It's a hedge against the risk of the current government. Leaving a bunch here is part of the hedge. It's not as "multifaceted" as you're making it out to be.
The Dutch are pretty direct but not to Donald Trump, who has a famously thin skin and can cause a huge European crisis with a single tweet.
You have to see all European diplomacy through that lens. Everybody’s tiptoeing around the orange idiot’s feelings and meanwhile working hard to make sure we’re never again so dependent on a country that’s so untrustworthy. This gold move is one of the many little steps taken in that direction.
You could make the argument that leaving gold there also leaves them ammunition for later. The threat of removing the rest is also a useful tool. Personally I'd be getting out of all US bond holdings and investments and making sure the banks are limiting exposed too, well personally I have. Keeping investments in the US, in US debt is just irresponsible at the moment.
Microsoft is still the best Indian OS manufacturer. And as such, it's forced upon people throats by corrupt Indian IT department heads, so a few non Indian people who actually care don't have a choice.
They have only themselves to blame for this. They've spent decades developing technology to spy on and micro-regulate what their captive customers can do with their property. Now that they have this technology, it's only logical that they be held responsible for misuse.
The only (and inevitable) solution at this point is for big tech to get micro-regulated like the banking industry. The same mindless greed that drove them to take control away from their customers will be responsible for the same control to be taken away from them.
Be careful what you wish for. I'm sure Microsoft and Google would love the kind of regulation we apply to big banks. It has become a moat that makes it impossible for other (snaller/foreign) financial institutions to compete because they don't have massive specialized regulatory departments.
The more complex the rules become, the more difficult it will be for alternative providers to exist, unless they have explicit carve outs. So far, with age verification and user id laws, there doesn't seem to be much appetite from politicians to create exceptions for open source and smaller projects. By comparison, in the US the regional banks have special exemptions for many of the really onerous regs, which is why they are still a bunch of them.
Oh I'm very away of the damage over regulation will cause to this industry and to humanity as a whole. I'm merely highlighting the irony. Humanity will never again have the kind of autonomy and freedom it enjoyed the past 50 years. We lost thanks to the unchecked greed of a few nasty players. What a shame.
You don't think that regulation would require everyone to embed watermarks and guids to make sure that nothing objectionable is being generated or created?
We'd be lucky if government stopped at this. General computing will likely end up be treated like cars and driving. Users and corporations will be highly restricted and over regulated. I don't want this but this is how it's going to go. I bet we will have fully lost our autonomy within the next two decades, sooner if AI gets misused or misbehaves in a significant way.
This has nothing to do with generating harmful content and everything to do with fascist surveillance. This is an OS level functionality that get utilized before AI even existed.
"privileged take"?, sorry I am not from the US, so I don't compete in the sorry-o-lympics.
Nothing is stopping you from using it for free at home, everyone is privileged in that regard.
And it was obvious to everyone else, I was talking about decisions you can take yourself. I'll try better in the future to be hyper explicit about this, so people who are looking for a reason to feel hurt will have a harder time.
If you work at a company and it's a company device, then its not your privacy to worry about - you don't use your work device for personal matters, and the concerns are someone elses.
IBM, SAP, Capital One, GE, Cisco, Intel, Deloitte offer a Mac/Windows choice program. Better than just one choice, and arguably a bit better of a privacy record than MS (especially of late)
On all fronts we are having a easier time than before.
Healthcare, safety, life expectancy, disease, mental health (yes, you disagree, but it not being existant in the past kinda sets tue bar).
This is like a modern form of "I could do that in a weekend". Try reading the article before making such statements.
There's a lot of pre-processing, experimentation and validation that went into this project. The training data collection and sanitization alone is a big undertaking.
As for the blog post itself, from the article:
> Note: This blog post is 100% written by me. No AI has been used whatsoever.
Put another way: You can ask the LLM yourself to do this project? Please do, share your prompt, I'd like to see it.
I get what you are saying, but at the same time I was bored on a Saturday and 'vibe coded' a small VR game, nothing special, but I had the LLM throw down a structure, and then I walked through it looking at and thinking about why placement of code was how it was and how different things were handled. It was basically exactly like my job, jump into some okay working legacy app, code I have never actually seen, try to get my brain around it, then personally tweak things until the app performs the way I fully want.
That's a fair point TBH. I said in my post that this LLM is first of all a learning project and I skipped an important step: the training loop. But on the other hand, how many data scientists are writing their own training loops? Is it even worth it? And how much learning do you want for one project, I mean, where do you stop? Why use "Huggingface Transformers" when you can write it from scratch, for learning? Why use Torch when you can write it from scratch, for learning? Why use Python when you can write in C, etc. It's cheating, right?
In my case, I decided to skip the training loop and focus on the data processing and the hyper params and the rest of the higher level steps that took a ton of time anyway, and I reduced the friction.
I do get your point tho. Now that I know how to train an LLM, maybe I'll write a training loop from scratch as a project, to learn how to do it.
We're getting to the point that building something with AI doesn't really indicate skill. So, for a prestige project, there is great value in avoiding AI use.
I don’t know. Em-dashes are normal punctuation. The prose on the site doesn‘t strike me as particularly AI-y, but of course I might be wrong. Generally speaking, if the person wants to not use AI and tell people that, thats fine by me too.
From the article they list a bunch of arbitrary constraints...
> If this sounds unreasonable to you, that is because it is.
Those listed, are tame. I don't understand this kind of faux modesty.
> My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s
Goes on to explain how they used 3D blender...which wasn't available until 1998.
A vanity cat project being tailored and submitted for nostalgia clickbait. I don't think there's anything useful to take away from this other than some color shade selection ideas.
>Goes on to explain how they used 3D blender...which wasn't available until 1998.
In the early 90s, there was enough money in this kind of software that you could have hired a specialist 3D artist to use the software that was available at the time, e.g. LightWave 3D. When it's only a single-person project, I think it's reasonable to stick with what you know.
> Goes on to explain how they used 3D blender...which wasn't available until 1998.
You conveniently left out the second part of that sentence:
> … modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.
The author very explicitly laid out their constraints in a bulleted list right below; I think calling this nostalgia clickbait is infelicitous at best.
You look like you are completely unaware of the wave of big and small early nineties games that used flat shaded 3D renders for art, sprites, and full motion video segments. Unlike fully textured polygons, they could be rasterised quickly on older or entry level Silicon Graphics workstations (or cheaper alternatives, but with more sweat). It was one of the distinctive styles of that era.
I did mention that in my case I had the 4080, but you do not need the 4080 whatsoever. You can run the same model with less context on a single £200 V100 or with the same amount of context on two of these.
Or, perhaps, you are the one who is mistaken and other people ARE having success with large and complex programs?
I am not saying you ARE wrong, but I don’t know how you could be so certain that no one else is having success with complex, AI written, code.
There are well known, established, and respected engineers creating AI projects right now. For example, antirez, the creator of Redis, created the DS4 project. When you see these sorts of projects, do you never think, “Maybe I might be wrong about this.”?
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Just to be clear, I'm not saying they don't make mistakes. In fact I constantly scream into the void with the sheer amount of absolute stupidity of those models, however I would never say, using them for what I use, that they can only be used for simple and small use cases.
Fact is, it was not a issue before, because of trust.
"for more resilience against a backdrop of increased geopolitical risk." is just nice wording for "Trump is burning down all bridges".