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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#531

Post by grues-dinner »

Tomis02 wrote: post #517
grues-dinner wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.

> Kicking kids out to play There's cars everywhere, cities are optimised for them. There's nowhere to kick the kids out to play without the risk of them being run over by a car.

Not only that but also farmland is heavily industrialised. It's not Farmer Jenkins on a horse or a 1800cc Ferguson tractor any more.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#532

Post by fragmede »

cs702 wrote: post #70
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable. However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention: * Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F * TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single…

> Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations

Not to detract from your point, but Waymo's happen to use electric iPace Jaguar cars in several cities that they serve, but their original self driving taxi service used gasoline minivans at beginning in Phoenix, AZ. EV vs ICE is orthogonal to Waymo's self-driving car technology. Waymo was a pure R&D self driving project for 15 or so years that Google/Alphabet dumped insane amounts of money into before a car ride was ever sold to the public. The are a few competitors to Waymo, at various stages, so market forces likely still would have resulted in self driving car technology eventually arriving, but as its competitors are also well funded, so it seems like it still takes a large org to turn university prototypes into a real live product.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#533

Post by chaseadam17 »

saberience wrote: post #502
chaseadam17 wrote: post #176

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans. * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not con…

Surely the interest rates on 1000 100k loans are going to cumulatively exceed the interest on a single 100M loan by a significant amount. Those 1000 loans are going to result in millions more interest per year than a single 100M prime loan.

Sure small loans have higher rates but they are lower margin and less profitable. They require way more overhead relative to loan size and a drastically higher chance of default (I used to underwrite small biz loans, many times you can’t even get recent and accurate financials - eg for a small plumbing biz). Just look at the market - there’s a reason all the big banks compete to bank Apple but the SBA has to step in to try and stimulate small biz lending.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#534

Post by chaseadam17 »

riemannzeta wrote: post #522
chaseadam17 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, those tokens are not stable enough to use as a medium of exchange and I’m arguing that there are likely new ways to achieve stability that are better than how the US dollar is currently managed.

What ways? I'm curious. Have you written anything about this? I'd be interested in reading more of what you see as possible. If we think about stability from first principles, then when you're talking about aggregating up billions and trillions of transactions, each of which occurs with some characteristic frequency, then the primary factors are coupling strength (how correlated or uncorrelated are those frequencies?…

There are lots of ways… you could back it with a basket of real assets (eg gold, commodities, etc) or multiple currencies (eg to reduce the role any one central bank plays) or create a new process for delegating central bank authority (eg with better transparency). I’m not saying I have the answer but I’m quite confident that in the next few hundred years we will have digital and stable mediums of exchange that are better than the US dollar for most holders, in terms of lower inflation, more interoperable, more transparent, more stable, etc.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#536

Post by snthd »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text. It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.

Now, by default Mastodon follows your browser's light/dark theme preference.

Mathstodon must have it's setting configured as dark, overriding the default.

Maybe email them and ask for it to be fixed?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29748/commits/9ece...

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#537

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Eisenstein wrote: post #488
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result. Oh, that one is easy. The original US constitution gave the federal government the right to preempt state laws in matters within its…

I am not criticizing your historical explanation or your comment, but I would like to make a footnote: Sometimes narratives like these which lay out a simple cause-and-effect between political decisions and modern outcomes can make people think that reverting the situation is a solution to modern outcomes, but that is rarely the case. Everything evolves, and the solution to modern problems is to find a solution that…

There is more than one possible structure to sustain an active constraint against power grabs, to be sure. But a Senate elected by the state governments was effective in doing it for as long as it was in place. There are other things that could work instead, but sometimes the old thing only stopped working because it stopped happening. And either way you would still need the something else to be used instead rather than continuing the status quo which is objectively not achieving the intended purpose.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#538

Post by fragmede »

bccdee wrote: post #298
UncleMeat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people will read this and decide not to look into relevant scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it is presented by somebody that this community (rightly) respects very deeply. In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.

I don't think being an expert in one field means you need to constantly engage in an academic level of discourse. It's extremely normal for blog posts featuring vibes-based hot takes to hit #1 on HN. I think that's fine, if the take is good.

yeah but as non-experts in the field, how does HN know the take is actually good, and not just well put together and sounds really good?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#539

Post by bccdee »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…

You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#540

Post by mym1990 »

joz1-k wrote: post #500
mym1990 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the question is whether monopolies are being allowed to exist, my question is what is the source as to WHY you think it is happening. A source would be any kind of proof that having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries. Data, publications, etc...

> A source would be any kind of proof... I cannot give you proof for the line of political thinking. :) > ...having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries. Having a large, unified domestic market is a strategic advantage because it enables companies to grow to a size that makes them formidable global competitors [0]. The United States and China are examples of this phenomenon. The poi…

My argument is that the point is whether its advantageous to allow companies to continue to grow because whether a company has a monopoly or anticompetitive edge is the central argument behind breaking them up. By allowing companies to become monopolies or near monopolies, you disturb the very unified domestic market that you initially mentioned, which hamstrings growth in the future.

I believe companies aren't broken up because they are now so big, it is a logistical nightmare to do so, therefore those companies lobby the crap out of politicians to kick the can down the road. NVIDIA is nearly 3x the market cap of the next non-US firm...is that really the global competition you're looking for?

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