Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:

It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.

When it comes to crypto assets, I lean skeptical but I hold that opinion loosely - since I won’t be investing in them I don’t have sufficient motivation to spend time learning more. I’m a CPA so I have some professional interest in it as a financial instrument. On the other hand, I have basically zero understanding of the technology. In any case, Stephen Diehl has written some good, skeptical commentary. I find this argument particularly compelling:

If there is any innovation in crypto assets it’s not in software engineering, but in financial engineering. We’ve created a new financial product like an option contract on a startup potentially building something real, but in case they don’t you can always exercise it early by simply dumping the stock on the public to cash out completely untethered to the company’s success. You don’t need to file a S-1 or have a coherent prospectus about attracting customers or business or revenue. Hell, the company doesn’t even have to have a business model at all, and in fact the best performing crypto assets are the ones that literally don’t do anything at all. They just need to tell a good story.

I’ve been reading a bit about surveillance capitalism (Privacy is Power and a couple hundred pages thus far of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) so I’ve been trying to disentangle myself from some of the worst offenders. My Facebook account was permanently deleted a few days ago. I’ve switched email from Gmail to ProtonMail. I’ve moved all my files from Google drive to Dropbox. Here’s where my question comes in: Dropbox is fine but I would like something privacy-focused with the ability to edit documents on my iPhone (as with the Google apps). Is anyone aware of something like that?