no. just NO.
look at maps of polio proliferation before/after Jonas Salk, the frikkin guy who DISCOVERED/CREATED the polio vaccine, and then look at maps related to Gates work, which, while admirable, bears no comparison from the night-vs-day world of pre-polio-vaccine vs post-vaccine.
Wards of people in iron-lung machines staring at mirrors on the ceiling.
It was before your time, but this is no excuse for spouting total nonsense.
You might be right. It is possible that Gates is merely one of the most positively impactful human beings, rather than the absolute most positively impactful.
Bill Gates also gave billions of dollars to the world for free, it's just a question of which one is more praiseworthy. I could be convinced Gates was not more impactful than Salk, but he's definitely in the running for top 100 best overall human beings in terms of positive impact on the world, in stark contrast to the claim that tech billionaire have contributed nothing
In fact the world didn't have this money before. Maybe this is the first time you've encountered the idea that the economy is "positive sum" so think of it like this:
Is the value of everything in the world higher or lower than it was 1000 years ago? If it's higher, how did it go up?
Maybe you need to do a quick Google on monetary policy 101 and how money is created. You seem to not understand the basics here.
While you're at it, consider what portion of MS success is directly attributable to Bill Gates and not the many thousands of other people involved in the company and code it literally copied from open source projects. Not to mention the extreme anti-competitveness of MS and their aggressiveness in suing and shutting down other companies, and other negative externalities they generated.
Ok let's compare the year 1000 with the year 1500. Do you believe the value of everything in the world increased in those 500 years? There was no monetary policy yet so that isn't the explanation
The explanation is the entire human race working diligently to produce, create and grow. Not because king Bobbert the 7th gave some artist some money, and not because king Jeffrey got rich by enslaving/conquering/exploring someone else.
no, creating the actual technical standards and the internet is/was hard.
monetizing it and walling off sections of it is STEALING FROM THE PUBLIC that which we already PAID for and selling it back to us!
and a lot of it is directly funneled to crony's of the current king...
I doubt DOGE will recommend cuts to SpaceX funding.
I need to remind you that Mush has invented nothing nor is he an engineer.
His vast personal wealth is extracted, and at least part of it's vastness is due to corruption.
Mush's personal views expressed on his own-media-trumpet Xitter, have hampered more technological innovation than he has ever enabled or paid for.
BTW what's SpaceX carbon footprint like? This 'man' also just paid for a slice of the US presidency that just pulled the US out of a global treaty to attempt to address human-caused climate crises that are unfolding in front of our face on a daily basis as predicted.
Mush has done net harm to Earth, not good.
sure it is.
"mature" markets are only interesting for large moneyed entities to try to tweak things and squeeze .01% more profit out of a service/process/product.
innovation is risky and rewards accordingly.
Ycombinator app-startups are low-hanging-fruit with marginal innovation and marginal risk => it ain't hardware, and it's just webservices and a few React devs...
nice try. The billionaires gave us none of the above. Sincerly, an old programmer who was actually there when these things were funded, often at the public expense in many nations.
Computer games are pan-et-circenses, IMO, but I also don't recall any billionaires having created any.
They are dodging a bubble and don't even know it.
If America thinks it can base future prosperity on the AppStore and AI, it should think again, because actual innovations are needed, and this low-hanging-fruit tech-bro-fantasy investment cakewalk will not provide anything but pain upon the inevitable comedown and disillusionment. You will not be able to sell products nor services with the term AI anywhere near them in the very near future. (already the case amongst a certain percentage of us)
RaspberryPi's SOC famously boots from it's GPU first, then it's CPU.
The GPU is a binary blob (not open source) thanks to Broadcom...
Broadcom... that same hardware mfgr that makes your Debian install so much extra fun... (well, if you care about networking and integrated controllers...)
It boggles my mind that the entirety of the hardware world cannot accept the simple concept of making computer hardware capable of booting and running <latest open source operating systems literally purpose-built to take advantage of general hardware standards the Hardware Manufacturers WERE ALREADY MAKING for Microsoft Windows (TM)>
I mean, it's not like Linux didn't spend 30 frikkin' years specifically aping hardware that carried the WIntel brand from the IBM PC with MS-DOS up to WindozeWhatever13 or whatever they are up to now...
I cannot fathom the strange incentivization schema that would cause the entirety of the existing mass-retail OEM computer production to be "Windows ONLY" and actively contributing to literally selling LESS of their own units via efforts to lock their own hardware against running your own damned OS upon it!
I buy hardware I can run Linux on. I have no use for Microsoft Windows in any capacity for any purpose, period. end of story.
Hardware Manufacturers please take note! (I remain puzzled... Dell even sells some preloaded Linux laptops, IIRC... what gives, Dell?)
Dell even sells some preloaded Linux laptops, IIRC... what gives, Dell?
What gives is that the Developer Edition gives them permission to make the other models 110% Windows-only because "if you want Linux just buy the Developer Edition". In their minds there is no reason to make the normal edition support Linux.
Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs.
Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.
I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.
Neural Networks? that's 90's technology.
Scale is the only new factor I can think of.
This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.
