I, too, am curious if there’s an advertising bubble. I hope so.

I’ve noticed something about my wife, though. She’s not a “mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff”, but she does pay attention to advertising a lot. We need more diapers? Well, it just so happens there’s some new startup app that’s advertising a free first month, so if she signs up for that up, we could get free diapers, and we’d only have to keep the membership for another two months, and they have deals on peanut butter, and we’d get access to their free streaming service and they have Disney, so it’s probably worth it overall.

And so it goes, with a million of these deals. The thing is, each “deal” is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to know which ones we’re actually saving money on. The cynical would say “you’re never saving money: everything’s rigged”, but that’s clearly not true. Some of these deals clearly do work out for us (and some of them cause the startup to immediately go bankrupt). But most of them aren’t clearly better or worse for us: we’d have to spend several hours going through hypothetical scenarios to do the full CBA, which we don’t do.

I do wonder, on balance, how much it’s costing us. I also wonder how many of these deals are specifically (personally) targeted at my wife because they know what she needs and what her habits are.

Article reads as propaganda

More like advertising. I’d put down a pretty big bet that Life360 sponsored this article and probably wrote a fair chunk of the copy, too.

Not quite. By the most common definitions, they’re born between 1997 and 2012, so 10-26.

It’s come up in interesting cases. I can’t remember which package it was, but there was one package that was distributed under the humourous “Don’t Be Evil License”, where you could “use this software for anything that’s not evil” or something like that. This technically does not qualify as free software (freedom 0 must allow anyone to use it for evil), so Red Hat (I think it was?) had to get their lawyers to contact the developer and get him to give them an exemption to the licence, just in case one of their users used it for evil.

Indeed. Licensing usage of something is antithetical to free software culture anyway. It would violate the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero, that you should never have to accept a licence to use something. (This is why free software cannot ever have a EULA, for instance)

There are a few projects here and there that do it, like this one (haven’t tried it). Generally if you find projects online like that, they’re generally written for the purposes of a particular academic paper and might not work very well for the general case, but the worst you can do is try it out.

The “random ass websites” you find that do a good job of it probably have put more work into training a good general-purpose model. If you want, you could try doing that yourself, but it would require a fair bit of work.

If it helps you to visualize, one somewhat common/popular form of personal knowledgment management is a wiki. Like Wikipedia, except it’s personal (or for a small team). You can keep track of references and also make notes about things, but it’s also about connecting ideas together. Just like on Wikipedia, you can have a page about, let’s say LLMs, which includes all the software and approaches you’ve tried, results, sample snippets, references to repos, but as you’re writing about what you’ve tried and what worked, you might also have links to other wiki pages, like programming languages, build tools, test tools, etc. As you document more and build more knowledge, your articles all get meshed together in one well-organized network. Ideally it should be easy to navigate if you come back to a technology later and need to get back up to speed.

I have a similar kind of idea. I think if it had been a free/open source/community project that made the headlines I would have been all like “this is so awesome”.

I guess what I don’t like is the economic system that makes that impractical. In order to build one of those giant GPTs, you need tonnes of hardware (capital), so the community projects are always going to be playing catchup, and I think quite serious catchup in this arena. So the economic system requires that instead of our posts going to a “collective hive mind” that aid human knowledge, they go to some walled garden owned by OpenAI, which filters and controls it for us, and gives us little bits of access to our own data, as long as we used it only in approved ways (i.e., ways that benefit them).