Its less about torrents being the delivery mechanism and more about bringing data from a potentially unknown source, under potentially unknown licensing, and distributed for a potentially unknown reason into the corporate computing environment.
Torrents would be a perfectly valid way for Google to distribute this dataset, but the key difference would be that Google is providing it for this purpose and presumably didn't do anything underhanded to collect or generate it, and tells you explicitly how you're allowed to use it via the license.
That sort of legal and compliance homework is good practice for any business to some extent (don't use random p2p discoveries for sensitive business purposes), but is probably critical to remain employed in the sorts of giant enterprises where an internal security engineer needs to build a compelling case for spending money to upgrade an outdated protocol.
SQL injection is possible when input is interpreted as code. The protection - prepared statements - works by making it possible to interpret input as not-code, unconditionally, regardless of content.
Prompt injection is possible when input is interpreted as prompt. The protection would have to work by making it possible to interpret input as not-prompt, unconditionally, regardless of content. Currently LLMs don't have this capability - everything is a prompt to them, absolutely everything.
Yeah but everyone involved in the LLM space is encouraging you to just slurp all your data into these things uncritically. So the comparison to eval would be everyone telling you to just eval everything for 10x productivity gains, and then when you get exploited those same people turn around and say “obviously you shouldn’t be putting everything into eval, skill issue!”
Yes, because the upside is so high. Exploits are uncommon, at this stage, so until we see companies destroyed or many lives ruined, people will accept the risk.
C++ isn't always "unsafe-but-high-perf". Move semantics are a good example. The spec goes to great lengths to ensure safety in a huge number of scenarios, at the cost of performance. Mostly shows up in two ways: one, unnecessary destructor calls on moved out objects, and two, allowing throwing exceptions in move constructors which prevents most optimizations that would be enabled by having move constructors in the first place (there was an article here recently on this topic).
Another one is std::shared_ptr. It always uses atomic operations for reference counting and there's no way to disable that behavior or any alternative to use when you don't need thread safety. On the other hand, Rust has both non-atomic Rc and atomic Arc.
> one, unnecessary destructor calls on moved out objects
That issue predates move semantics by ages. The language always had very simple object life times, if you create Foo foo; it will call foo.~Foo() for you, even if you called ~Foo() before. Anything with more complex lifetimes either uses new or placement new behind the scenes.
> Another one is std::shared_ptr.
From what I understand shared_ptr doesn't care that much about performance because anyone using it to manage individual allocations already decided to take performance behind the shed to be shot, so they focused more on making it flexible.
C++11 totally could have started skipping destructors for moved out values only. They chose not to, and part of the reason was safety.
I don't agree with you about shared_ptr (it's very common to use it for a small number of large/collective allocations), but even if what you say is true, it's still a part of C++ that focuses on safety and ignores performance.
Bottom line - C++ isn't always "unsafe-but-high-perf".
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?
Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.
Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
You’re describing positive-sum outcomes in subjective preference space.
I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space.
Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time.
You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe.
It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite" is an unimaginative undergraduate-level position that adds nothing of substance to the discussion.
If you want to have a constructive conversation about pricing environmental externalities then by all means, but you need to drop this "I'm smarter than you" attitude if you want better reactions to your comments, especially if you're just going to aggressively post lukewarm takes and then insult people.
There's quite a lot of positive-sum energy the enters the environment from the giant nuclear reactor in the sky, which we have a few billion years lease on.
Money may be constant-sum but that doesn't mean what you can purchase with that money is constant, new markets emerge, others become more efficient. Many positive-sum systems are possible within a universe that is on-the-whole zero-sum.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite"
This is literally the position of the field of ecology and the field of cybernetics
I live day-to-day inside of that world because that is the real world
the fact that few others live live day-to-day inside the field of ecology and Cybernetics is precisely the problem I’m pointing out
the fact that you want to deny this means that you’re ignoring the intersectionality between climate change, social and structural dynamics, industrial production, financial production, Infrastructure and all this other stuff as though they are separate they are not separate
Is pure projection to say that it’s reductive for me to demand an accounting for all possible externalities in order to have a coherent system
I’m telling you to do 10 to 100 times more work in evaluating any of these actions structurally then is currently happening and you’re trying to induce that I’m collapsing the problem into some kind of single state variable and I’m saying no you need thousands of more variables to be tracking in your head at all time and on ledgers at all time then we currently do because all of these externalities have been dumped into the ocean and nto the atmosphere effectively
When the global food supply collapses and there’s blight and drought and famine because we overextended resource extraction without identifying the long-term effects of that literally no other argument is going to hold sway
Ah, so you indeed are doing the extremely reductionist view of economy that completely ignores services. And then calling capitalists wrong. While not even talking about the same subject as capitalists. This is lalala I can't hear you with extra steps.
I'm very open to a serious discussion. But only if it's actually serious. I don't consider reducing economy to thermodynamics to be serious.
Any statement about any economy is meaningless if you're ignoring services. Especially when discussing the totality of an economic system, such as the question whether capitalism is zero-sum. I am happy to hear actual arguments how the value of services always, necessarily, by definition comes at the cost of some environment somewhere. I'm not happy to hear arguments that dismiss existence of services entirely.
I was sure you were a troll yourself after that hole digging line. My bad.
The only reason people work is that they can have food so that their thermodynamic process of biology maintains consistent - if you do not account for this then you have not even begun to think about an economy
I have a degree in econometrics
that has nothing to do with reality
economists are totally completely capitulated to capitalism as a religion
there is no other possible thing that institutional economics talks about
so if your entire point is that you wanna stay within the frame of institutional economics then like I said there’s nothing else to be said here
If you really wanna go fully into this then you can read my paper that pulls all of it together:
I, unfortunately, do not have a degree in economics. I don't have the knowledge necessary to digest your whitepaper. It would be useless of me to read it (I tried). I'm sorry.
My objection to the thermodynamic argument is that it means that no value can ever possibly be gained from any action whatsoever, both at micro and macro scale. Life is pointless, nothing matters, etcetera etcetera. While undisputably true, it doesn't make for an interesting discussion.
Capitalist model, even if fundamentally wrong, at least makes it possible to talk about value and its changes. And even if it doesn't describe real world, it still describes some kind of world. Taken purely as a mathematical construct, the world of the capitalist economic model can be analyzed in terms of game theory. And at least when I do the analysis, it comes as non-zero-sum. Not only because of services, but also because of processed goods - even if thermodynamic balance is the same, some arrangement of atoms have more value than others, usually because of their utility (copper lumps vs. copper wires, for example).
Taking away parts of the model in order to show that it's zero sum isn't very convincing - what if it's only zero sum because you took away parts that make it non-zero-sum? A much more convincing argument would be to add to the model - accept what the economists say as is, but expand on how externalities are being ignored and that if you account for them, the sum does indeed end up zero.
Note that I'm not claiming capitalism is good. I'm only claiming that in game theory terms, it is not an example of a zero sum game. The only way it could possibly be true is if there was some inherent law that any . It's much easier for me to believe the world will be destroyed in 30 years due to capitalism than that the world being eventually destroyed is a mathematical consequence of zero-sumness of capitalism.
Not GP author. I'd like to continue the conversation though. However, be warned that my view is actually closer to reducing the economy to thermodynamics. I don't intend to overturn every single point you've made, but I hope this doesn't preclude a productive discussion.
> Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
I think it's very hard to fall back on services being positive-sum on a gross basis (i.e., 0 inputs, positive outputs) to justify that it is positive-sum on a net basis.
What kinds of services actually consume no resources? I could agree that, in isolation and on a marginal basis, a particular exchange of services for money might deplete a negligible amount of (physical) resources, but when you consider the operation of the entire industry (supposing a mature industry, i.e., that there is an industry to speak of), can it really be said that the entire industry consumes no resources? A prototypical counterexample is any service that relies on physical equipment: I would view that physical equipment always incurs wear and tear, and this is potentially substantial for sufficiently large industries. The wider umbrella here are all the other various externalities of the service.
(A good rebuttal to the physical equipment counterexample is actually where we've mastered the materials science well enough that, miraculously, the wear and tear outlasts the lifetime of anyone involved and hence where the equipment feels impervious to wear and tear... I resort to time horizons, which is another aspect of "scale". Something like GDP [growth] tries to normalise for time scales, but sadly I see this as falling prey to the same shortcomings as any kind of prediction activity.)
Personally, I consider it reductionist to try and measure every transaction with a currency value and then aggregate for a GDP. (The next key phrase in this train of thought is "Goodhart's law", which happily also gets addressed in the OP site [0].) However, I do also appreciate that this is a really fundamental paradigm in modern implementations of capitalism to attempt to uproot.
One way through which I can appreciate that capitalism is non-zero-sum is: across multiple different dimensions/axes/facets of measurement (currency value may be one of them), transactions incentivised by capitalism are not "zero" on all of them simultaneously. Under capitalism, it is that the transaction is positive by currency value which incentivises its own execution.
But there are lots of service industries where an undue focus on the currency value pushes us towards undesirable outcomes (necessarily on some axis besides currency value or GDP). For instance, some services are just innately incompatible with commercialisation. (Arts and culture comes to mind as one. Basic research is another.) When you attempt to offer/conduct these services under capitalism, you invariably need to moderate/regulate/limit the offering due to capital constraints. As in everything, moderation is sensible, so the next question is: are there enough people with enough influence thinking about whether we've gone too far? In a system where garnering influence is highly positively associated with accumulating capital, the answer seems self-fulfilling...
EDIT: I just realised that the "G" in "GDP" is "gross", for being gross of depreciation ("wear and tear"). This is a pretty big revelation for me, since it probably sheds some light on why I think GDP gets undue focus. Nevertheless, I think the principle of what I said above still stands.
There is a big difference between being zero-sum and the sum being zero. A zero-sum game cannot end with any other outcome but the sum of zero. Non-zero-sum games can end with the sum of zero but can also end with other sums. This last part is what makes capitalism not zero-sum, even if in practice the sum is zero (which it isn't but that's a separate point).
I focused on zero-resources-needed services because they're the easiest example. They don't make much of the overall economy, but they do exist - tutoring, standup comedy, basic massage to name a few. Because no resources are used, you don't have to quantify the value to prove the sum is positive, you just need to prove the service isn't completely pointless. A proof for services that do use resources is also possible, but far more complicated and requires quantification of value, which is always a very contentious topic in and of itself. Like, you already contended it before I even invoked this concept, that's how contentious it is.
Externalities exist, sure. And are often omitted in pro-capitalism arguments, sure. But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.
I only brought up GDP to highlight that services are a big part of modern economy, so any model of economy that assigns no value to services is a wrong model, because it will not match the actual flow of money within a real world economy. I strongly believe models ought to be useful.
May I ask what your impression of "the sum" is? Namely, what is "the sum of a game" to you? The question may sound slightly opaque (and, sure, maybe even pedantic), but here are examples of some aspects I am trying to garner:
• Do you see it as a single number (e.g., representable by a single floating-point value)? If not, how alike to a number is it? To what degrees does it lend itself to ordering (higher/lower/equal) and aggregation?
• Do you think the concept of "the sum" has a consensus interpretation (consensus across people, say)? For a particular game, do you think its sum has a consensus determination?
I'm less settled on precisely those aspects, and I think they tend to mask aspects that are worth clarifying/examining. Please do not see this as my claim that my stance is absolutely the only valid one. However, without a unified stance on these aspects, it feels hard to contribute further to the discussion.
My contention is that "a game" cannot be condensed down to a single number. (More specifically, I think that it should only be done so in a way that is unequivocally universal and objective. If this doesn't exist, any discussion should begin on more general premises, rather than the premise that a game can be condensed down to a single number.) From the perspective of evaluating whether capitalism installs incentives that result in a better world, I view it as overly simplistic to think about "a sum" and then consider whether that sum is zero/nonzero/positive/negative.
Of course, these are models, and I judge the merits of a model based on its ability to be useful. But here I really consider that such a simplistic model is a hindrance. I don't mean hindrance in the sense that it necessarily results in poor decisions being made (partially because the model seems to come with an intrinsic notion of "poor"). It's a hindrance in that it seems too ubiquitously adopted, to the extent that discussions on the alternative are hard to initiate/sustain/come by.
As a result, I think there is a lot more elaboration needed before landing on this dichotomy:
> But to argue that externalities make capitalism zero-sum is to argue externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions. Which is even harder to prove than the already dubious argument that externalities are larger than the value of capitalism.
Namely, I don't readily see that there is a dichotomy in the form of either (1) "externalities always exactly match whatever value was gained by capitalist transactions" or (2) "externalities are larger than the value of capitalism". The dichotomy doesn't easily stand to me because it seems attached to an oversimplified way to compare outcomes/merits of a game ("exactly match whatever value", "larger than the value of").
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation
Windows used to be half operating system, half preconfigured compatibility tweaks for all kinds of applications. That's how it kept its backwards compatibility.
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