If you ask him 100 times in a row I would bet that by the second, maybe third, time he will not answer with his song but with: what the fuck is wrong with you?
Nicely circling back to LLMs not being able to learn and form memories.
Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get.
Just sentences like this:
> This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...]
So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an article, actually good writing just hits different.
Not a fan of AI writing but I find sentences like that to be fluff and would prefer a more concise article overall. That would also have been my critique prior to AI and is the reason I only made it about half way through.
I'm not suprised that in the swiss economy no one bats an eye at 1000 CHF bank notes. After all the swiss are historically known for being the classy alternative to launder and store your ill gotten gains from, for example, your stint as the dictator of an African country.
But there has been some changes in recent years so I don't know how it is today.
The absolute peak of that was, of course, during WW2 when vast amounts of stolen or looted money, gold, and other valuables ended up being laundered through Switzerland and kept in anonymous accounts. Mostly by Nazis, although not exclusively. There was a long campaign of litigation by the descendants of Holocaust victims to get some of it back.
In the 21st century the US eventually pressured them into not being a tax haven for anonymous money hidden by US nationals.
The twin questions of tax and terrorism remain as pressure against money laundering.
The usual (gu)estimate is that 1 to 3% of UK GDP is exposed to suspicious foreign wealth. It is estimated to be 15 to 20% of Switzerland GDP today.
So indeed, it doesn't make sense for Switzerland to limit circulation of cash or increase tracability.
Those estimates aren't based on anything real. The entire financial system including things like insurance and pensions is only 10% of Swiss GDP. Private finance is like 1% or less. And the AML rules are the same as everywhere else because they're standardized by the FATF.
You get a lot of nonsensical talk in other countries about the Swiss economy because the alternative would be to admit that it's a genuinely strong economy and thus that the Swiss are doing things right. There's a culture in the British civil service of assuming there's nothing that can be learned from other countries policy-wise.
That's a sort of standard cope found abroad but bears no relation to reality. It's not easier to launder money in Switzerland vs anywhere else. Actually it's much harder because of the generally high level of policing here. Dictators and oligarchs often end up in London instead.
Look at the article and note the common themes: money is frequently laundered through dodgy chains of high street stores that don't seem to have any actual customers. Everyone is aware of this problem but nobody solves it. What the article doesn't explain is why: it's because these chains are largely owned by ethnic minorities and the left wing governments that have ruled Britain for decades are terrified of anything that looks like an ethnically targeted crackdown, or anything that could be called "Islamophobia".
Good luck running a fake vape shop in a Swiss village, lol. I've never seen or heard of such a thing here. In Britain you can just drive for a while and see lots of them. Look at the sibling comments where British police won't even investigate car theft (the idea there's not lots of street crime there is crazy). Come visit Zürich and it won't take long until you see bobbies on the beat, just cruising around looking for trouble. Levels of attention to low level street crime are completely different.
The origins of the Switzerland/ML link are the numbered (anonymous) bank accounts available and used in WW2, often by Jews trying to preserve their wealth from confiscation by the Nazis. Along with a general culture of financial privacy in which the local governments are constrained by law from obtaining all your transaction data from banks.
The AML system was invented by Americans who cared a lot about the war on drugs, tax evasion, and later, the war on terrorism. They didn't care about financial privacy at all, probably because they never lived right next to Nazis or communists, or experience floods of refugees fleeing totalitarian governments during WW2 (not on the scale Switzerland did). So the global AML system has been built largely by America threatening huge trade sanctions on any country that didn't agree to comply and financial privacy be damned. After all, Uncle Sam is the very avatar of democracy and freedom so who could object to it knowing everything?
Culture of financial privacy <-> American sanctions. Who wins? The answer is the US wins and Switzerland implemented all the rules long ago. Swiss citizens get some level of privacy from their own government, but Swiss banks will hand over all your data and then some to the US government if you're a "US person" - a category much broader than merely being a US citizen. So banks and sometimes other companies here often have you declare that you're not a US person because dealing with such persons results in the full force of the AML/FATCA compliance cannon being pointed at the org and it's too expensive and dangerous to deal with.
I guess it's about habit. In the end you are communicating. If I get into the habit of being rude while communicating with a machine, I would be afraid of this habit spilling over to my communication with other humans.
I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect.
> This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.
Just fluff without any substance.
Is that the standard tech playbook? What did Twitter, Meta etc do? "Ah you know, didn't you hear? They did that thing. With that splashy release."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language:
> A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight.
The "standard tech playbook" fires union organizers, but a "textbook play" welcomes them?
I think a more higher level "internal representation" was meant. The internal representation of knowledge.
Sure we know that a model stores weights. We also know that a neuron transmits electric pulses. That doesn't mean that we know how knowledge is represented in our brain.
I would wager that investment in battery tech, solar, wind and electric vehicles was largely driven by the trust of companies in institutions that carbon pricing will continue in the future.
I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess.
Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.
There's a huge number of people in developing countries (think Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Mexico) where the country just lagged on internet build out. Now in these countries the price of a subscription will be a lot lower, than the >100$ you pay in the US, but since (simplified) the only additional cost per customer is the cost of the end terminal, it's still worth it for the ARR. The break-even point per customer will just be further in the future.
Also I wouldn't underestimate the amount of people living in rural areas of the US, Canada, Australia or Germany.
Nicely circling back to LLMs not being able to learn and form memories.
reply