The reality is, unless youre working on something that is actually revolutionary and positively going to impact humanity (which is rare I know) - who cares? Many people get wrapped up in their identity for work and its pretty sad. Little do they realise, they play straight into the hands of those who want them to be a productive asset and nothing more.
Most governments aren't decentralized in their structure, which causes the "problem". If you have private entities that coordinate with each other it works quite well, but the world is very used to big centralized governments that "solve" all their problems.
It's a pretty direct response to your claim that "decentralisation sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice". Decentralization has worked in practice many times in many ways.
Also, you can have reputability AND decentralization, that's actually a fundamental component of how any Blockchain system works. When you mine a block you sign it to ensure nobody else can resubmit your work and take credit.
Crime is pretty heavily regulated on the Internet, has been for years. If that regulation had been impossible, it would not have been allowed to grow, and would have been shut down / banned.
The internet for the average person has converged to a handful of products and services.
Your point being?
People prefer centralised stuff since it takes care a lot of stuff for them. They dont actually care all that much about technology that yield decentralised outcomes. I know that may be difficult for many here to comperehend.
> people move to the next thing, thanks to the decentralization
This does not quite follow. Care to explain more? What I observe in practice is that people move from one centralized service to the next centralized service (e.g., X->BlueSky) but rarely from centralized to decentralized.
Most services aren't decentralized, but the Internet itself is decentralized, which allows to set up these independent services that can compete with each other.
It's been terrible that BitTorrent doesn't work anymore. I can only download 10TB of all the movies and TV shows our family has ever wanted spanning 60 years. It has to run off this massive server in the closest as big as our cat! Sucks our grandma can't access it from across the country via Tailscale and a bit of DNS abuse.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. Obviously Bitcoin doesn't "work" for any purpose. But in contrast, Tor obviously works. Here are constantly updating HTTP response dumps from the Tor hidden service ecosystem: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ (NSFW) There is a lot happening inside the Tor network.
Yeah I think Thiel's fundamental basis for his investment in FB was not that it would generate a tonne of revenues from Ads - but rather - it could become a large scale surveillance tool. Which benefits his interests (it seems).
"This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors."
This sounds like an expensive solution to a marketing problem re. the product. And if one digs even further, perhaps an issue with your product line - the benefits of it aren't immediately presentable in a simplified way to the extent it is differentiated relative to the competitors.
So many things, once you start looking. However, most of the critics seem to focus on what it can't do currently, which seems to turn off their brains to the possibilities.
Just look at what Cursor (and similar) have done in terms of the tooling for LLMs. There's still tons of progress to be made there, but similar tooling can happen across a variety of industries and categories.
For example, I run a database of information that needs constant updating. I set up automated fact checking (with a human looped in), that enables nearly live updates, which would be incredibly expensive without an LLM. There are so many projects, big and small, just like that one, that are being created right now. The low hanging fruit is extremely abundant, for those who are able and willing to find it.
I'm using LLM tools to do quite a lot of things, and am very happy with the results in my business. So yeah, I am indeed running my own firm and profiting from this opportunity.
There's a point at which you need to actually specifically refer to what low-hanging fruit there is, "trust me bro" and "do your own research" shows you either don't know or don't have conviction in what you're saying
Was this not specific enough, from my previous comment?
> For example, I run a database of information that needs constant updating. I set up automated fact checking (with a human looped in), that enables nearly live updates, which would be incredibly expensive without an LLM. There are so many projects, big and small, just like that one, that are being created right now.
And you just described exactly why firms are going to be hurt in the long run by what is happening.
Short run? Sure shipping seems to accelerate. But as you mentioned - you are actually downtooling and optimising for what you do outside of work. Which is what labour always does. But now you have a tool to enhance it!
"IMO, this is the whole point of the article: AI tools "help" a lot when we are completely uninformed. But in doing that, they prevent us from getting informed in the first place. Which is counter-productive in the long term."
Great way of framing it - simple and cuts straight to the heart of the issue.
The reality is, unless youre working on something that is actually revolutionary and positively going to impact humanity (which is rare I know) - who cares? Many people get wrapped up in their identity for work and its pretty sad. Little do they realise, they play straight into the hands of those who want them to be a productive asset and nothing more.