Am I missing something? Is TFA only 2-3 paragraphs of a generic metaphor, with no actual data/research from aviation (or other fields) to back up the core thesis?
It’s a stupid statement by a stupid philosopher. Years later we learned collective development and incentive produced a society he could have never imagined.
It’s simply being looted now by the idiots this moron worshiped.
It’s from the Melian Dialogue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos) and it’s perhaps the most succinct embodiment of the realist school of international relations/politics.
I quote it here because the best way to get a day off is not to continue being weak, but to find strength, just as miners and railroad workers found strength in the 1870s.
The commentary was that of a general/philosopher/historian fused together... and really just a statement of "the weak are meat". Yes power has an advantage but its not the end all be all configuration.
Maybe he meant this somewhat disparagingly, but ultimately not enough. For a greek.
Statutory antitrust regulation would be fantastic. Instead of litigation, the regulators, corporations, and shareholders know when a business must split or divest. The firm files a plan, it gets approved, everyone wins except monopolists.
Not a bad idea honestly. Would be interesting to see how it affects tech companies since they rely on hypergrowth. My one worry is that instead of divesting they would just play shell games with complex ownership structures.
Berkshire Hathaway: it's a holding company, spin out the big holdings
Nvidia (this one is tougher): Ethernet, Video Cards, AI cards; maybe chipsets vs cards?
Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. Or ... split out the internal Cloud Services from the frontends.
TSMC: I dunno what to do here, but it's also not a US corp, so yeah. You could spin off fabs by node maybe.
United Health: not a tech company, but Insurance (possibly spin out regionally), Regional Healthcare Providers, Pharmacy Stuff
There's potential to break up some of the other companies along regional lines, like the Baby Bells ... but IMHO, that doesn't make that much sense for most of these.
Have some sort of phase-in, but if ownership between formerly related companies remains similar, contracts between them need to be a) public, b) terms must be available to others (FRAND). For cases where the spun-off companies are still market dominant (a lot of what I've suggested), constrain the company from entering other markets; this doesn't end the monopoly, but it prevents using one dominant position to establish another.
Not OP but a progressive tax generally scales non-linearly to tax higher brackets a higher %. So then you have an increasingly lower / decreasing incentive to make even more money.
Many countries already have a progressive tax on income, but that is irrelevant to business profits.
Yep, exactly. There's an easy way to make it gradual, too: put the "heel" of the progressive tax above where the largest American companies are and let inflation bring them into the curve. They can either pay a tax cost not to split, or they can split.
Alternatively, don't. I expect this proposal to be popular with executives regardless because it creates new spots for executives, just as it does with lower-flying labor.
Money is the most honest transaction, if people are paying money to anthropic it means its solving their pain. Its the same reason OpenAI and others are copying Anthropic.
This is some late-stage capitalist cope. Money goes to the person who can hoodwink people into thinking their product will do something they care about, not the person with the product that actually does something people want. There are a litany of examples of people swearing up and down by products that have been scientifically proven to __DO NOTHING__. The correlation between popularity and quality is tenuous AT BEST.
People discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis of the other AI companies.
If anything, the amount of original and foundational research at Google is a black mark against their position now. They blew a hell of a lead.
I’m willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago (“Attention is All You Need” was 2017) in an industry that moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
Backups are definitely helpful in ransomwares, but before systems can be restored and brought back online, victim organizations still need to assess the scope of the breach, find the initial access vector, identify compromised accounts, and evict the threat actor. That can take time.
I’m not certain, but it appears you’re giving Instructure a pass here, as if this is the first time they were hacked. But, it’s the second, by the same group.
As a parent of kids who are impacted by this, I’m not super concerned about the data being held for ransom, but I sure as fuck am concerned about how much it’s going to cost the district to move to another provider.
Not at all; standard IR procedure is scope -> containment -> eradication -> recovery. There is a fog right now; we don't know all the details. It seems to me that it's just as likely they weren't fully kicked out before or that the initial vulnerability wasn't remediated. You can't recover until the threat actor has been removed.
I don't have an opinion on Instructure (except as a parent generally hating the overall app-ization of education; fortunately our district switched away from Canvas a couple years ago), their cybersecurity posture, or this particular event. My only point is that even if backups exist, working through a ransomware attack often takes time.
Also, ransomware gangs often exfil the data and threaten to release it if the ransom is not paid--blackmail, of a sort. It depends on the company and the data set whether this is effective as a tactic. But when it is, backups don't help.
I hate using languages that only have signed integers. Using integers that can’t be negative fits many problems nicely and avoids the edge case of having to check for negative.
You are perfectly right, but neither C nor C++ nor many more recent languages derived from them have non-negative integers.
The so-called "unsigned" integers of C are integer residues, where each value can be interpreted either as both positive and negative or as neither positive nor negative. In any case no "unsigned" value can be said to be non-negative.
You have to go back to languages not contaminated by C, like Ada, to find true non-negative integers among the primitive data types.
In C++, it is possible to define a non-negative integer type, which can have good performance if you implement its operations in assembly language.
However I am not aware of an open-source library including such a type.
I really appreciate your comments in this thread adrian_b. Could you point me at a brief summary of how Ada (or Pascal?) non-negative ints work? What is a compile error, what is a guaranteed run-time error, etc.
It's not "can't be negative", it's just that the semantics for negativity is wrapping around.
And - yes, there are very important use cases for unsigned/modulo-2n/wraparound values. But sizes of data structures are generally _not_ one of those use cases. The fact that the size is non-negative does not mean that the type should be unsigned. You should still be able to, say, subtract sizes and get a signed value which may be negative.
That’s definitely not true. Unsigned ints have no “negativity” semantic. Wrapping around is what happens when you decrement the minimum value of any integer type, including signed types. Regardless of the type you use to represent an integer value that cannot legally be negative, you will have to take care not to allow your program to return values lower than zero for things like indices or sizes.
> Wrapping around is what happens when you decrement the minimum value of any integer type, including signed types.
No, signed wraparound is undefined behavior in C, whereas unsigneds are defined to wraparound. If you use -ftrapv, signed wraparound is an immediate abort().
While C like in many other places fails to define the correct behavior to avoid shaming the processor or compiler makers that fail to provide it, there are only 2 correct behaviors on overflows and underflows, like when incrementing the biggest number or decrementing the smallest number.
Both for signed integers and for non-negative integers, the 2 alternatives of correct behavior on overflows and underflows is to either generate exceptions or to saturate the result to the biggest or smallest representable number.
Wraparound is the correct behavior for integer residues, which are a distinct data type from either signed integers or non-negative integers.
While some people criticize C for making easy for careless programmers to make certain kinds of bugs, like access outside bounds, those are easily mitigated by using appropriate compiler options.
For me a much more serious defect of C is this confusion promoted by it in the heads of most programmers, who do not understand which are the fundamental integer types and which are the correct conversions between them, because C uses "unsigned" instead of at least 3 distinct types that it does not have, bit strings, integer residues and non-negative integers. More rarely, "unsigned" is used for other 2 types that are missing, binary polynomials and binary polynomial residues. All these 5 types must be primitive types in a programming language because all modern processors implement in hardware distinct operations for all 5 types, which can be accessed only through assembly language when these types are missing.
When I was building my computing stack out of x86 machine code I noticed that even if my high level language only had signed numbers (I'm still pretty brainwashed by C, which leads to the conclusions of OP), I still needed the ISA's unsigned jumps to deal with addresses (which can have the MSB set). So my big "insight" was to name unsigned comparisons "address comparisons".
This feels like you’re trying to “gotcha” me, but I didn’t say C specifies 2s complement wraparound, I said that’s what happens in virtually every language (including the major C/C++ implementations). It seems like you are “violently agreeing” with me.
That’s not a negativity semantic, it’s the behavior of the “-“ operator. If you print y or compare it to zero you will see that the result remains positive. Unsigned integers by definition have no negative semantic, hence the name.
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