Building tools and services to reduce hassle and friction for others is great. However, what often happens is that you end up creating and building a moat around that hassle. Think about how companies like TurboTax lobby the government to not build electronic tax filing stuff.
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
i'm fairly certain Cory Doctorow does not understand the economics of Enshittification.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
What are you talking about. Cory literally coined the term to describe this phenomena. He is not confused by the idea of cheaper products with wider appeal. He takes issue with vendor lock-in that is weaponized first against the end-user, then against paying customers, and finally against investors themselves. This is first and foremost a criticism of online products and platforms, not mass-produced gadgets from China.
Do you think e.g. the AI/LLM boom is all rent seeking? Do you think there's no positive value for the world on the recently announced e.g. MacBook Neo and that it's purely a monopolistic activity? Those are 2 clear recent examples of big players making massive benefits for the world, and I'm okay if they get X% of that value as company valuation.
Not at all. OpenAI / Anthropic are producing tons of surplus value right now! Not to mention how great the Chinese open source LLMs are. And Apple's hardware division has always been fine.
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
It's an 8GB RAM 256GB SSD laptop with a lower spec'd 6-core chip for $599 USD. Seems overhyped to me, PCs have done that for a while, just not as elegantly. Admittedly it probably has far better battery life than a PC, so that's a genuine advantage.
In general, it's kind of the difference between having a sharp axe vs a dull axe.
Though in the particular case of the MacBook Neo, I'm not sure whether we're talking about sharper or duller. Depends on the metric you're using, I guess.
The Neo is supposed to be the budget version. I think MacOS is a decent computing platform for some engineering and creative endeavors -- if one more college kid gets access to it for cheaper I say it's a positive
Macbook Neo is just another laptop. There is nothing "massive benefits for the world" in the context you are trying to put it. And doesn't Apple take close to a third in 'rent' for anything on their platform?
The bar isn't massive benefits for the world, the MacBook Neo is great! If there was a new company that builds MacBook Neos, that's a great company. They build something real and sell it for more than it costs to make, no strings attached.
The problem with Apple comes down to the App Store, the forced 30%, and all the apps that just don't get built cause of Apple. This is rent seeking, and this is evil.
If you don't want a MacBook Neo, don't buy one and it doesn't affect your life. But the App Store affects your life whether you own an iPhone or not. It affects the direction of the world. And that's where the rent seeking problem is.
Unlike profit-seeking, which creates value, rent-seeking redistributes existing resources, often through lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, or favorable regulations, causing economic inefficiency and higher prices.
So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.
slightly offtopic: I would be delighted if Tucholsky had written something hilarious along those lines. But he didn't as far as I know, he focused more on the German language himself.
I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?)
I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing.
As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance.
>I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?
It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces.
>For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車)
1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese).
2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-)
As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English.
Watching Dr. Eric Lander's lectures in MIT OCW Biology course was a watershed moment in my life. I felt exactly the same way as this blog post after finishing the course, two years after graduating from college. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/P-Ry4rRdDbk?si=Hp2SEkEKGeeui-pP
May I ask what library you're using for kanji to hiragana transliteration? I'm working on a language product as well and I'm using pykakasi which is certainly prone to errors. I tried your app and noticed similar errors as well (大いばり should show ooibari instead of daiibari, for example). Wonder if we can do better on transliteration.
MeCab with ipadic and a lot of custom swift logic for fixing issue patterns and matching to JMDict entries as an additional heuristic that the stemming/token was done right. I’m also using a custom generated JLPT classification (a more complete guess at what the full set of JLPT vocab is based on ebook word freq) to choose more likely candidate results. I haven’t improved this in a couple years, it’s one of my upcoming focuses now that I have the app rewritten and out.
Unidic also interesting but harder to use and huge data size.
I’m going to be layering on gpt to further improve.
Given enough advances in hardware and software optimization, isn't it reasonable to think that if we connect this level of language model to speech-to-text + image-to-text models on the input side and robotic control system on the output side, and set up an online end-to-end reinforcement learning system, the product will be a convincingly sentient robot, at least on the surface? Or am I underestimating the difficulty of connecting these different models? Would like to hear from the experts on this.
Hey! we did 2 events in Taipei in 2022 w/ 30-40 ish people attending each time. We will try to keep it running regularly in 2023. Happy to join force if you want to help making it happen more regularly!
This is a very short-sighted view. Globalization requires certain level of operational efficiencies, such as speed and cost of communication and transportation. We have just recently reached a level where governments and corporations can support demands from billions of population. Technology will keep on progressing unless we end up in an extinction scenario, and at certain level globalization will be just another step in humanity's perpetual drive towards centralization.
It's actually a very long term view, looking at the last 9000 years or so of history we are aware of. You also have requirements confused with incentives. That the things you mention are required does not in any way mean globalization will happen if they are present. There needs to be a strong incentive that is more valuable than the status quo to all the parties involved and there are all sorts of assumptions about that incentive that are unclear if they are true or pretty clear they are false (eg: assuming economies of scale will continue with size at a meaningful enough value rather than plateauing, changing slope to be much flatter or outright decreasing. Assuming technology will always improve. Assuming population changes from, for example, an ultra low birth rate won't precipitate one of the many breaking up of large countries we have seen in history, etc.)
