But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person. There's civilian, everyday task that would be easier were better firearms and explosives available
Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.
In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves. Have you ever taken an opioid? The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
> Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.
In this scenario the addictive product has the margins of a generic commodity and 75 competing suppliers. Getting the customer addicted has close to zero returns because the margins are thin and the customer's future purchases are more likely than not going to a random competitor rather than you. Notice how little advertising you see for things like flour or onions. If something is completely fungible and commoditized the incentive to push it on you is minimized.
And retailers have the opposite incentive, because making a $0.05 margin on a bottle of pills once a month is worth far less to them than not having someone who is a repeat customer lose their job to addiction or die of an overdose and then stop buying all of their other products.
> In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves.
If the drug dealers don't need to do any pushing then why do they spend so much time and effort on pushing? It'd have to be because pushing gets results, and therefore blunting the incentive for pushing gets results the other way.
>The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
It's not that crazy, but it has to be coupled with accessible recovery programs. The classic tale (one that people in my life have gone through) is the prescribed opiates -> street heroin when the scrip runs out / when they change the oxy recipe so that it doesn't dissolve in water anymore so you can't shoot it.
This is obviously much more dangerous than getting oxy from your doctor, so the logic of "keep people from seeking heroin on the street" actually does make sense to me from a public health perspective.
> Of course, this then introduces the circular reasoning "because of a potential US attack", but of course if Iran wasn't funding Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis
I think the first step of thinking about war objectively is to consider how each side sees it. The US POV is no less circular, from Iran’s perspective - they could list any number of provocations from the US to justify arming themselves, none more obvious than the war itself.
The debate around who started the hostility is ultimately pointless, the question is what to do about. Ideally the answer isn’t “arm for obliteration because the other side started it”
So let's say Iran stops building up massive amounts of missiles, funding these terrorist groups, stops pursuing a nuclear weapon, stops mass killing of its own civilians, and stops helping Russia prosecute its war against Ukraine (we can even leave this optional just to not introduce additional complexities).
What will the United States now have to do on its side as it pertains to Iran?
are you implying that the US share in the hostilities is only direct military intervention? because that's not correct. through their alliances, they are additionally responsible for more
Even as someone highly interested in memory I don’t see it as a useful tool for coding. The source of truth for what a repo does or should do is the repo itself.
What you’re describing sounds more like code review guidelines, which can be explicitly brought into context at specific times during a change. A memory system is both too complex and less accurate for this
Simple vector similarity plus a cheap model to filter results works pretty well. Though ofc t does add tokens to your primary chat, which is the basic tradeoff of memory systems in general (in addition to latency)
I favor automatic recall, invisible to the agent. For memory creation, I find tool calls do a pretty good job, though I also like automatic memory creation on context compression.
I think with automatic creation you need async consolidation (calling it dreaming is a little dramatic for my taste).
But these products are all drop in replacements for each other. I've recently favored Codex more than CC, just because rate limits got mildly annoying. I really didn't have to change anything about my workflow in doing that.
> But these products are all drop in replacements for each other
For now. That doesn't really change the risk, that just means they are all hyper competitive right this moment, and so they are comparable. If one of them becomes king of the hill, nothing stops them from silently degrading or jacking prices.
The only shield is to not be dependent in the first place. That means keeping your skills sharp and being willing to pass on your knowledge to juniors, so they aren't dependent on these things.
Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding. There's nothing they can do.
I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.
It doesn't look commoditized to me, it looks subsidized. It looks like everyone is trying to be "the one" and running as competitively as possible until the others fail. Commoditized would imply these services are all going to mellow into a stable state and mostly compete on price. I don't think that's happening. These aren't paper clips, they are courting governments and trying to pull the ladder up behind them. That's why both Anthropic and OpenAI are preaching doomsday and trying to build a moat with regulations.
Fair. I have high hope for local inference, feel like right now it is simply cost prohibitive to get the hardware. It will be interesting to see what happens.
The thing is that AI is still more akin to a glorified autocomplete than something that can really supersede your skills. Proprietary model suppliers are constantly trying to obscure this basic underlying fact, without much success (much of the unpredictable shifts you see in proprietary AI behavior ultimately boils down to this); so it becomes far more crystal-clear when using open models that really are a pure commodity.
yeah, I think there's the marketing and then there's the actual true utility. AI isn't a better computer program. It's not going to be able to do everything you want autonomously. But, it's pretty good at some stuff!
>Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding.
It's similar in the way many businesses transitioned their scalability etc. to 'the cloud' starting a couple of decades ago.
It's a combination of loss of control and abdication of responsibility. They can claim to the customer the reason the service went down is now Microsofts or Amazons etc. etc. fault. Ultimately the end-user was the one that ended up losing.
It was a choice. There was something they could do - and keep everything in house, although cost-competiveness becomes an issue at some point and you get priced out of your target market. Everyone loses except for the cloud computing (or now AI) providers.
> My feeling is that if the AI is this good, the audience will just prompt the AI themselves and cut out the middleman.
I call this the instant imitator trap. If anything AI generates stands out from the slop, the slop generators will just imitate it, thus quickly making whatever standout quality from the "original" work also slop.
reply