"Grok's differentiator from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data." That's just RAG. Retrieval Augmented Generation. All Grok is doing is acting as a summarizer. This is something you can do with an ultra-lightweight model, you don't need a 314B param monster.

Also, you don't need an X Premium subscription to "get access" to Grok, since its weights are public. To "get access" to an instance running it, maybe.

I've not tried running it, but from others who have, the general consensus seems to be: it's undertrained. It has way more parameters than it should need relative to its capabilities. Kinda reminiscent of, say, Falcon.

I also have an issue with "A snarky and rebellious" LLM. Except people using them for roleplaying scenarios (where you generally don't want a *fixed* personality), people generally don't want it inserting some sort of personality into their responses. As a general rule, people have a task they want the tool to do, and they just want the tool to do it. This notion that tools should have "personalities" is what led to Clippy.

"Negligence" has killed this once great city.

There, fixed that for you.

After they had watched Star Wars back when the original was in theaters, my parents commented: It's a standard Western movie with astronaut costumes.

Just because you can tolerate change, doesn't mean change will not be damaging. And in most cases, dramatic change is damaging. The motto being "move fast and break things" recognises this.

I suspect the main problem with this view is the same as we had in shift from Altavista to Google. Only things that are relevant to the mainline search engines success and the rest become abandoned, because most things need to be maintained to work. And search engines generally use very similar technologies to one another to determine relevance in times other than some novel technological breakthrough while it is being adopted. And then you have the new "best technology" win the race and everyone who remains relevant goes to that technology, and only details of implementation really differ.

"The winner takes it all" in natural selection is a universal law of nature. And here the combat is not between the companies, but between technologies that bring maximum relevance to searches. Companies are merely adopters of these technologies. And the problem right now is that we're in the next technological breakthrough. Just like Altavista died due to using technology that allowed for much less relevant searches than Google and being unable to adopt something that would be competitive with Google, there's now a good chance that Google is going to be dethroned in Western search markets by someone who adopts current style AI in a way that enables producing more relevant search results.

So Microsoft's search is absolutely replaceable. But they're the leaders in the potential new technology that lies under the engine due to their OpenAI partnership, while Google is massively behind while apparently agreeing that yes, AI will be the future instead of current algorithmic determination. And this is when things on the web itself will break, because just like the old working sites were aimed at being indexed to be most discoverable in search, the current ones are aimed at being SEO:d for current technology. And Microsoftie talking is indeed correct that popular web pages need maintenance to stay online. Altavista dying caused a pretty significant shift in web itself, as things that were designed for AltaVista style indexers and not re-worked for Google's PageRank et al algorithmic search just slowly fell off and died.

If governments had shut down the sales of booze during the lockdowns, it would have been political suicide.

Not quite. It's mostly bing, but there are other engines at very low relevance weighting. When you search DDG vs bing anonymously from a proxy and clean browser, results will be very similar, but not quite the same because of it.

>I see you chose to conveniently sidestep the substance of what I said

And projection continues. You're done nothing but that for your entire posting on this topic, specifically because your totalized morality would crash if you addressed the topic.

And now you're accusing me of doing what you've been doing for the last few days on this topic.

I forget than American "Christian conservatives" have that weird idealized version of history of Christianity, where they think themselves somehow exceptional.

When in reality, there's nothing exceptional about them except the amount of resources they have because of where they are.

So ancient societies without slaves didn't and couldn't exist? Say, the Incas? The Harappan civilization? None at all? *eyeroll*

Incan society is IMHO really interesting. It's sort of "What if the Soviet Union had existed in the feudal era", this sort of imperial amalgam of communism and feudalism. There was still a heirarchy of feudal lords and resources tended to flow up the chain, but it was also highly structured as a welfare state. People would be allocated plots of land in their area of specific size relative to their fertility, along with the animals and tools to work it, including with respect to the family status (for example a couple who married and had more children would be given more land and pack animals). Even housing was a communal project. The state would also feed you during crop failures and the like In turn however all of your surpluses had to go to the state (and they had a system to prevent hoarding), and everyone owned a certain amount of days of labour to the state (mit'a), with the type of work based of their skills. It was very much a case of "each according to his ability, each according to his needs" - at least for commoners.

The Incans saw their conquest as bringing civilization and security to the people under their control, as a sort of "workers paradise" of their era. Not that local peoples wanted to be subdued by them, far from it, but the fact that instead of dying trying to resist an unwinnable war, they could accept consequences of a loss that weren't apocalyptic to them, certainly helped the Incan expansion. They also employed the very Russian / Soviet style policy of forced relocations and relocation of Incan settlers into newly conquered territories to import their culture and language to the new areas while diluting that of those conquered within the empire.

The closest category one might try to ascribe to "slaves" is the yanacona, aka those separated from their family groups. During times of high military conquest most were captured from invading areas, while during peacetime most came from the provinces as part of villages's service obligations to the state, or worked as yanacona to pay off debts or fines. These were people that did not continue to live in and farm their own villages, but rather worked at communes or on noble estates. But there really doesn't seem to be much relation beyond that and slavery. Yanacona could have high social status, even in some cases being basically lords themselves (generally those who were of noble descent) with significant power, though most were commoners. But life as a yanacona is probably best described on most cases as "people living on a commune". There was no public degradation for being a yanacona, no special marks of status, they couldn't be randomly abused or killed, there were no special punishments reserved for them, they had families just like everyone else, etc. Pretty much just workers assigned to a commune.

First off, it's simply not true that ancient wars had only two options, "genocide or slavery". Far more wars were ended with treaties, with the loser having to give up lands, possessions, pay tribute, or the like. Slaves were not some sort of inconvenience, "Oh, gee, I guess we have to do this". They were part of the war booty, incredibly valuable "possessions" to be claimed. Many times wars were launched with the specific purpose of capturing slaves.

Snyder argues that the fear of enslavement, such an ubiquitous part of the ancient era, was so profound as to be core to the creation of the state itself. An early state being an entity to which you give up some control of your life in order to gain the protection against outsiders taking more extreme control over your life. For example, a key aspect to the spread of Christianity in Europe was that Christians were forbidden to take other Christians as slaves, but they could still take pagans as slaves. States commonly converted to Christianity, not by firm belief of their leaders, but to stop being the victim of - and instead often be the perpetrator of - slave raids.

First slaving focused on the east, primarily pagan Slavic peoples. With the conversion of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, some slaving continued even further east into Asia, but a lot of it spread to the south - first into the Middle East and North Africa, but ultimately (first though intermediaries, and later, directly) into Central Africa. Soon in many countries "slaves" became synonymous with "Africans". Yet let's not forget where the very word "slave" itself comes from: the word "Slav".

While I do not expect that Plato would have known a better system than slavery and do not fault him for it

To put this properly in context, Plato himself was a slave.

Italy and Japan have shrinking populations. We would too, if it weren't for immigration. However our population growth rate is still low, and if it were any lower we'd be facing serious economic and social challenges. Sure, a shrinking population would drop housing prices, but we are far from having so many people there isn't space to fit them. Our real problem is seventy years of public policy aimed at the elimination of "slums" and the prevention of their reemergence.

If you think about it, "slum" is just a derogatory word for a neighborhood with a high concentration of very affordable housing. Basically policy has by design eliminated the most affordable tier of housing, which eliminates downward price pressure on higher tiers of housing. Today in my city a median studio apartment cost $2800; by the old 1/5 of income rule that means you'd need an income of $168k. Of course the rule now is 30% of income, so to afford a studio apartment you need "only" 112k of income. So essentially there is no affordable housing at all in the city, even for young middle class workers. There is, however a glut of *luxury* housing.

In a way, this is what we set out to accomplish: a city where the only concentrations of people allowed are wealthy people. We didn't really think it through; we acted as if poor to middle income people would just disappear. In reality two things happened. First they got pushed further and further into the suburbs, sparking backlash by residents concerned with property values. And a lot of people, even middle-class young people, end up in illegal off-the-book apartments in spaces like old warehouses and industrial spaces.

Not officially. In most places here, you need a permit to let rooms to 3 or more people in a single property. And when the permits are issued, they don't just take fire safety concerns into consideration, but also livability, impact on the block and the neighborhood, noise issues, available parking and so on. I don't think they get issued when tenants don't get their own room at least.

Solution: don't apply for the permit and just let the place. Works especially well if its your own workers you're housing, not an uncommon arrangement even if it's highly illegal.