I need to share with you an epiphany that occurred to me yesterday.

Have you heard of GPT-3? If not, I can tell you that it's a language model that has been showing up everywhere. Having been trained with a lot of data, it can generate text that people find impressive.

If you follow the hype, GPT-3 will revolutionize everything - people have been using it to generate plausible-looking creative fiction, pickup lines, SQL Queries that are sometimes wrong, trivia answers, tweets, and so on.

But you know what no one has generated yet, as far as I know? Something useful. Or even better: something that people always wanted but current technology cannot provide.

People are excited about GPT-3 because it promises to "just work" - you give it the right prompt and you get the right answer. This would solve all of those pesky problems associated with NLP such as "this search terms make no sense", "I hate knowledge bases", "That question has multiple answers", or "I don't want to manually write all possible answers for my system". But this is not what GPT-3 can do, because GPT-3 will not bend to your so-called facts and therefore will not do what you want. As Robert Dale puts it when talking about GPT-2: "driven as it is by information that is ultimately about language use, rather than directly about the real world, it roams untethered to the truth". In other words, people are excited about GPT-3 because they think it solves a different problem that the one it actually does.

If you want a chatbot to tell a patient that the solution to their depression is talking to a professional instead of GPT-3's suggestion that they should just go ahead and kill themselves, you need a way to constrain the system's output. This means that you still need to write the code that interprets the patient's problems, the code that chooses the right solution to that problem, and the code that says exactly what you want, no more and no less. And while turning structured data into human-readable sentences is a valid possible use for GPT-3, the amount of work required to constrain its output to an acceptable error level is comparable to the effort required to write smart templates that guarantee you'll generate exactly what you want.

And so, GPT-3 joins blockchain technology in being a solution searching for a problem. In fact, the parallels are kind of amazing: both technologies are hyped to the extreme, completely misunderstood by the general public, very expensive to run, and products based on them rarely make it out of the proof-of-concept stage.

I would like to leave you with two optimistic thoughts. First, I do think that it is only a matter of time before someone actually finds a good use for GPT-3. I predict it is going to be something marginal, with my best bet being something related to grammatical correctness. Abstractive summarization is also a good candidate, but my faith is lower because inserting unrelated facts is simultaneously what abstractive summarization tries to avoid and what GPT-3 does best.

And second, I want to let you know that there's a great business opportunity here. The blockchain craze reached the point where simply putting "blockchain" in your company name is enough to make your stock price rise by 289 percent. Therefore, if my prediction is correct then all you need to do is either name your own company "GPT-3" or invest in someone else doing it. Sure, their stock will probably tank once investors realize they invested for the wrong reasons, but by then you will have hopefully cashed out and moved on to something else.

Disclaimer: I am not an investment banker, this post does not constitute financial advice, I don't know why anyone would listen to me, and you shouldn't follow advice you find on random blog posts anyway.

Uber arrived in Argentina working in a grey legal area, as usual. Word of mouth is that Uber refused to be classified as a transport company and insisted on being classified as a digital services company instead. These legal problems led to them being unable to accept Argentinean credit cards for payment. But Uber kept offering the service at a loss, allowing local drivers to accept cash and adding the debt to their driver profile. According to insiders, the drivers were expected to keep Uber's 25% cut aside and transfer it once in a while themselves. Although Uber eventually managed to get access to credit cards, they kept the cash option available.

The collateral damage of this policy is extensive.

Some drivers decided not to settle their debts with Uber, keeping 100% of the proceeds instead. If and when Uber closes the driver's account they get a new SIM card, send fake documentation, and start with a fresh account that lasts between a week and a month. These drivers accept only cash: they have no bank account data to provide because their data is fake, and they know that it's only a matter of time before their account gets banned anyway.

Because these drivers accept that their account is temporary, none of Uber's typical incentives work. When a passenger pays with credit card the money goes straight to Uber and the driver doesn't see a dime -- it all goes away to settle a debt they had no intention of paying. Therefore, drivers will often contact potential passengers asking how they intend to pay. If the passenger says "credit card", the driver either cancels the trip or straight up ignores the passenger forcing them to cancel. You can take the time and report the driver, but few people do it and all it does is to cause a mild inconvenience to the driver.

And while this is inconvenient for the passenger, it also opens the door to the really shady practices: once you have no way of verifying that the driver is who they claim to be, you are one step away from being robbed by a fake driver (in Spanish).

In short, Uber Argentina has become yet another dysfunctional taxi service. And rival local apps are catching up: not only do they have their paperwork up to date, but they have also incorporated apps into their daily routine. It would be no surprise if Uber were still operating in Argentina just for PR purposes. With a 43% drop in revenue for Latin America last year, and with Uber pinky swearing that they will achieve profitability any time now, the only reason I can see for Uber operating in Argentina is to keep the illusion of "one app for the entire world".

And sure, that's a fair point. But I have no reason to believe that these problems are exclusive to Argentina, and probably neither should you. I wrote this story because I found it interesting and I picked Argentina because that's what I know about, but if you are one of those tourists who blindly gets into an Uber believing that their drivers are more honest than taxi drivers you may be up for a rude awakening. Apps are not well known for solving deep, systemic social problems after all.

Sources

The information for this post came from these threads in Reddit's /r/argentina: Thread 1, Thread 2, Thread 3.

I have tried this week to buy the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman for a gift and let me tell you, it's really hard.

I started naively thinking that, since the album is available on Amazon as MP3, I could just click "Buy" and be done with it. But Amazon, as it turns out, doesn't want my money. Sure, they say they will sell me the album. But once I actually try they reject my credit and debit cards with a mysterious error that, after some digging, may be related to Amazon not having the rights to that album in Germany. I say "may" because Amazon doesn't give me any usable information - all they show is this error:

We were unable to process your purchase with your current payment information. Please enter a valid payment method and an address which are both local.

Seeing that my credit card is valid, my address is local, and the buy page doesn't mention any kind of restrictions, that's my first dead end.

My second stop is Warner Music, who owns the soundtrack. This is also a waste of time: they will gladly sell me physical copies in vinyl, but digital? No luck there.

Next: Apple, the first big company to offer DRM-free music downloads and self-professed champions of user experience. We were off to a rocky start: you can only buy music using iTunes, which is not available in Linux and forces me to boot my Windows 10 PC. One hour later, courtesy of Windows 10 deciding it's a good time for an update, I am faced with this screen:

If you think this well-known and yet unresolved issue stopped me, you are mistaken - I have signed way too many contracts in languages I don't fully grasp to be afraid of what is clearly a credit card details form. Luckily, after giving my password like 6 times, converting m4a files to mp3, and almost two hours later, I am finally the proud temporary owner of this soundtrack.

So let's talk now about Spotify. I reluctantly started using it again because it's one of the few services with an offline mode for Android phones that doesn't require giving my phone number. Seeing as I still object to their collection of private data, I created a fake profile that I regularly renew with gift cards. But do you know what happens when your subscription is about to run out? The answer is "nothing": you get zero notifications, no e-mail, nothing.

What happens when my subscription runs out? First: all of my offline music is deleted, which is the one feature I'm paying for. Since I'm often in offline mode for work, that means no music for me for the rest of the day. And second: just like there is no notification about my balance running out, there is also no option in the app to give a new gift card code. I can easily give my credit card and subscribe forever, but gift cards require extra steps.

What these two infuriating stories have in common is that they are examples of the music industry working both badly and as intended. Amazon, Spotify, and Apple (up to a point) will gladly give me access to the music I'm trying to pay for, but only if I agree to set recurring payments to their walled gardens and access to my private data. Owning my music and keeping my privacy, however, is really hard.

Which brings me to my final point. There is a service with an extensive, high-quality music catalog that's easy to use, works on every platform, let's you keep your privacy, and will take your money but only if you really want to. It's called piracy. And even though it's been almost 10 years since Gabe Newell publicly pointed out how to effectively get rid of piracy for good, we are somehow still living in a world where buying a single music CD takes two hours, Windows, fluency in fictitious languages, and a computer science degree.

At least you can now order your vinyl records via e-mail. Take that, 1980s!

As someone who regularly switches between keyboard layouts, I have a problem: I have at least three keys that can be used as an apostrophe, but I don't know which one is the correct one. Compare:

• Backtick: Hamlet`s father
• ASCII Apostrophe: Hamlet's father
• Acute accent: Hamlet́s father
• Single closing quote: Hamlet’s father

Do you know which one is the right one? If not, this small guide is for you. But you'll have to endure a lot of theory first.

The problem here is that using your keyboard requires mixing three different concepts: which key you pressed, which character it represents, and how is it visually represented. To explain that in clearer terms, let's take the backtick as an example.

The key itself can move around. The backtick key is located below the tilde (~) in a US keyboard, to the left of the backspace key in a German keyboard, and under the caret (^) in a Spanish keyboard.

Internally, this key is called "Grave accent" in ASCII but programmers know it it as "backquote" or "backtick". When you press it you send a code to your computer that, if you were using ASCII, would be reflected as the 0x60 hexadecimal value. And here we make another distinction: if your computer is configured to do so, this code can be interpreted as a dead key that only exists to modify the next character. If you want to type the è in the French word très (very) you use the combination <Grave accent key> + <e key>. If your computer is not configured in this way then you simply get a backtick.

But here we have a very subtle difference between a backtick and a Grave accent. The Grave accent is a modifier, changing the sound of the letter underneath. Therefore, it cannot exist by itself. If you see the character ` alone then it is not a Grave accent, it's a backtick. They both look the same, but they have different meanings.

Your program is another factor: some programs may replace the character you are using because it's very likely that you are using it wrong. If I type the double quote character (") in Microsoft Word it may be replaced by an Opening double quote (“), a German opening double quote („), an English closing double quote (”), or a German closing double quote (“, which is the same character as the Opening double quote in English).

And then we have the issue of fonts. Some fonts may represent two different characters in the same way, or straight up ignore it. If you have been staring at some of the quotes I mentioned above and see no difference, well, maybe that's why.

So back to our original question: what is each key good for?

• The backtick quote (`) has no meaning in typography at all. The only reason a non-programmer would use it would be to type a Grave accent.
• The apostrophe (') is the one I need for daily use. In truth, Unicode defines a different character as a "true" apostrophe (we'll get to that soon), but not all keyboards can generate it. Therefore, and just like the double quote example above, it is okay to use it.
• The Acute accent (́) should only be used as a modifier. You can see that it insists on modifying whichever character is next to it, because it has no meaning by itself.
• The Single closing quote (’) can be generated under certain combinations of keyboard and local configuration. If your keyboard supports it, this is the preferred key to use for apostrophes.

There are plenty other versions of the quote character that can be used. This list of commonly confused characters has been of great help, while this technical description of the apostrophe character also provides more info than you thought you needed. Sure, it may sound like a lot of work. But you'll thank me next time you need to write a phrase like “In a Déjà vu, René corrected ‘It’s x′, not x″’” knowing full well that you are right.

Have you heard of Parler? In case you haven't, Parler is (was?) a social network for racists the alt-right that gained notoriety this week. Having allegedly been used to coordinate the storming of the U.S. Capitol, its app was removed from both the Google Play Store and the Apple Store and then pulled from Amazon AWS the next day. With no hosting and no app, Parler has been effectively killed by the tech giants.

The swift removal of Parler from the internet is the incident that, I hope, will bring together the right and the left under a common cause: that the internet should be considered a public utility and that Internet Service Providers (ISP) should be regulated as such.

A public utility is a service that everyone needs (think water and electricity) and where regulation is needed because the high cost of entry discourages competition (so-called natural monopolies). It has been argued that internet should be included in this list too - can you imagine your current daily life without internet? ISPs, on the other hand, are happy setting their own prices and policies, and have resisted for years efforts in this direction.

Parler was effectively removed from the internet by the tech giants under the argument that, as private companies, they have the right to refuse service to anyone they don't want to work with[1]. But ISPs are private companies too, and therefore free to do the same to you - if your live in a country with no ISP regulation, your provider has a right to stop giving you internet access and tank your business with little repercussions.

And here is where I hope both "the left" and "the right" will see that their interests overlap. The left should support ISP regulations (and net neutrality!) because they believe, as Germany and France put it, that free speech should be governed by law and not by tech giants. The right, on the other hand, should realize that they gave tech monopolies all the cards and that they are the only ones getting kicked out of their social media accounts. If the President of the United States himself can be banned from Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Youtube, then no one is safe.

Why ISPs?

You might have noticed that everyone I linked above talks about regulating Amazon, Google, and/or Apple. I, on the other hand, would suggest that we focus on ISPs instead for the following reasons.

First, because the internet parallels the history of the telephone almost perfectly: a communication technology that catches on and that, while not biologically required (unlike water and heating), plays a critical role for life in a society. And ISPs are not "like" the telephone companies, they are the telephone companies.

Second, because it makes sense that internet should be provided to everyone without discrimination: imagine a world in which your shower stops working because you said in public that you prefer bottled water, or where your telephone is disconnected because you bad-mouthed someone during a conversation.

And finally, because it's the last step down the technology chain at which you can still survive: there are alternatives to Amazon AWS, and if they won't have you then you could still plug your own server and keep going (ask the Pirate Bay). But if the only ISP in town denies you service, what are you going to do, move your family to the closest town? Ask people to send you letters?

So here's my proposal: make the internet a public utility and, in exchange, give ISPs immunity from what their customers do with it. Let's bring the internet into the 21st century.

Footnotes

[1] Leaving illegal discrimination aside, which doesn't seem to be the case here.