> And then if this becomes more widespread an the existing software companies that do business with government will start sucking money out of such grants and the government quality code.
Agreed, but keep in mind this must be compared to the phenomenal inefficiency of the developing monopolist oligarchy to the end user. I find it interesting how much harsher people are when some fraction of government money is siphoned, when the current alternative is *most* of it being siphoned, albeit without passing through government first.
The implicit claim often seems to be that people see less value per dollar when money passes through the government. But this is pure nonsense, particularly when you compare things like the cost of healthcare in the US vs everywhere else. Or generally most cases where government managed services can be compared to consolidated markets.
Just because some government money is wasted in ways that are less applicable to private industry doesn't at all mean the private industry creates more value for the consumer.
This is an argument in favor of all anti-competitive walled garden moves. But we've seen time and again the degrading service and price gouging that ultimately comes. People have a right to use the things they own as they please. Companies don't have a right to protect their image that supersedes this basic human right of independence.
Look up Claude Code, Cursor, Aider and VSCode's agent integration. Generally, tools to use AI more actively for development. There are others as well. Plenty of info around. Here's not the place for a tutorial.
It's such a rapidly developing field with much of the progress happening in small labs on the open source models. Eventually, the field will coverage and stabilize. For now, the bet is too be open and supportive, to be close to the progress and be in best position when the dust settles.
Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where Netflix hasnt.
But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.
For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.
Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.
It's not blame, but it's a striking reality that needs to be kept at the forefront.
It introduces a substantial set of novel failure modes, like cross-tool shadowing, which aren't obvious to most folks. Making use of any externally developed tooling — even open source tools on internal architecture — requires more careful consideration and analysis than most would expect. Despite the warnings, there will certainly be major breaches on these lines.
> I'm wondering if it is something like they can track mouse movement
Yes, this is a big signal they use.
> adding some more human like noise to the mouse
Yes, this is a standard avoidance strategy. Easier said than done. For every new noise generation method, they work on detection. They also detect more global usage patterns and other signals, so you'd need to immitate the entire workflow of being human. At least within the noise of their current models.
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?
Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.
I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.
The author specifically mentioned paid 3rd party. So an individual/business can “advertise” all they want for their services, but paying other entities to “speak” for them is not allowed.
Yes, i can find all kinds of loopholes too. Thats what judges are for.
Assume paying for others to advertise for you is illegal. What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
What about them wearing a sign so they don’t have to shout? Driving with a sign on a car?
Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
I am not an advertising apologist. I hate ads with the power of a thousand suns. I use an ad blocker. But this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
Practically speaking, 99% of advertising is covered by a dozen or two primary channels which are obnoxious and ubiquitous. The goal should be to regulate platform-ads, e.g. print, billboards, TV, radio, web, streaming, social media. Ads are all already clearly regulated within the limits of freedom of speech, such as criminalizing false advertising, as another comment has pointed out. These platforms are also generally regulated for obscenity, harassment, etc., which if anything are much more subjective than commercial activity.
> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?
That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.
> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.
You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.
> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?
Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.
I haven't thought hard about this, but I think the solution relies on some definition of a 'platform' or a similar idea. I think most people could see a difference between the carsigns and the websongs, where the latter look like ads because they're on someone else's platform.
I think we can narrow down on weird cases in between the carsigns and the websongs. Maybe the line gets muddier if the employees aren't driving their own cars with signs, or if those employees are hired to do nothing but drive, or if they're not even employees and they're Uber drivers but for driving signs... To me, that last one sounds like a platform which exists for nothing but advertising.
> this idea of making advertising illegal is just a non-starter. It goes against the basic tenants of freedom of speech.
FWIW, that’s not entirely accurate. The tenets of free speech include a long list of exceptions. In the US, commercial speech and specifically advertisements do not necessarily have free speech protections, by design, especially when it comes to false advertising, misleading advertising, and anything else ads might have that is on the list of exceptions including IP, defamation, and false statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Computers can and should help along the way, but Dijkstra's argument is that a) much of the challenge of human ideas is discovered in the act of converting from natural to formal language and b) that this act, in and of itself, is what trains our formal logical selves.
So he's contesting not only the idea that programs should be specified in natural language, but also the idea that removing our need to understand the formal language would increase our ability to build complex systems.
It's worth noting that much of the "translation" is not translation, but fixing the logical ambiguities, inconsistencies and improper assumptions. Much of it can happen in natural language, if we take Dijkstra seriously, precisely because programmers at the table who have spent their lives formalizing.
There are other professions which require significant formal thinking, such as math. But also, the conversion of old proofs into computer proofs has lead us to discover holes and gaps in many well accepted proofs. Not that much has been overturned, but we still do t have a complete proof for Fermats last theorem [1].
I am having a hard time finding controlled testing, but the premise is straightforward: different modalities encourage different skills and understandings. Text builds up more formal idea tokenization and strengthens logic/reasoning while images require it learns a more robust geometric intuition. Since these learnings are applied to the same latent space, the strengths can be cross-applied.
The same applies to humans. Imagine a human who's only life involved reading books in a dark room, vs one who could see images vs one who can actually interact.
Agreed, but keep in mind this must be compared to the phenomenal inefficiency of the developing monopolist oligarchy to the end user. I find it interesting how much harsher people are when some fraction of government money is siphoned, when the current alternative is *most* of it being siphoned, albeit without passing through government first.
The implicit claim often seems to be that people see less value per dollar when money passes through the government. But this is pure nonsense, particularly when you compare things like the cost of healthcare in the US vs everywhere else. Or generally most cases where government managed services can be compared to consolidated markets.
Just because some government money is wasted in ways that are less applicable to private industry doesn't at all mean the private industry creates more value for the consumer.
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