The people behind these funds are playing Monopoly IRL, and this in particular makes me very angry.
The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.
You're only thinking from a consumer perspective. When it comes time to sell a business, original owner wants to retire or what not, most small businesses have a hard time finding a buyer. This forces the owner to continue working beyond their time or face destitution. Having a market where PE can snap up a small business is a god-send for these owners. It meets a market need.
As a consumer, there are many non PE owned restaurants and pubs you can frequent. While you might not be able to change the game, you can absolutely vote with your wallet. The small guys will thank you.
Same for Amazon vs going direct to the manufacturers, which is more often than not, China.
> Same for Amazon vs going direct to the manufacturers, which is more often than not, China.
That comes with a bunch of problems. Taxes, import duties and import refusals are the biggest one. With Amazon, at least as long as it's sold or fulfilled by Amazon, no matter what, you are going to get the product in a reasonable time frame (1-3 days IME).
Shipping... depends. If you're in bad luck, the seller doesn't ship Fedex or DHL, but Yanwen or another one of the usual bunch of "aggregators" that bundle weeks worth of shipment to forward it to the US or Europe and unbundle the shipments there.
Assuming your product shows up at your doorstep, legally, you are now the importer and fully responsible for anything related to that specific product - say, an electrical appliance that sets your house on fire. You can't hold anyone accountable but yourself.
And finally, if there's defects, you only have to deal with Amazon. Free shipment back, done. With anything straight out of China, you are now responsible for shipments.
I think if local models catch up with current SOTA then that might not happen. Either way, I'm don't think the long-term for OAI, Anthropic etc. really holds up.
Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).
Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.
i didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD
imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing
I have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!
A long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites.
It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.
The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.
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