymore!
"just reformat/reimage the drive and remove all the crap"
And that is not more work?
It was usually the way I did it, too. But this requires checking with the owner what apps are important, saved preferences, where are the important files stored (they never know) etc.
What’s the financial incentive in that? Manufacturers ideally want you to buy a whole new device every year, they don’t want you repairing or extending the life.
