“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
> the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Except, of course, that this is historically wrong. Transitions from democracy to dictatorship are common, but I cannot think of one that happened because of "loose fiscal policy".
Athens spending like drunken sailors during the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Oligarchical Coup d’Etat comes to mind. Or must the dictator be just one person and not a bunch of Orwell's pigs?
Pithy. But a made up quote by Tytler, he never said or wrote that.
Tyler expressed some skepticism of Democracies but nothing like this. The too on-the-nose nature of this often passed along bit of propaganda should also be the giveaway that it might be one of those rare things on the internet that someone may have been less than honest about the origins, and go look and see.
Tytler's quote is trying to say too much. It might be acceptable as historical commentary, but it carries little weight to me; it seems overly confident about what the future might hold.*
Tytler died in 1813. We have learned much since then: much about human nature, institutions, experimentation, statistics, evidence, constructing good theories, and governance.** Sure, the quote is worth some reflection; it has grains of truth, but it should not be given undue weight.
* I am not saying "we can predict nothing"! Far from it. I am ok with predictions (even bold ones) to the extent they are deeply rooted in the best understandings and models we have available.
** I'm talking about what motivated people figure out through careful reasoning and evidence, not simply how the median person funnels information from their ears to their mouth. And I'm certainly not commending the effort and thought that the median person puts into stewarding their democracy (if they have one). While we (in the USA, for the time being?) have something like one.
That doesn’t disprove him at all: if the average one lasts 200 years and not all last exactly 200, then some will necessarily last more than 200. This is a mathematical consequence of what an average means.
what better way to celebrate the democracy by combining it with a celebration of the birthday of the Great Leader, with a soviet style military parade and an admonition that any protest will be met with the harshest of consequences.
I know that math makes it harder to come up with political zingers but if there are two civilizations; one lasted 150 years and the other lasted 250 years the average is 200.
You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts:
While man is being instigated by the love of power—a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals—he will seek personal superiority in preference to every matter of a general concern.
The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.
Relevant quote today but seems to misunderstand the U.S. framers’ idea of what the U.S. govt was set up to be, namely by consent of the governed.
It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too. -Tertullian, 1st century.
The power used by government…is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled -Sabine explaining John Locke
Therefore if the governors ever fail the criteria of said justification, the consent is removed by default, irrespective of their elected term length or anything else.
One particular democratic election or another is not the contract. The Constitution itself is the contract, countersigned by the 50 U.S. states.
The quotee would be surprised to see how little voting is being done by the people receiving the largesse in the last 20 years.
Not to mention how little voters had to do with the decisions which caused the deficit to rise the most. The Iraq war, poor handling of COVID, tax cuts for the wealthy.
So limiting max context length also reduces VRAM needs a bit? If cache is 20% of total, 1/10th of context as a limit would mean 18% total memory reduction.
What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution: lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated, general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of small pieces of software we have today.
Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.
So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.
From what I have observed in my team, the opposite is occurring. Everyone is just making their own software because the barriers are so low. There is a lot less sharing and coordination going on, and the bottleneck moved to having the hardware available to run it all, so now we’re spending a lot more money on compute.
Factories benefit from economies of scale that favour centralization.
I think smaller groups handling more complexity is on point. But that's because each group will build their own bespoke factory catered to their exact needs.
I very fully expect a mass proliferation of custom programs rather than standardizing on a common set that groans under the weight of being so general to support all use cases.
This is very interesting. This could allow custom harnesses to be used economically with Opus. Depending on the usage limits, this may be cheaper than their API.
For files I use the open source Material Files, which supports SFTP servers. So I just have a little file server. For calendar, because Google doesn't reliably support background services, it's best to use a calendar app with builtin caldav sync. For carddav, I use a background sync app though (davx). Super lame that this is not built into android, not even into lineage.
You'd think someone would implement native caldav/carddav sync? Maybe this is my calling haha.
I'm telling that someone who comes up with a decent file sync setup between iPhone, Android and Linux/Windows without charging a monthly fee will make some good money on one-time buy fees alone. Dropbox etc can do things like these but I'm not interested in paying monthly fees for using my own storage across devices.
For my desktop systems I do a nighly rsync to a central onsite server, which does nighly encrypted ZFS send to an offsite archive. I suppose a script could trigger on file change using Linux file watch features (exposed via CLI and C headers). What I'm not sure about is wether two way sync with rsync is possible. This could run as a simple daemonized bash script. On error the script would just retry. Rsync would have to handle conflicts, it probably has features for it. Paste this comment into a coding CLI and boom, you have your solution :). Does need rooted Android for running shell scripts on boot. But a good coding CLI can log into your phone and set everything up.
Banking and govt. on a cheap, locked Android. The rest (mail, calling?, SMS, web, on an unlocked Android).
You'd need two SIMs, one for the banking/govt google play stuff, and one for the regular phone.
My bank does support a physical reader device though. That may eliminate the main Google Play dependency.
Open Android will still exists right? But it won't have the Play Store and Services. You could also download the APK on the official phone, then pull the APK off it and install that on the open phone. Won't work if the app requires play integrity, but I think there are alternatives for that.
Pretty lame that this is needed, but I'm used to this crap anyway.
> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now
This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.
Which types of tasks, in your experience, show negligable improvement when using larger models? And for what types of tasks do you feel even the best models deliver mediocre results?
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