QM and GR can be written as matrix algebra, atoms and electrons are QM, chemistry is atoms and electrons, biology is chemistry, brains are biology.
An LLM could be implemented with a Markov chain, but the naïve matrix is ((vocab size)^(context length))^2, which is far too big to fit in this universe.
Like, the Bekenstein bound means writing the transition matrix for an LLM with just 4k context (and 50k vocabulary) at just one bit resolution, the first row (out of a bit more than 10^18795 rows) ends up with a black hole >10^9800 times larger than the observable universe.
Yes, sure enough, but brains are not ideas, and there is no empirical or theoretical model for ideas in terms of brain states. The idea of unified science all stemming from a single ultimate cause is beautiful, but it is not how science works in practice, nor is it supported by scientific theories today. Case in point: QM models do not explain the behavior of larger things, and there is no model which gives a method to transform from quantum to massive states.
The case for brain states and ideas is similar to QM and massive objects. While certain metaphysical presuppositions might hold that everything must be physical and describable by models for physical things, science, which should eschew metaphysical assumptions, has not shown that to be the case.
Naming schemes in consumer marketing serve a function. They are easily identifiable, unique, and memorable. All of these properties serve to identify the thing by associating a unique name with a unique set of services/function/effects on use.
Medical and chemical terminology is built on the history of latinate terms and compounds whose simples follow the same pattern. Latinate terms, I might add, which reference mythical, fantastical, or unusual things. Consider the planet Mercury, for example. The only difference? The centuries of time it took for scientific evolution to turn these unique names into a taxonomical language with its own logic.
There is no such taxonomy for computer science. But in the course of the evolution of such a taxonomy, it will be built out of the mess of names like the ones we like to use for our programs and tools like Rust, Ocaml (notice combination of interesting and technical), git, npm, bun, ada, scipy, etc etc.
That says nothing about this particular situation. Written language has been a thing for 5,000 years, and it's used for this bid, so nothing remarkable here ...
I guess the OP is just making an unrelated comment, because it almost sounds like he thinks that a hostile bid is evidence that the US has Ukraine-levels of corruption. Leaving aside the odd time period (Ukraine was much less corrupt pre-war than it was pre-Maidan, not to speak of its other more corrupt neighbor), the fact that hostile bids have been around for a long time in the US is good evidence to suggest that they don't indicate the level of corruption implied by OP. If OP made the same comment under a post about verb conjugation, wouldn't that seem odd to you too?
Or maybe they just happened to make an off-topic comment that had nothing to do with the hostile takeover.
Before even railroads, the original manufactory boom that is commonly associated with the industrial revolution is the exact kind of case the other poster is alluding to when thinking of large economies of scale. I think Kolko is great to demonstrate that economies of scale aren't infinite, and in the absense of government intervention, market forces actively conspire to ensure firms shrink to their optimal size. But that also proves the flip side: firms will grow to their optimal size too. There is no economic reason to be suspicious of large firm sizes, and the political reasons inevitably hinge on some sort of mistaken assumption of the economics of the matter; anti-trust regulations advocacy is a perfect example of this.
Kolko talks about that in the context of scaling social/charitable solutions.[1]
There's a cite to Marshall, who talks about it in an industrial context.[2] But Marshall wrote in the days before computers and the Internet. There was a time when big companies had enormous clerical plants and corporate headquarters operations. Some paperwork and management operations scale O(N log N) or even O(N^2). At some point, corporate overhead became too large.
But we got past that. Walmart, Amazon, Samsung, McDonalds, Starbucks, Foxconn, and BYD all have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of employees, but don't seem to be hitting scaling limits. There may be an optimal size limit, but it's above planetary scale now.
Computers have made this possible.
This leads to monopoly or oligopoly being reached before any natural limit to growth appears.
I am not convinced it is above planetary scale, nor that these are monopolies. For one thing, all the companies you named have competitors, and no company has a distribution center or restaurant in the arctic. There are plenty of other more populated areas that those companies do not serve. Administrative work still requires overhead, and the internet does not remove that burden, otherwise companies wouldn't be scrambling to invest in AI which they expect to reduce this overhead. AI wont entirely remove the administrative overhead either; there are hard economic limits to the efficiency of a bureaucracy.
But more to the point, consider what you're saying. Is the world, viz-a-viz these companies/services that you refer to, worse off than before the internet? Obviously not. In fact, it is substantially better, because higher economies of scale mean mass production for mass consumption. There would be no way you and I could converse this way on our phones without the hyper extensive scaling of production caused by capitalism. This calls into question the concern over scaling. Large scaling and less firms is preferable when they perform a social function.
If co-ops were replaced by big business, this is something everyone should be grateful for. To go back to the industrial revolution example, there were a form of early mutualist co-op that dominated the non-farm market in the pre-capitalist era: the guilds. And the guilds had a stranglehold on handicrafts, apprenticeships, and all manner of specialized production. In order to increase guild profits, the guilds, through their noble patrons, regulated and limited production of all kinds, who was allowed to sell their craft, and all while being worker-owned. And yet these guilds were the true monopoly: they used legal privileges granted through lobbying to the kings to limit production and raise prices. Their products were exclusively for the wealthy and privileged. On the other hand, it was the capitalists that found a loophole in this system that condemned people to poverty and starvation: the mass production with unskilled labor by manufactories. And, through the manufactory system, they smashed the guilds, producing tons of goods for the everyday man, contributing greatly to the prosperity over and above the medieval system that we see today.
If by capitalism you mean whatever is happening right now, then there is a mix of different things going on.
There is the system of private enterprise governes by capitalist accounting methods which is driven by the action and exchange of people acting to fulill their needs. This is like a functioning organism whose organs act autonomously, and in doing so affirm the life of the organism itself.
There is then the system of hegemony and bureaucracy which is organized by rules, dictates, and orders. It is like an organization, a machine whose parts operate according to a will, and function only so far as the will of the organizer operationalizes them into the pattern that fulfills the organizer's ends.
A natural, organic system can survive only as it functions in the matter of the former. When it functions in the matter of the latter, it dies with the failure of the organizing force which binds the parts. Society is an organism, not an organization. It is as senseless to organize society as it is to tear a plant to bits and make a flower out of the pieces. I should hope that we figure this out sooner rather than later before we smother society and its people with endless bureaucracy and regulation.
Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.
Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms.
The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics.
The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.
When they find out that it is not, in fact, an infinite money glitch, they're going to have to eat that cost. It will work out great for everyone as long as they aren't bailed out.
It's more like a waste-infinite-money glitch, if that's what they're trying. There's no way that a simple speculative attack actually makes DRAM more valuable in the long term on its own, and that's the only win condition for that kind of play. People have tried to hoard all sorts of commodities as a mere speculative play on the market, and it never works.
There is nothing suspicious or abnormal about this behavior. It is called competition. Ironically, trying to prevent this kind of behavior prevents competitiob, and is a key factor for causing monopolization
It depends... if OpenAI bought the DRAM in order to use it, then fair play to them.
If they bought the DRAM in order to stop their competitors from using it because they are falling behind, that's anticompetitive in spirit, though I'm not sure if it actually breaks any laws.
Knowingly attempting to buy or sell in quantities likely to move markets, for direct profit, is called manipulation and is most definitely illegal. this is true in physical markets commodity markets and financial markets. Not saying that this is what openAI is doing but it definitely merits an investigation.
All quantities bought or sold on the margin will move the market. Whether it moves the market is not up to the buyer or seller; it is up to other buyers and sellers who react to that transaction and adjust their expectations. This is normal market dynamics, dynamics we should want to happen because markets adjusting to movements of big players performs a social function; you and I need to know how large movenents of resources affects our livelihoods, and this is how that can happen.
There is no reason to pathologize or find suspicious these normal economic facts. Especially when it is not within the power of a big player to choose how other people react to their actions, which is all "moving markets" is. If something is suspicious and illegal about that, then it is equally suspicious that you and I seem to go along with this "market movement" by these big players and pay the new prices. Are we colluding with them? We could do with less conspiracy-minded interpretations of these things.
market economics are like newtonian mechanics. It's all so wonderful and logical and even elegant, until the dimensions expand a few orders of magnitude, and then all the rules break. Having worked on a trading floor for 20 years I know how this works. Swamping a market with huge trades is definitely considered manipulation by essentially all authorities, and indeed is a form of monopoly power, which even economic theorists will agree is undesirable. Jane Street just got a mega fine for exactly this in India, btw.
I can't get over the confident dismissal of science by hand-waving about imperfect modelling. But what I said has nothing to do with that, and is more true to the real world than an idealized perfect competition model. Pathologizing normal trading behavior like this is more the result laymen and authorities misinterpreting bad economic modelling. So I recommend you take some of your own medicine and look at the mirror. Maybe a trade affecting the market isn't so suspicious as you make it out to be, because the perfect competition model you're using to make accusations of monopoly simply doesn't make sense. Again, if there is something wrong with affecting the market, then you or I are just as liable for our consciously self-interested behavior of choosing higher-quality, lower-priced products.
Every normal market interaction could be described by scary monopoly-sounding words. You heard about you're friend's salary in the same industry, and ask for a higher salary next time you negotiate. You're colluding with your friend to price gouge your employer!
In reality, so-called collusion is normal and unobjectionable. But when price surges happen, often due to factors outside of the seller's immediate control, people look for any reason to find an ethical dimension and find how to place blame, because this is more convenient. Things that were normal become abnormal and suspicious. It is in consumers economic self-interest to act in this way, because it often secures favors to them from various economic policies that they don't normally get when the market is "normal". This is no less a form of collusion than what sellers might do to secure their economic advantage. But a key difference for these anti "gouging" policies is that it gives consumers a special privilege and makes market pricing less able to fulfill its social functions.
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