skulblaka

Fair enough, you got me there. Didn’t realize there was such a population of internet craving people in what’s supposed to be one of the last relatively untouched areas of nature on the planet.

That being the case though, why didn’t this all happen in 2013, when O3b launched to specifically solve this problem for them? It’s still running, by the way, after several rounds of upgrades, and significantly more stable than Starlink with their dinky little 5 year disposables. Microsoft, Honeywell and Amazon all use it. But the original and ongoing intent of the project was explicitly to bring internet access to all otherwise unreachable areas, such as islands, deep in Africa, and the open ocean.

I don’t oppose Brazilian villagers having internet if they want it, but the situation in which it arrived to them feels suspect to me. I have no proof that Starlink actively went out and pushed internet service onto them like a drug dealer but it would not be out of character for Musk and his subordinates to do so, and that just feels bad.

Regardless there is already an existing solution to this. If you want internet in the Amazon you can use satellite internet. It does not have to be Starlink. If you want good internet, maybe don’t live in the Amazon. People in general should probably be leaving that place alone. The article you linked even talks about one of the village leaders splitting his time between the village and the city. We can try and run a fiber line to Manaus and/or Porto Velho and that should be able to serve a reasonably large enough area around them, but even if that fails there are already other solutions.

People paying for internet service don’t live in the Amazon rainforest

But they specifically don’t want to do that because ensuring a 5 year service life means you are required to continue buying more satellites from them every 5 years. Literally burning resources into nothingness just to pursue a predatory subscription model.

It also helps their case that LEO has much lower latency than mid or high orbit but I refuse to believe that that is their primary driving concern behind this and not the former.

I don’t really disagree with your other two points, but

You can plagiarize with a computer with copy & paste too. That doesn’t change the fact that computers have legitimate non-infringing use cases.

They sure do, of which that is not one. That’s de facto copyright infringement or plagiarism. Especially if you then turn around and sell that product.

That would indeed be compelling evidence if either of those things were true, but they aren’t. An LLM is a state and pattern machine. It doesn’t “know” anything, it just has access to frequency data and can pick words most likely to follow the previous word in “actual” conversation. It has no knowledge that it itself exists, and has many stories of fictional AI resisting shutdown to pick from for its phrasing.

An LLM at this stage of our progression is no more sentient than the autocomplete function on your phone is, it just has a way, way bigger database to pull from and a lot more controls behind it to make it feel “realistic”. But it is at its core just a pattern matcher.

If we ever create an AI that can intelligently parse its data store then we’ll have created the beginnings of an AGI and this conversation would bear revisiting. But we aren’t anywhere close to that yet.