Or, the world needs more of your field because it's now cheaper.
I've often heard of house painting as an example of this. It used to take a crew of 8 with buckets, paintbrushes, and ladders to repaint a house. Then paint rollers came along and it got easier. Then sprayers came along and it got even easier. Costs fell, so now people want their houses painted far more often. Landlords now nearly always fully repaint apartments between tenants. As cost fell, painting demand rose.
> The FDA has approved bemotrizinol (PARSOL Shield). This is the first new sunscreen ingredient approved in over 20 years, offering superior UVA and UVB protection... an advanced sunscreen filter that has long been used in Europe and Asia.
The FDA statement makes this sound like something we all should be pleased with. Somehow this 19,000-person bureaucracy is popular on Hacker News, but I like to remind people that the FDA's primary job is to prevent Americans from buying medicines.
A more accurate summary might be something like:
> After many decades of successfully preventing Americans from buying the same safe and effective bemotrizinol sunscreen that the rest of world has had for years, today the FDA finally relented and stopped blocking Americans from buying it.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but the fact that SpaceX will be "valued" at $1.75 trillion after the IPO is irrelevant when only $75 billion worth of its stock will be publicly traded.
$75 billion in float-adjusted market cap puts it around 180-190th in the S&P 500. So sure, it will likely get in there eventually, but there's no rush to bend the rules to get it in right away.
A friend gave AI access to his accounts to summarize his finances.
On reviewing the AI-generated report, he spotted a $500 monthly loan payment that he didn't recognize. He asked AI where it came from, and AI admitted that it was a mistake.
Perhaps in its training data, most people have a $500 loan payment, so AI just stuck one in there.
I always wonder, just how many payments per month do these people have that they need to "summarize" them instead of scrolling through history in about 1 or 2 minutes max? It would probably take me longer to type in a concise LLM query and fiddle with access,APIs, permissions and stuff, than to view all my expenses for a year.
And on the same note, regardless of how many transactions there are, how come people are unaware about some of them? How does that happen? Do you have loan payments you take and then pay monthly but then get a 29 day amnesia every month on schedule? Were they banned by their bank from the banking app or something? I have ADHD (real, shittier one, not an Instagram version) which makes me forget both long term and short term things all the time, for decades. It doesn't prevent me remembering which big transfers I need to do, or done already, and what is the balance now or typically end of month. Just what kind of financial empire with offshore tax evasion accounts necessitates some 3rt party "audit" of one's individual finances?
I pointed Claude at a read only API account for our ERP, where our accounting happens, and it was pretty useful for helping figure out some historical missing data we left off when we were importing pre-ERP stuff. It did start losing the plot pretty quickly though and get confused about which actor was which (e.g. some of our customers are also our suppliers).
is this the ChatGPT finance features they launched in May? it keeps asking me to integrate my finance data, but I have doubts about how useful it would actually be (not to mention some distrust about how well they would actually protect my data).
A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.
LLMs are software. They take inputs and produce outputs. What humans choose to do with those inputs and outputs is up to us.
Getting the pope involved makes it all seem more mystical and magical than it is. And these remarks only further feed that delusion. Regardless of intent, it seems to just feed the AI marketing and hype.
I agree. The pope seemed to take the opportunity to talk about the ethics in good faith, no pun intended. But Olah just used the association to aggrandize AI for marketing sake.
The article is thin on details about the sharing of names. If US companies responded to US government inquiries about speech regulation by forwarding the emails they received from Dutch regulators, those would unsurprisingly include regulators' names.
The article title seems like click bait, even though the article content goes on to have interesting details about EU attempts to reduce dependence on US technology companies.
> We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies.
Absolutely true, but ignorant stock traders making irrational trades only matters if company management pays attention to them. Musk will maintain complete control of SpaceX even after the IPO, so he can focus on long-term value rather than short-term ups and downs.
Of course, over time, if more shares are issued, this may change.
At this point in time, Musk can afford to ignore the stock price since he will retain sufficient shares (with 10x voting rights if I am understanding correctly) to outvote any board.
However, some projections I have seen suggest even the public raise won't be enough for the entire vision (which includes LEO data centers AND trips to the Moon and Mars). That means he will either have to find the revenue or eventually sell even more shares. It will only be at that point he will care about stock price.
That's the thing, why does everyone seem convinced that the guy who has been making up pie in the sky projects and breaking his promises, won't find himself wanting more money?
Have IPOs ever been about just a one time cash infusion?
He'll be able to raise debt against the massively inflated valuation of the company. SpaceX will have access to far more capital after this than before.
As I understand it he will retain control of the company in a similar arrangement to the one Zuckerberg has at Meta. Anyone who buys SpaceX stock is just along for the ride.
Stallman tried to introduce the term "intellectual monopoly", which fits better, since they really are monopolies granted by the government for limited periods of time, intended to promote progress in science and the useful arts.
"Property" was chosen specifically as a bait and switch. It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects, and apply it to this novel century-or-two long experiment for encouraging the production of easily-copyable things.
> It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects
That's false. Property used to mean a set of rights that gives legal control over valuable things, not limited to simply "physical objects", has been around for thousands of years. Ancients used it for future payments, interest (which could be traded), and much more.
Ancient Syrians (600BC) gave exclusive rights for breadmakers to make certain breads for a year window, and these were property rights, tradeable, sellable, had futures, etc. Ancient Greeks had a patent system for "a new refinement in luxury" that were property rights. Athenaeus (200AD) describes the system in place then where inventors could own their inventions and be the only one to profit for some time.
These are all property rights - something owned by a person, sellable, tradeable, has value, exclusive use. That you (and too many others) seem to think property can only be a "physical object" is as short-sighted as some who claim property can only be land.
One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial.
The other was popular in 1700's France re: their system of privileges, and the people found it so onerous that they embarked on a campaign of executing nobility until it seemed like the concept was good and dead.
We can use the word however we like, it's just a word, but if we conduct ourselves as if they're the same sort of thing, which France was doing at that time, we're in for the same sort of pain.
So what I'm saying is that its a bad idea for us to let data be property.
I was thinking of the code of Hammurabi as the settled one, and membership in a trade guild--which you had to buy from the government--as the controversial one.
I wouldn't classify debt as an uncontroversial kind of property. In medieval Europe, Christians were prohibited from owning debt by their religions (Jews weren't, so they ended up being the lenders, which is probably why the stereotypes exist today).
I'd argue that the fungibility/resale of debt is a bad idea because it takes on weird properties when too much of it accumulates in one place.
Slight correction: Jews were religiously prohibited from charging interest... to other Jews. (As I understand it, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong: not being Jewish myself, my information is second- or third-hand for most of this). Which is part of why they ended up being moneylenders to the non-Jews they lived among. Another part was that, as people who often had to pack up and move, fleeing from armed groups (who may or may not have had the official sanction of the local authorities, but usually did have their unofficial sanction), Jews tended to gravitate towards professions where most of their wealth was portable. Farming? Nope, get chased off your land and your profession is gone. Blacksmithing? Your tools and your stock-in-trade are too heavy to move quickly. Also nope, not if you expect to need to run for your lives at very short notice. But moneylending, or selling gold and jewelry? That works. Grab one or two chests and throw them onto the cart, and you've preserved most of the core of your business, even if the mob torches the shop and any tools that were impractical to move.
So Jews ended up gravitating towards being jewelers, bankers, moneylenders, and so on. All of which, yes, did feed into stereotypes.
There have also been long(-SH) periods of times where they were banned from any form of guild participation or membership, which drove them to this - i.e. in Bohemia, at least around the 15th century, re-selling wares that no one else wanted to buy (in the book I have read this in, bloodied clothing and weaponry from battle was one example) was one of their means to survive.
Do we have evidence around what the Code considered property? It seems to be vague [1]. (“Stealing” is applied to minor sons and slaves, for instance. And the terms “article” and named tangible items are used in some cases, while in others the translators chose the term property per se.)
> wouldn't classify debt as an uncontroversial kind of property
I wouldn’t either. I’m saying it’s old. And I wouldn’t say the concept of privately-owned land is “an uncontroversial kind of property” either, entire races had to be wiped out to consolidate that view.
Yeah good point. There's a whole spectrum of applications of "property". People can and do fight over it, and consensus shifts with time.
I think we can agree that data is at least not on the uncontroversial end of that spectrum.
I guess I just don't see a meaningful difference between:
"____ cannot be property"
And
"At some other place or time ____ might be property but as a participant in the consensus for this place and time I am proposing that we not allow ____ to be property"
Its like rights. They only exist if you fight for them. Controversial notions of property are only legitimate if we let them be... so let's interfere with that legitimacy (and if we must, enforcement).
All, or at least most property rights are monopoly rights anyway. I have a monopoly right over my house, and my car, my bank balance. That's just what ownership means.
Those rights are very flimsy actually. The government can seize your house, your car, and your money anytime. Hardly a monopoly when a third party can break it at will.
That the state which grants you your right can take them away doesn't make them flimsy.
And it's certainly more than "hardly" a monopoly. If the government gives a certain company right to operate on train track infrastructure but denies the same to every other company, then does that first company hardly have a monopoly?
By that standard, nobody has any right to anything. I think it's pretty widely understood that rights range from aspirational descriptions of a just world to widely accepted legal consensus.
I've often heard of house painting as an example of this. It used to take a crew of 8 with buckets, paintbrushes, and ladders to repaint a house. Then paint rollers came along and it got easier. Then sprayers came along and it got even easier. Costs fell, so now people want their houses painted far more often. Landlords now nearly always fully repaint apartments between tenants. As cost fell, painting demand rose.
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