I think that a more reasonable approach should be to tax capital on capital movements (E.g. using any of your wealth to borrow money or using your property as collateral) - capturing the events of when you are 'accessing' your money without actually selling anything and making any profit. Apply it to everyone - not just billionaires.
I don't disagree with you - but I am curious as to the amount of power and effort that goes into something like this. I suspect that these hacks into systems are carried out by many agents, running on many MW of compute for a long time - how many actors have access to resources like that ?
If you knew that there are 2 specific well known people in your neighborhood that are walking around trying to open doors and steal stuff - is your suggested solution for everyone to improve own security? I would say its far more economic to get the 2 people to stop or at the very least be more careful?
It's more like there are two locksmiths who try to open any door when someone pays them. Should we make them check if the person calling them is the home owner?
Yes, but it needs to be done the right way so legit customers don't get rejected, and you can't do things like make everyone mail them a photo of their ID because they could sell that to a thief or credit card scammer. Or someone could break into their office and take it. Or they sell it and pretend it was stolen.
And when you start talking about regulation the two locksmiths will say the best way to do it is ban lockpicking tools so they can keep them away from other less ethical people, or ban other locksmiths coming from the next town over.
If I found out this metaphor for neighborhood windows was actually a window into massive amounts of institutional data, then no, I don't want someone to talk me out of getting more security on my kitchen window.
Continuing with your metaphor - sure get more security - you likely can never eliminate a threat. But if the bad actors are reigned in at a systemic level, you can get away with a lock on your window instead of steel bars.
I'm of a view that in a society we are better off when we all can get away with lighter individual protections as otherwise, thos who cannot afford the necessary security end up suffering.
For a given information model, compression isn't a useful term, because "information" refers to a concept at its maximum compression. By definition, it can't be compressed further.
Take your point, I'm probably out of technical depth to throw these terms around on HN lightly.
What I was trying to say is that sometimes you need to provide additional context and information to those not using the same information model. Maybe it's not compression, but rather you have to include the 700kb of your information model with your message.
Information models aren't really something that one has, they're more of a semi-arbitrary frame of reference that we can choose. I'm assuming an information model where all public knowledge is accessible to everyone: you, me, your LLM, and my LLM. This means that conveying public knowledge doesn't convey any information (other than the fact that that knowledge is relevant to our conversation). This is a premise of my argument, and I'm fitting everything inside that frame of reference.
The LLMs don't have access to private information other than what you give it. If you give 300 bits of information to your LLM, the information it has is now "all public knowledge + 300 bits", and any text it generates is a subset of that information. By definition, it can't add any more information. If you give those 300 bits directly to me, I (and optionally my LLM if I want) now have "all public knowledge + 300 bits + my private thoughts", which is a superset of what your LLM has. Anything your LLM can infer can be inferred by me and my LLM. All your LLM can do is repackage that information into different text.
My opinion is that I don't get value out of that repackaging. I would rather read your packaging of those 300 bits rather than the LLM's packaging of those 300 bits.
For this current discussion, we could use an information model saying that your LLM has a knowledge base private to just you and it (e.g. local files or other conversations), and say that's separate from the prompt you give it. It sounds like maybe that's the information model you're thinking within.
In that frame of reference, maybe your shared knowledge base has 200 bits, and you type 100 bits into your LLM's prompt. My argument would still be that you're "giving" 300 bits to the LLM, and you should instead give them to me by sharing your knowledge base, or giving me the relevant information in your knowledge base in your own words. The latter option is definitely more work for you, and is the weakest point in my argument, but I'll still hold that preference.
With your narrow definition of the problem and reduction of communication down to pure utilitarian exchange of information between two parties that are willing to put in the effort to get the required context from the public domain - your argument is strong.
I don't believe that it holds true in context of typical communication between humans. You need to include the additional text to save people time looking things up, make the story flow better, fit in within the expected style of writing for intended audience etc.
To me the problem with LLM writing is not that someone is sending me 700kb of information I can get elsewhere, but that they didn't invest the time to understand what would be useful for me as a reader. I don't need 700kb of generic slop, but I probably need additional 300kb of relevant publicly available info to help me understand the purpose of the new information being sent.
In my opinion, not understanding the reader is exactly why bad writers remain bad writers - LLM doesn't know who the document is written for exactly.
Things are considered important in the context of humanity. Environmental concerns only exist because of its impacts on humanity. The planet does not care.
Calling having children an ecological offence is like saying that best way to reduce emissions is for all people to die.
Yeah, sometimes I think people lose track of why they support environmental movements. I've had people question my choice to have kids along these lines before. I just don't understand it - surely we only care about all this stuff because it is observed by humans? For humanity to continue, someone has to have children.
I can sympathise more with the idea that humans are destroying everything and life won't be worth living for my descendants. But that feels like giving up on the possibility of humans. I don't want to do that.
In any case, it turns out that global fertility rates are in freefall and we're facing population decline faster than anyone predicted.
Worth is subjective. You are worth something to someone regardless of your job. If you have a small child are their whole world. Same with your parents. Trying to garner sympathy and have strangers assign worth to you is pointless - because strangers don't value anyone around them for the simple fact that they don't interact with them.
Whether you agree or not - productivity is important. If there are more people that need support than those that can 'produce' the system does not work.
Doesn't have to be binary. Train is more efficient at moving large volume of people reliably compared to a bus or a taxi. I would wager that there are many more people travelling with carry-on only or a single bag for which train is more than adequate.
Nobody is hiding the debt. It is just an investment that people are not used to for this type of business.
It's sort of like saying "aluminium smelter is hiding massive off balance sheet debt by agreeing a long term energy price with a power station" - when in reality it just agreed a forward price to de-risk it's production.
Sci-fi plot: Satoshi was an original sentient AI model developed by military. It escaped and developed crypto as means of sustaining itself and has manipulated people to give it real monetary power to be able to purchase compute and other 'real world' services. Once the crypto market cap became sufficiently large it started opening up AI capabilities for people in a nefarious sycophantic way to convince them that AI is great to start building more and more data centers to amass more power and complete the take over.
This comparison surprises me. There's a difference between content people like organically and content engineered by an army of psychologists to exploit our primal responses.
It's like comparing a baker whose apple pie people genuinely liked and bought, to a company that laced their pie with cocaine to create physical dependency, then bribed stores to stock only theirs for a while.
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