I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one?
The other things you state are not even close.
First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.
Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.
If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.
As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".
So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.
My bad for "massive starvation", that's clearly a mistake, I meant to write something along the lines of "massive unemployment – and sometimes starvation". Sadly, too late to amend.
Now, I'll admit that I don't have my statistics at hand. I quoted them from memory from, if I recall correctly, _Good Economics for Hard Times_. I'm nearly certain about the ~40 years, but it's entirely possible that I confused several parts of the industrial revolution. I'll double-check when I have an opportunity.
That article leaves out a lot of result that should have been cited, but they run counter to his narrative and would make the story sell less.
The last big CBO analysis on results of min wage does a better job summarizing all the literature. They also made a nice tool to visualize results https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55681
The results are pretty much what one should expect.
The amount of effort this team took, literally co-opting AMD engineers, and working for 5 months, to get closer but not yet usable, means they are not even close to usable. What team wanting to do ML training/inference can afford so much down time for zero benefit? How many except a few big ones can get AMD to devote so many resources simply for that team?
And, if you’re training a model costing you millions, the last thing you need is a buggy, untested stack, breaking training or perhaps worse giving you noise that makes your models perform worse or increases training time.
By the time AMD gets usable out of the box at this point, NVidia will have moved further ahead.
It sure doesn’t sound done. It’s a one off hacked set of scripts tied to incompatible chunks of a ton of libraries. What happens when you want or need other parts of the PyTorch/billion libs ecosystem? You’re gonna get more AMD engineers and waste 5 months getting those to work?
Meanwhile those libs release running CUDA on NVidia’s old and newest releases out of the box.
So no, it cannot be reused by others in production any more than my custom hacked car engine mod can be added by Ford to every car in existence.
Have you done any deep professional production work on any of these stacks? I have, and would never, ever put stuff like the stuff in the article in production. It’s no where near ready for production use.
If your scaling requires you to ignore some laws and regulations, maybe your scaling is just a wet dream that should not become reality, and still attempting it should be punished. It's just the cost of doing business.
Meta net profit 2023 was $40B. Revenue is not profit.
AT&T has 100M customers, 40k customer service reps, avg wage $20/hr full time, i.e., $40k/year each.
If you simply scale this 5B customers would need 2M customer service reps. That’s $80B in wages. With no legal need, and since people use their services more by choice more than just about any other company’s product on the planet, it would seem they’re doing just fine.
Nonsense. It's (moderately) expensive, it's a cost. It's far from impossible, the proof of that being that huge companies did and do provide customer support.
Big tech loves "stripping unnecessary fluff" and "being efficient". Turns out the "unnecessary" stuff is there for a reason. The automatic management + zero customer support is dystopian to say the least.
That's a consequence of growth they should have thought of and a basic part of running any business.
At least in the US Attorneys General are being forced to do this work for them. It's essentially the only way to get a hacked Facebook/Instagram account recovered.
No, attny generals chase things that raise their political stature. They’re political. Every single one of the 50 are dem or republican: 0 independent.
They’ll make noise about this because it riles a loud minority. If they really wanted it fixed then pass laws. They don’t, because they also like business.
That’s not true. There’s been laws in many jurisdictions, including the US, applying to online forums, since before the internet even existed.
The famed section 230, passed in 1996, is an update to a section of the 1934 Communications Act, which is but one set of laws regulating many aspects of forums. Lawsuits in the early 90s led Congress to modify, but not abolish, the stack of laws regarding all communications technology.
Now that you know but 2 of the many laws affecting online forums, you can dig up plenty more yourself.
And 335,000,000 people in the US. Seems reasonable.
Plenty of jobs employ around that number: house maids, bookkeepers, groundskeepers, and a host of professions the average person rarely or never employs.
I suspect many of them may wonder why we have twice as many programmers :)
Couldn't the same argument be made for all kinds of things companies have made open? Some examples:
• Tesla gave away its EV patents.
• Pixar and DreamWorks have both open-sourced some of their tools, including tools used to make some of their best works. For example DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used on everything they have done since "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World", including "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" and "The Wild Robot", and will be used on their upcoming films.
Yes, it can. But my reply is to the person I directly responded to that claimed these tools are for meta product benefit, but ignored that same argument applies to competitors.
A better answer is meta releases them for some combination of they see it benefitting the business and/or a desire to provide broad benefits to everyone. They certainly expend tremendous resources to create these models. No other company has provided this much value to such a large base of users in this space.
this is like saying that AMD making chips that intel/nvidia employees can buy and use to do their jobs is a bad strategy for AMD. lol. ok not every single strategic choice needs to both grow the top line and be anti-competitive. some can just grow the top line.
The other things you state are not even close.
First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.
Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.
If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.
As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".
So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement....
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511
[3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719
reply