The first amendment only applies to the oligarchs and their friends in the 3 branches of the United States. TikTok is only the first to be blocked, there will be more, and they will be DC political fodder too.
We need a distributed social platform. Distributed currency system. Distributed personal information privacy. Distributed AI. Where’s the tech YC?
TYC gives zero shits about information privacy and distributed AI because they can't make more money than god. TYC isn't going to save you here. Nor are the masses going to adopt it.
Here's the lesson: We need our social media platforms to be distributed and out of the hands of any government to promote sharing knowledge and creating peace.
When the mass Tiktok exodus tsent Red Book [1] to the top of the App store, it was the first time in history that American citizens started talking directly to Chinese citizens in mass. I've heard all sorts of stories of both sides learning a lot about each other, including the lies and propaganda each others government places in the media, but mostly more positive things like art, fashion, cooking, food, healthcare and -- probably the most important, each other's different humor.
Video, and an AI algorithm to drive the For You page, is probably the most difficult part. We have some good ideas on privacy[2], and I can imagine some sort of crypto ledger system paired with AI learning, but video expensive to store/stream and at such a high volume of streaming, I don't know what kind of end points would really work to keep quality up.
Then there's the problem of policing such a system, and who the police would be. There's some dark places on the internet that I think everyone but a handful of people think should never be allowed on such a network, but more generally there's questions on politeness, stalking, harassment, "facts", memes, and other culture differences that would need to be ironed out.
Who's building this? We need it by Jan 19th, 2025.
I've visited the areas outside of the major metro areas (Athens, Thessaloniki) and found the vast majority of Greeks to be very friendly and family oriented. It really is a break from the American way -- you don't check a website, you ask someone or call someone. The boat is late, maybe call the captain's wife?
There's lots of real estate to rehab in all the smaller towns and even the tourist towns too. Book your flights already!
You could add just about any University to the list. At least in California, many UC IT people left due to poor pay and long hours, however the UTPE CWA 9119 union has grown in numbers and strength and the trend in pay and hours is quickly improving.
There's plenty of gray beards, the UC is starving for seasoned talent, and the HMO plans are inexpensive and cover a lot -- 5 years to vest in the pension that matches nearly 100% and you can take distributions starting at age 50.
UCSF (and I believe other campuses) went all in on shipping IT jobs overseas so job security isn't great. And the pay is… not great. I went looking for examples and was immediately reminded just how poorly organized their job listings are. Cal actually doesn't show anything until you click through to "featured listings" — that doesn't actually show any listings but has a link to the aggregated job listings across all campuses.
A Unix BOFH spot that tops out at under $180k in a HCOL area? It's something I guess.
It's not the bike lane. The price of going out has gone up and the amount paychecks that have gone up doesn't match it. Each wave of tech layoffs wipes out more customers that can absorb price increases. The city needs to continue lower permit fees and cut red tape for new business to start city-wide to get new money in.
As for the center bike lane design, I dislike it as a cyclist. The entry curbs make it difficult to pull out mid-block without someone behind me hitting me, and if I'm biking in the car lane I can't safely merge back to the bike lane with how the curbs are.
The best design is to make those blocks car free like Market St; deliveries, ADA drop offs, and local garage owners only. Ubers can drop off on the side blocks and back in parking can go in where it fits as well.
Excellent news. I’ve been worried that Sam moving to Microsoft would stall out possible future engineering efforts like GPT-5 in IP court.
As an example of how much faster GPT-4 has made my workflow was the outage this evening — I tried Anthropic, openchat, Bard, and a few others and they were between not useful and worse than just looking at forums and discord it’s 2022.
GPT-5 is kinda pointless until they make some type of improvement on the data and research side. From what I’ve read it’s not really what OpenAI has been pursuing it
One big improvement is in synthetic data (data generated by LLMs).
GPT can "clone" the "semantic essence" of everyone who converses with it, generating new questions with prompts like "What interesting questions could this user also have asked, but didn't?" and then have an LLM answer it. This generates high-quality, novel, human-like, data.
For instance, cloning Paul Graham's essence, the LLM came up with "SubSimplify": A service that combines subscriptions to all the different streaming services into one customizable package, using a chat agent as a recommendation engine.
Are you just blindly deciding what will make “gpt-5” more capable? I guess “data and research” is practically so open ended as to encompass the majority of any possible advancement.
A built-in cell modem in Macbooks also means additional partnerships with telcos like with the iPhone, iPad, and Watch. Right now there's a clear line between a telco and an Apple laptop. With cell enabled devices, telcos can sell a lucrative "subsidy as a lock in" discount.
I think $5-$10 is a good price point for just the privacy aspect. As far as search, it's about 90% kagi and 10% Google if I don't like the kagi results. Maps could use some work and I'm always jumping back into Google maps.
About me: Hey team, I'm Mark and I've been doing compute infrastructure for over 20 years. I specialize in deployment automation, computing at large scale, high performance computing, and identity management, and security. I have a strong interest in AI as well!
I'm interested in co-founding and early stage startups, but if you are doing something really cool in corp or gov/mil (Cage Code: 8Q152) drop me a note too! I'm available for W2 or C2C, a US Citizen, and have previously worked with clients in UK, EU, Japan, and Thailand.
We need a distributed social platform. Distributed currency system. Distributed personal information privacy. Distributed AI. Where’s the tech YC?