From a communication strategy standpoint, I'm just curious what the thinking was to go with 'Little Tech' to refer to new tech startups? I understand the purpose is to succinctly stand in contrast to 'Big Tech', but the word 'Little' somehow feels a bit more cutesy or infantilizing to me than saying 'Small Tech.'
Mark probably figured Meta would gain knowledge and experience more rapidly if they threw Llama out in the wild while they caught up to the performance of the bigger & better closed source models. It helps that unlike their competition, these models aren't a threat to Meta's revenue streams and they don't have an existing enterprise software business that would seek to immediately monetize this work.
It's also worth pointing out that a company doesn't have to hold a meeting where they vote to deliberately target and exploit vulnerable members of the public, instead they just use an algorithm that constantly optimizes for making them money and which eventually figures out exploiting people is easy and effective.
Those companies generally know it's happening, and often do set out to make it happen just like they've always targeted ads at young children and teenagers whose brains aren't developed yet, but the algorithm gives them plausible deniability.
Who needs evidence when there is no real enforceable penalty for doing so? Credit card companies sell our data. Ancestry services probably sell our data. They might put signs in the windows saying "your data is safe with us" but that's pretty much where any amount of trust we place in these companies ends and becomes blind faith.
I always love reading myopic technology takes on this site.
Based on the article, it sounds like they're in exploratory talks to figure out what that "AI device" could be. I agree that it's likely we've already figured out the right form factors for such a device, but it's not a leap to imagine a significantly better UX than what we have from today's computing devices.
The movie "Her" seems like a decent blueprint for a post-smartphone "AI device".
I paid $148 USD for the HD595s in 2011. They still work just as well today, but I'm disappointed to find out 14 years later I was conned into paying more for a false premium.
A tb4 kvm would be nice. I use a dock with my 2 laptops primarily to split video and USB to use with a kvm I share with my desktop so I don't have to switch out mouse, keyboard, and headset between everything.
I will say my favorite accessory has been my particular KVM that allows me to switch between my dock and desktop with a special keyboard command. Beats fiddling directly with the many buttons I had to press on my monitor to switch video inputs previously.
This is going to be the case with any sufficiently scaled business. I feel the same way about how marketing and sales people talk about human beings as an opportunity to qualify for their sales funnel.
I'm sure others might feel similarly disgusted how software developers and business people talk about users. I personally find it gross that high spenders are commonly referred to as whales.
Maybe your opinion, but I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion. Software is a critical part of people's daily lives and the successful functioning of modern society. Some, but certainly not all, software developers actually work on systems designed to improve some aspect of the human experience and not on systems designed to continuously extract money or attention from their users.
Those things aren't mutually exclusive imo. You can be helpful and extractive. A good example is implementing automation that replaces a job and not advocating for retraining for the people impacted or implementing procedures that encourage human oversight. Another is creating targeted tracking systems. Advertisements are generally viewed as a positive for the business world and a net negative for humanity. Working on the more inane parts of these systems doesn't make you less culpable.
From a communication strategy standpoint, I'm just curious what the thinking was to go with 'Little Tech' to refer to new tech startups? I understand the purpose is to succinctly stand in contrast to 'Big Tech', but the word 'Little' somehow feels a bit more cutesy or infantilizing to me than saying 'Small Tech.'
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