I doubt it would've made any difference, zero data retention is truly trivial to get around and I think it's highly likely OAI is already doing this. Just use another model to distill, summarize, and/or paraphrase the data and boom - you get to train on the ideas, while claiming zero data retention, which is true. You legitimately retained zero data.
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
"The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations."
What?? Can you explain this better? The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is? The USSR was more developed than the US?
Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically? See other comments about USSR buying wheat from the US. See the 21 million people Stalin had to murder to try and keep the system running. See Venezuela, drowning in the riches of it's oil, having massive inflation and people starving while their overweight leader ate a pile of empanadas on TV in front of them all. None of these arguments people are making about US resources or distance from other countries or whatever else make any sense.
> The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is?
Yes, generally, but it's not linear and 1-1. The USSR was not more developed than the US, it doesn't work like that, but the trend is: the more developed a nation is, the more centrally controlled the economy will be. Why? Because as nations develop, the government has BOTH the capital and motivation to more tightly control the economy.
Underdeveloped countries simply don't have the capital to enforce economic planning. They might have laws on the books, but it doesn't matter, they can't enforce them. The US has laws on the books, and the capital to back it up. On a macro level, the US government is very closely monitoring and steering the economy. Of course through control of the currency, the Fed, taxes, regulation, subsidies, tariffs, contracts, and more. Consider what makes up our GDP - healthcare alone is 20% ish. How is that controlled? Through our regulations and structure established and maintained by the US government.
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
Nothing is impossible, but it's really difficult. If some greedy entrepreneur is raking in the cash with some product or service then of course another greedy entrepreneur will see that and start competing with the first guy. The evil corporations you are worried about are not going to cooperate with another corporation. They're evil! At best they'll fake it for a while and then backstab each other.
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.
In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).
Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:
"You can always present a case history of one".
Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".
Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".
In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.
If some believes free market monopolies exist, they ought to know of some examples. Hence why I ask for a case, it's the easiest way to point out that they don't exist.
I mean, they don't exist by construction per your definitions. A free market is a market that lacks state intervention beyond what's required to enforce property rights, and a monopoly is a state-imposed single seller in a market.
A free market in this construction must necessarily lack monopolies. There is no counterfactual observation that could falsify the proposition because the definition of free market doesn't admit a counterexample.
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
You can have a monopoly without having 100% of the market. Even one of the most famous monopolies, AT&T throughout the 20th century, never had 100% of the market. You know this, so now you're just actively lying.
Microsoft was briefly deemed a monopoly by engaging in anti-competitive practices and abusing its market leadership to squash competition, like artificially blocking the use of DR-DOS to install Windows [1].
Can't reply to tombert, we're too deeply nested for hacker news, but the Microsoft example is great. The government didn't have anything to do with them being a monopoly? Have you heard of copyright laws? Did you know that Microsoft's whole business depends on the application of copyright laws to software? Did you know copyright protection used to only last for a few years? And then copyright holders lobbied government for longer and longer copyright protection?
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
Over time, I've come to conclude that copyright should not be a monopoly, or at least the copyright protection shouldn't last more than a handful of years.
While you can lower your commute by living closer to work, you should understand that what you’re doing is taking a drastic pay cut for the pleasure of in-office work.
In-office work might be worth it, maybe. Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year of your money? Probably not.
At that point, it’s probably still cheaper to rent a wework or something.
I disagree, the minimalism of C results in writing overly complex code to solve simple problems. Things like type punning and bit hacks are common place in C.
The end result is equivalent C code is much more complex than C++. For example, you need to remember to call free every time, forever, in every function. In C++ you just use unique ptr or shared ptr and you’re done. It’s a simpler model, enabled by the more complex feature of RAII.
Something like std::vector isn’t hard to write in C, it’s impossible. The language semantics don’t allow it. So you have to do hacks and remember to free, over and over again forever. It only takes just one time forgetting, and that’s a memory bug.
I mean, consider a large codebase. How many free calls does C++ eliminate altogether? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands? You just need to forget one of those in C, or even just put it in the wrong place.
And that’s just one class of things. Generics are much more complex in C, too. The type system in C is more complex IMO because it can be so easily defeated at every turn. C gives you practically no guarantees, no tools, for anything. The result is you are forced to write extremely defensive code everywhere, complex code.
The analogy I use is to physical tools. A screwdriver is simple, but building a house with only a screwdriver is complex. A suite of power tools is complex, but building a house with them is simple.
> The analogy I use is to physical tools. A screwdriver is simple, but building a house with only a screwdriver is complex. A suite of power tools is complex, but building a house with them is simple.
The analogy I prefer is that it's safer to ride a bike down to the store than flying a space shuttle down to the store.
The absolute danger of a space shuttle is much greater than a bike. But the absolute danger of C++ versus C is… equivalent. All the suspicious memory things you can do in C++, you can do in C. In fact, with a couple more added in C (type punning via unions, for instance, is not standards compliant in C++, there are casts for that).
That’s not to say C++ is a good language. It’s a rotten, no good evil language. And the same things apply to C# versus C++.
A garbage collector is much, much more complex than reference counting and RAII, particularly the CLR GC which is a beast. But the extra complexity makes applications simpler, not more complex.
> The absolute danger of a space shuttle is much greater than a bike. But the absolute danger of C++ versus C is… equivalent.
Okay, let's pretend, for the sake of this conversation, that the absolute danger in the event of failure for both the bike and the space shuttle are exactly the same.
My analogy still holds in this hypothetical case: the odds of a failure operating a space shuttle is much much larger than the odds of a failure when operating a bicycle. Using C++ is a much larger cognitive load than using C, same as launching and piloting a space shuttle is a much larger cognitive load than riding a bicycle.
It doesn't matter that the space shuttle has hundreds, if not thousands, of safeguards built into both the vehicle and the process, while the bicycle doesn't have so much as a seatbelt; the bicycle is still safer to operate because of the lower cognitive burden.
There are simply more rules to remember in C++ to ensure that you don't get exploited than in C. Ask the average working C++ devs about the danger between virtual vs concrete destructors in derived classes and half of them won't know what you mean. Ask about putting objects into a std vector, and maybe half of them will remember the surprise they felt when it first broke (because it worked until that point).
C++ provides global ways of avoiding footguns, but those global ways are not easily inspectable in the local scope. The problem is the sheer number of C++ footguns is simply overwhelming[1]. There's a handful of C footguns to commit to memory (signed overflows, used-after-free, etc), and they're all visually inspectable in the local scope.
When I need to a language better than C, I don't reach for C++.
------------------
[1] Even world-renowned C++ superstars with decades under their belt can't come back to it after a mere 2 years. You don't see that with C.
That’s where CarPlay comes in, the tech doesn’t matter. Your phone has good navigation right? Good messages, good music. So just use that. Then it doesn’t really matter how awful the car infotainment is.
Even “good” infotainment (tesla) is inferior to CarPlay in many ways, because it’s not your phone. You don’t get your maps app with everything magically synced and working.
I don't think Apple Carplay nor Android Audo are good technology either though. They both appear as an afterthought and are completely isolated from the car.
Consumers are just easily impressed with car infotainment at this point. If the screen takes less than 1s to respond to input and doesn’t drop 30 frames on every animation, they consider it “good”.
Yes, it’s the same story on android. Apps are sandboxed and security is a top priority… unless you’re Google, then you get elevated privileges across the board, no permission dialogs, and sandbox escapes with no questions asked.
It might just be cheaper to change the not-robot things to fit a robot shape rather than create humanoid robots.
For example, spending ungodly amounts of money to develop a humanoid to flip burgers feels overkill. Probably cheaper to just… replace the flattop grill with an automatic cooker. Which do exist, right now, and have for decades.
A lot of train an automotive stuff can be traced to the size of a horse drawn carriage, same with mny other areas - the legacy goes way back in most places and has immense power.
reply