I guess this idea makes the most immediate sense in the context of US politics, but maybe also the UK, and other places where there are two main political parties. Does this exist? Is it a thing?

A politics ambidextrous person would be able to see from both vantage points with the fluidity as a bilingual person can interpret 2 languages. In a sense it’s really just the same thing, all be it at a higher level of abstraction. Importantly though, it’s not just about comprehension, that’s part of it, but such a person would also be able to perform and be successful in both environments.

It’s only relatively recently that I have started to move my attention towards politics. One thing that has suprised me is the level of polarisation between say, in the US, Democrats and Republicans, but there’s a similar thing going on between Labour and Conservatives in the UK. The thing that’s somewhat amusing is that even if you take just one political party, the same pattern, or at least similar repeats itself again, except other categorisations are used such as progressives, or libertarians.

There’s always an us and them that develops. Anyway that’s not super important right now just worth noting.

One thing that was quite a suprise to me was how ingrained some of these beliefs are. It makes sense because we are raised from birth to absorb these ideas without really noticing. There are areas of our lives where the programing runs deep. At times it’s easy to spot in others, but difficult to see in yourself. That’s where the ambidextrous idea arose from. I wonder if it’s even possible.

I would imagine that it could be quite a skill to have. Obviously for say an actor, you would immediately double the space of possible work opportunities. But the same should hold for other professions too. You are a lot more likely to fit in if you can see the world through the two major political lenses.

On the other hand, I imagine that such thinking might be considered heracy by those who were staunchly one side or the other, which is probably why nobody ever mentions this idea. I’m obviously quite stupid.

So anyway, if they do exist, the other thing I wonder, is if they could perhaps help us all get along a bit better?

Chris Coyier went on a bit of a friendly rant about LLMs using your data [53:29]. I think it’s super interesting to hear his perspective because he’s not a big media or tech company, he just runs some small businesses, Code Pen & CSS Tricks, and they happen over the years to have published a lot of great web development content and code. A lot of the web is from sources like that, narrow niches where hard working folks spent years creating and currating content, often labours of love, and it’s all just being hoovered up so a very small amount of people, often already part of very large a profitable businesses, can make out like bandits.

Here’s what Chris has to say about it:

To me it still boils down to the like ‘Yeah but you like took my stuff’. And nobody wants to tell you that that’s true or false. There are a lot of LLMs now. It’s not just Llama, ChatGPT4, whatever the names of these models are. There are a ton of models. There are so many [...] It’s not like there is a list, like this LLM is trained on this list of sources. I’ve never seen that ever. So what’s the deal? Were you? Were you trained on my stuff? Did you read my book? Did you scrape Codepen? Did you learn about CSS from CSS-Tricks? Did you do that, or not? Cause you didn’t ask me. I’ve never gotten an email from any model ever ever in my inbox. I get lots of email, and I’ve never gotten one that says ‘do you mind if we train it on your stuff’.

Then you’ll hear a news article like "Matt Mullenweg awarded 20 billion for allowing Wordpress to be used in language models". Why didn’t they just scrape him too? Are they more scared of his lawyers than mine? Cause I don’t have one and he does. Or Reddit allowed to be a source. Or Stack Overflow allowed to be a source.

So if you are big enough they will ask you or they will pen a deal with you, but most content surely they just scrapped up and gave nothing to. It almost makes it hurt more. Oh like I see, you got to be rich to make money, that’s the trick.

I think it’s great that he’s speaking out, others in his position should do the same. If we don’t have the conversation now, we'll all be pushed into offers we can’t refuse, or worse. We are all in this together.