Open weights are a waste of time. What is required is all the raw source data plus training schedules and scripts. That's what open source means.

An open weight model is like an mp4 movie. They give you a compressed datafile and tell you to run it in your favourite (movie) player software.

Don't worry, Bill Joy said that JavaSpaces lets you do computations at any time and in any place, ie without the usual limitations on space and time.

Wait, did you hear that? There's a rumbling sound in my living room, it's like a vworp vworp vworp! BRB.

Well none of them really ever where. The closest we had was pre franco spain in that brief moment when the anarchists actually where doing the "workers running the economy" thing that the marxists promise but innevitably turned into turned into the state running the economy instead. Which ironically got smashed first by the communist party which did NOT like the idea of workers doing a communism without them, and finally by Franco and his fascist goons.

Use your imagination more. If you want the circle to grow, turn it into a cylinder. Eventually, you could call it a silo, and pay for it by shooting a TV series in it :)

Microsoft can't figure out a way to market/sell this so they're resorting to astroturfing

Strange that they can't figure this out. Have they asked their AI how to solve this problem? I assume it's as simple as creating an AI to simulate an influencer, that can influence people to use AI more regularly. No brainer, really. Does Microsoft even have any interns left who could be tasked with this?

Your negativity is why you've never been, and never will be, truly rich. This setback is only a failure of imagination! Time to tap a billionaire with a lot of tariff earnings he doesn't know what to do with, this ship of the desert will right itself up in no time!

Why isn't there ever a hate button?

There is! Its up the top of the browser window, and looks like a little [x] in the tab next to the tab name

However, most people who ask that do it while pointing to people who are actually quite important producers, such as financiers. Be careful not to conflate "don't produce anything of value" with "do something I don't understand the importance of".

Of course there are people in every profession who get paid a lot more than they're worth. This is less true of manual labor jobs where the output is easy to see and measure, but it's true across the board. Even in manual labor jobs you can have people whose output is negative. They may pick X apples or whatever, but they might do it while making everyone around them work slower.

Just to complete the description of the "empty chair" tactic, this is why lawsuits typically name anyone and everyone who might possibly be blamed, including many who clearly aren't culpable. It's not because the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney actually thinks all of those extra targets really might be liable, it's so that the culpable parties can't try to shift the blame to an empty chair, forcing the plaintiff to explain why the empty chair isn't culpable (i.e., defend them). Of course this means that those clearly non-culpable parties might have to defend themselves, which sucks for them.

So... you didn't actually look at the size of WikiMedia Foundation's bank account.

WikiMedia absolutely has enough money to run Wikipedia indefinitely if they treated their current pile of money as an endowment and just used the income from it to support the site. They don't have "billions upon billions", but they do have almost $300M, and they spend about $3M per year on hosting, and probably about that much again on technical staff to run the site, so about $6M per year. That's 2% per year. Assuming they can get a 6% average return on their assets, they can fully fund Wikipedia forever, and then some.

So, what do they do with all of the donations instead, if the money isn't needed to run Wikipedia? It funds the foundation's grant programs. Of course, you might actually like their grant programs. I think some of their grants are great, myself, and if they were honest about what they're using it for I might be inclined to give. But they're not, and the fact that they continue lying to Wikipedia's user base really pisses me off, so I don't give and I strongly discourage everyone I can from giving, at every opportunity.

Me too, but it took a lot longer and I was a lot less thorough. I would skim a half-dozen links from the search result, the LLM reads a lot more, and a lot more thoroughly.

I do. I tell the LLM to always include links to its sources, and I check them. Not all of them, but enough to make sure the LLM is accurately representing them. Granted that other people might not do this, but those other people also wouldn't check more than the first hit from the search engine, which is basically the same problem. If you only read the top hit, you're trusting the search engine's ranking algorithm.

That seems like a potential risk. I have't actually seen that happening in any of the stuff I've looked at.

Nothing like giving people the runaround until they're exhausted...

HR often has an Orwellian aspect to their communication. They say things in a way that sounds like they are there to help you, but they are really there to gatekeep. Not everyone can have the salary, promotion, office, etc that they want, and HR is there to control those things, and minimize the company's legal problems in doing so. The double-speak and gatekeeping make them incredibly frustrating to deal with.

On top of that they also know a lot of private info, from salary to disciplinary actions to disputes they got involved in, so they're often in a position of quite a lot of leverage.

Adverts pay for the web. And also clutter it up. Both of these things are true. Without advertising, there would be very little content that isn't paywalled, and there would be far less content than there is. Slashdot wouldn't exist, for example. The key is to keep advertising sufficiently profitable that it can fund the web, but not so intrusive that it make the web awful.

How do we do that? The best idea I've seen is to use adblockers that selectively block the obnoxious ads. But not enough people do it, so that doesn't work either.

This. There seems to be a widespread assumption that random genetic changes are somehow less problematic than carefully-selected ones because they're "natural" or something. It's not like cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals, transcription errors and other sources of random genetic mutation are somehow careful not to make harmful changes. Engineered changes might not be better than random mutations, but they're clearly not worse.