I feel like listening to Theo about anything technical is like consulting a Labrador retriever for advice on quantum physics.
Every time I've ever seen one of his videos it's pretty clear he has very little understanding of development or engineering. I first became aware of him from his early "unit tests are a waste of time" stuff, and it seems his skillset is building a personal brand. Fair play, he's clearly talented at that, but that doesn't make his opinion on anything else worthwhile.
"The cars have all have cameras checking for bad behavior, why shouldn't your phone and laptop?" said the esteemed lawmaker.
"Oh course there will be exceptions for politicians and authorized individuals, for national security reasons."
Over Christmas, I spent several minutes trying to debug my beeping dashboard - it only seemed to happen sometimes while driving, so stopping didn’t let me figure it out. Eventually I discovered that it was beeping at me because my eyes weren’t on the road enough. Of course, figuring that out required me to take my eyes off the road to figure out which blinking signal was associated with this particular alarm.
Also, being constantly warned that I was speeding in rural areas where the car missed a speed limit sign caused me to start ignoring the speeding alarm within a few hours of driving the car.
I feel like there’s some lesson here in building to the lowest common denominator, and giving people products rather than tools (tools are more dangerous, but more useful), but maybe I’m just grumpy.
To start your car please look into camera and repeat: "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"
All new cars.
At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008. Whenever I rent a new car around here (in the EU) I find them very annoying. The worst is the cruise control that tries to stick to the speed limit -- but its sensors don't always read the signs very well, so you'll often slow to 50 km/h (about 30 mph) for no reason. Then there's the incessant beeping at you, "lane assist" that you can't turn off (looking at you, Volkswagen,) and many more small annoyances. A camera pointed at your face just adds insult to injury.
I appreciate your perspective, but I was curious what B1 proficiency actually entails and this is what I found [1]:
- understand the main points of clear standard speech on familiar topics such as work, school, or leisure - manage most situations that occur while traveling in German-speaking areas - produce simple, connected text on familiar subjects - describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes, and ambitions, and briefly explain your opinions or plans
That seems like a reasonable standard of native language proficiency to ask of people who want to make the county with said language their permanent home.
[1] https://www.sprachenatelier-berlin.de/en/topic/3736.german-p...
Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
AmazonBrandFilter dev here.
Yeah. I don't know. I don't love that they're just ripping the list like that, I wouldn't mind as much if they at least helped contribute to the list. That is far and away the hardest part of this thing.
But it is what it is, I'll be more peeved if they monetize it (which I'm unsure if they're doing).
Maybe I should put one of those buy me a coffee links on the repo, I'd probably be better about focusing on it then.
The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China.
If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face.
You might as well go jump off a building or a bridge cause you’re done for.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/china-executes-ex...
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uvm7oy/i...
This says it's using AmazonBrandFilter's list of brands. Why would we use/support this chrome extension instead of the upstream one [1] which is actually doing the important maintanance task?
"Knockoff" seems to be literally describing itself.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazonbrandfilter/m...
All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry.
The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.
As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers.
There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
"The procedure now chosen gives the proponents of Chat Control a significant tactical advantage. Since the law is in its second reading, an absolute majority of 361 votes of all parliament members is required for amendments or a renewed rejection on Thursday. In contrast, a simple majority of the MEPs present is sufficient for the other side. As many parliamentarians have historically already departed by the last day before the summer break, the re-enactment of the regulation is considered almost unavoidable."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control is bound to become law? and this is after I think 2/3 rejections, how democratic of the EU.
Oh, and parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny.
Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants).
5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome!
> works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people
If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my food either. I don't need to make 8 billion people happy for my restaurant to survive. I only need to make ~1000 people happy who keep returning for anniversaries, birthdays, and the pure enjoyment of creativity with food.
I was a yacht chef for years and only needed to make 10 people happy. The technique I used was everyone eats the same thing, crew and guests. Saving money doing my own shopping instead of relying on provisioning companies that would send me food not handled correctly, my monthly expense went from ~$30k to ~$10k when guests are on board a month -- food in St. Barts was flown in from France everyday and expensive, circa 2005, so I could afford to serve the chateaubriand, osso bucco, and everything else to the crew. Therefore, what I wanted to eat everyday which likely was balanced, had lots of fiber, and healthier choices was the thing that everyone ate everyday.
People ask if the guests and owners would tell me what they want to eat everyday. The Mister was CEO of a fortune 500 company and when retired still chairman of the board. This guy was making billion dollar decisions everyday and the Mrs. was very busy also. The last thing they want to do is answer what is for dinner every night. They delegated the decision making to me. I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.
It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try -- it will break you.
Alternatively, 98% is plenty.
If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen.
As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update their browser once a year or better.
The tradeoff is code complexity and engineering time, vs having a larger market. And that's going to be an individual situation for every company.
There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:
1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.
2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.
3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.
4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them.
The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer.
In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with. The transition is basically updating your current harnesses to know about the other models.
I think the comparison most apt is the rise of AMD. Sure, it never(?) achieved market dominance, but it did ultimately make a huge dent. And a big part of that was because AMD x86 was pretty close and pretty compatible with Intel x86 at a fraction of the cost.
I'm not convinced raw costs matter:
1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins.
2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples.
3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time.
4. Many formerly open source infrastructure components like Redis and Elastic Search have Apache equivalents, but they still command healthy margins.
I understand the arguments for a margin collapse, but I don't see any historical analogues. It seems that enterprises will pay top dollar for service guarantees, integration, and someone they can sue.
It's nobody gets fired for buying IBM all over again.
150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin!
The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo.
You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs - "end-of-cycle": falling HW sales, fewer exclusives (-> preparation for next gen), fewer consumers (-> waiting for next gen). Here you usually have maximum profits since you don't subsidize HW and marketing is minimal (platforms are already locked in)
Generally you have to establish a big userbase during the mid-cycle such that you can levarage it during the late-cycle to be able to afford next-gen. Xbox has the big issue that their mid-cycle was catastrophic, which means they now don't have the console base to get into the next generation: If they have 3% margin _right now_ in the end-of-cycle where marketing and development costs are at their lowest, this does not bode well for the overall health of the business.
They are working on an OpenWRT Two at the moment which will be Wifi 7.
OpenWRT runs on a lot of hardware and its a great way to extend the life of a router past the manufacturers patches as well as gain a lot of capabilities. I wouldn't buy a commercial router that wasn't supported by OpenWRT now.
The article kinda glossed over it, but one fact under-appreciated by the general public is just how dangerous acetaminophen overdoses can be.
Scientists often talk about the "therapeutic index" or "safety ratio" of a drug. It's the LD50 (dose at which 50% of recipients die) divided by the effective dose. Common hard drugs like heroin or methamphetamine have a safety ratio of about 6-10 [1]. "Soft" drugs like marijuana or LSD often have safety ratios of about 1000.
The safety ratio of acetaminophen is under 4. A typical dosing schedule for an adult is 4-6 500mg tablets within a 24 hour period [2], for a total of no more than 3g. 7g of acetaminophen can kill you, and 12g is likely to [3]. Acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S, causing 50% of cases and 20% of transplants.
When they tell you "don't exceed 6 doses daily", they really mean it, and it's across all acetaminophen-containing products. The margin for error is narrower than heroin.
[1] http://politicsofsin.50megs.com/risk/Toxicity.Comparison_Add...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3585765/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/
This is a total mess IMHO.
- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
Some points -
- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke
- They did not have to buy all those studios
- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream
- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?
> in part because Google fired two of the authors, Timnit Gebru
I remember being angry about this situation when I first saw it on social media, until I read the details: This person submitted a list of demands to her employer and said that if they weren’t met, she quit. Google wasn’t going to meet her demands so they considered it acceptance of her resignation. There has been a movement trying to debate whether it was a firing or resignation ever since.
The original paper they published gets recirculated every year or two as some landmark history of AI safety, but as other commenters have noted it wasn’t really a great paper nor was it groundbreaking at the time. If not for the controversy surrounding the resignation/firing (depending on your POV), I don’t think it would have been notable.
It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO.
Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.
To me it's mostly unfortunate that this has left PlayStation with no direct competition because they've noticed and leaned into the not-giving-a-shit attitude after they had such a great console generation with the PS4. It's kinda crazy that we're already almost due for a new console generation and there's very little appetite for new consoles after this generation where it feels like it barely got started. And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. The industry is in a very strange state.
It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio
At some point, the games industry decided it wanted to be interactive Hollywood, and the consequences are entirely predictable. Meanwhile, Nintendo just quietly shipped 3.8 million units of Tomodachi Life in two weeks, and 4 million of Pokopia in five. They're making actual games. Sony's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat, like Xbox, has also put them in a slow-motion death spiral that's going to become painfully obvious in a few years.
The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
"There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries."
So there was nothing "limiting" them from making it already with user-replaceable batteries, they just didn't care enough until EU forced them (like all the smartphone brands). Love EU.