Some part of me feels like (and hopes?) this could create a golden era for tech in the EU. Competing operating systems, productivity software, SaaS solutions. If I had any say in the EU right now, I'd look at ways to increase visa access for disaffected tech workers looking to leave the US turmoil.
If you have a job offer for 50k and a university degree you can get an EU "blue card". Went through the process and it's pretty easy, I don't think this visa is a big issue for tech workers
> If I had any say in the EU right now, I'd look at ways to increase visa access for disaffected tech workers looking to leave the US turmoil.
We're lacking VC funding, not skilled tech workers. Increasing visas for tech workers without increasing the funding just lowers wages which are already low.
That might be true, I wouldn't know -- but I do know a lot of EU countries have visas for skills shortages and software is listed among those skills. I assumed that meant there's an opportunity to expand and expedite access if the need was more imminent.
Just because companies say they have skilled shortage doesn't make it true. They're mostly just picky and want to put pressure on wages. I also have a Ferrari shortage, so we need to make more Ferraris.
Plus, EU visas are basically just rubber stamps anyway compared to how hard getting an H1B is.
Actually here's another unused pressure point, the EU can retaliate by making it as difficult for Americans to work in the EU as it is for EU citizens to work in the US. Why isn't it already reciprocal?
>I wonder how Hideo Miyazaki feels about this, the fact that machines are able to recreate his style seems to go against the whimsy he creates in his art.
People thought "canned music" (aka prerecorded music) would be the death of music, and art in general
>The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
It kinda was the death of music - reasonably-skilled musicians used to make money performing live, and now they can't. The market got eaten up by recordings of really good artists, who, ironically, treat music more as industry than art.
That is the fundamental problem with trying to project property rights onto ideas. Capitalism works fine for distributing scarce goods and resources, but information and software are both public goods.
In a reasonable world, we would be imposing high taxes on all LLMs and using that money to fund grants for future writers and artists. It would be good for the LLM makers in the long run, since it would give them more fuel for their models, and it would be good for the artists and writers because it would provide sustainable, reliable wages.
Unfortunately, that isn't the world we live in. LLM makers don't seem to care about the impact they will have on society or even their own livelihoods, as long as they get rich today. And in addition to all the regulatory capture, we are having our governments gutted on the mere fear that they might do their job and prevent the wholesale looting of society by these new robber-barons.
So with the economically-optimal approaches off the table, we have to fall back on imposing false scarcity in the hopes that maybe capitalism can limp along.
Anti-Trust laws are a little different though. It's specifically about bringing giant corps down a peg, and has been used multiple times against companies that otherwise skirt the law quite a bit.
Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were above the law, for good reason, but they were all still broken.
in my experience, if you can't explain something to someone else then you don't fully understand it
our brains like to jump over inconsistencies or small gaps in our logic when working by themselves, but try to explain that same concept to someone else and those inconsistencies and gaps become glaringly obvious (doubly so if the other person starts asking questions you never considered)
it's why pair programming and rubber duck debugging work at all, at least in my opinion
So you should never build anything new? We should not use AI either, nobody truly understands how it works currently, it should not even have been built!
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