ARandumGuy

From my experience, the more advanced math you learn, the worse you become at arithmetic. I knew a lot of math majors in college, and all of them used calculators all the time.

Kind of, but they can't do any business with a US based company. Many specialized products are only produced by a small handful of companies, and if all (or most) of those are US based, Cuba's SOL. They've also had problems where a supplier was bought out by a US based company, so now they can't buy that product anymore.

There's also the fact that it's far cheaper to ship goods to Cuba from the US then it is to ship goods from Europe or China. This means that even if they can buy some goods, they're often much more expensive then it needs to be.

It'd be more accurate to call it a logarithmic relationship, since compute time is our input variable. Which itself is a bit concerning, as that implies that modest gains in accuracy require exponentially more compute time.

In either case, that still doesn't excuse not labeling your axis. Taking 10 seconds vs 10 days to get 80% accuracy implies radically different things on how developed this technology is, and how viable it is for real world applications.

Which isn't to say a model that takes 10 days to get an 80% accurate result can't be useful. There are absolutely use cases where that could represent a significant improvement on what's currently available. But the fact that they're obfuscating this fairly basic statistic doesn't inspire confidence.

One thing that makes me skeptical is the lack of specific labels on the first two accuracy graphs. They just say it's a "log scale", without giving even a ballpark on the amount of time it took.

Did the 80% accuracy test results take 10 seconds of compute? 10 minutes? 10 hours? 10 days? It's impossible to say with the data they've given us.

The coding section indicates "ten hours to solve six challenging algorithmic problems", but it's not clear to me if that's tied to the graphs at the beginning of the article.

The article contains a lot of facts and figures, which is good! But it doesn't inspire confidence that the authors chose to obfuscate the data in the first two graphs in the article. Maybe I'm wrong, but this reads a lot like they're cherry picking the data that makes them look good, while hiding the data that doesn't look very good.

Despite living in Minneapolis for 5 years, I never understood the street grid until reading this article. The fact that streets and avenues are opposite in Northeast vs South Minneapolis (and how North Minneapolis only has avenues) is a constant source of confusion. Obviously it can be worse (I've spent enough time in Pittsburgh to know that), and having GPS navigation means the inconsistency hasn't caused me very many actual problems. But still, it's annoying that the grid system isn't more consistent.

Maybe I should have clarified a little bit: It's easy to spot hate speech if your moral framework starts with the idea that everyone is entitled to a base level of life and human dignity. I acknowledge that that's not a universal idea. But quite frankly I don't particularly value the opinion of people who disagree with that sentiment.

Moral relevancy is kind of a cop out argument. We don't need literally everyone in the world to agree on something before we start taking action. Advocate for your own opinion, don't hide behind theoretical people across time and space.

Finally, I'm going to flip your argument a bit. You're the one who stated that there's no logical way to identify hate speech, so why don't you provide some examples? What are some things that you've seen identified as hate speech, where you disagree with that assessment?

Hate speech is one of those things that's hard to nail down a perfect academic definition, but is often easy to spot in practice. I may not be able to tell you exactly where the line is, but I can tell you that (for example) a Nazi saying "Jews deserved the Holocaust" is well across that line.

I'd describe Steam as a monolith, not a monopoly. There are several competing storefronts, and many games have been successful without releasing on Steam.

That said, the PC gaming landscape has completely warped around Steam. Epic had to offer huge incentives to get EGS exclusivity deals. Smaller games struggle without a Steam release, and even big companies with their own storefronts have decided the sales boost from Steam overrides the 30% cut Valve takes. And Steam is so entrenched at this point that it's difficult to see how a competitor could make a meaningful dent in Steam's market share.

Despite this, if we're going to have one dominant PC gaming storefront, Steam is probably the best we could hope for. Despite my many misgivings with Valve and Steam, it's difficult to imaging the situation improving if the dominant platform was run by a company like Microsoft or Epic. And it's fair to say that PC gaming wouldn't be nearly as big as it is today without the success of Steam.

If you want some more insight into what working at Valve is actually like, People Make Games released a great video last year [1] where they talked to a bunch of current and former employees.

While there are people who can thrive at Valve, their structure doesn't set people up for success. Valve has a many pseudo-managers, people who have a lot of influence at the company, but aren't designated as such. Doing well at Valve often requires trying to figure out what sort of things these people want, which they often don't make clear. Getting meaningful feedback is difficult, with employees often having little idea on what they need to do differently to improve things.

It really seems like Valve is kind of a mess internally, and they probably wouldn't still be around if it wasn't for the enormous success of Steam.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo

I think designing a system like that that gave the control necessary and worked predictably would be difficult. I'm not a navy person (the closest experience I have is driving fishing boats on a lake), but I do know that steering a big boat is complicated.

Steering via the rudder, via controlling the different throttles, or some combination has different characteristics. And which one is best would depend on the ocean and weather conditions, overall speed of the ship, as well as many other factors I don't know about.

A computer is unlikely to be able to properly account for all of this. And if it did, it would affect how the ship controls, something that you really don't want to do on a large ship.

Combining multiple controls into one computer managed control can be a good design. But I think it's the wrong design for large ships.

That's a good argument for independent throttle control being possible, but it's not a good argument for that being the default. When working with safety critical systems (which throttle control absolutely is), it's important to have sensible, easy to understand defaults. The more steps you have to take to do the "correct" thing, the more likely it is that someone screws up one of those steps.

Steam has a daily peak userbase of around 33 million users[1]. I haven't been able to find a recent monthly user count, but it's certainly a lot of users. The Steam hardware survey reports over 96% of surveyed users use Windows[2].

Now, we can't say for sure how many of these users primarily use their PC for gaming. But it's probably a lot of them. PC gaming is huge, and it's one of the few areas where a general consumer actually needs a PC, and can't use a phone or tablet.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/

[2]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

> The iPod was nice because of the storage, but competitors (like Zune) had more storage and were cheaper. It took a while for iPod to get "good" and gain adoption.

What are you talking about? When the first Zune launched, there were already 160 GB iPods, which was more storage then the Zune's 120 GB max (and more storage then you needed unless you watched a lot of videos on your iPod). I can't find MSRPs, but what I can find indicates that they were comparable on price as well.

> The iPhone was closer to the Vision Pro. It was obviously a revolutionary product, but it was extremely limited, and it took several OS versions before it got to the point where it was really ready for mass adoption. The iPhone 3G or 3GS was probably the first one that really got traction.

The iPhone 3G was the second generation iPhone, launched about a year after the first gen. The first gen also sold over 6 million units, while the Vision Pro has yet to crack a million.

I agree that the Apple Vision story isn't finished. But we shouldn't go re-writing history to defend it. Regardless of how much you like it, the Apple Vision Pro hasn't set the world on fire. And it's not clear what Apple can do to get the general public excited about it.

I understand why that seems like an appealing solution, but there are some pitfalls with creating multiple distinct UIs:

The most obvious pitfall is that more UIs = more work. There's the initial development, but it also increases the work every time you need to add something to the UI, and increases the likelihood of bugs. Microsoft could afford this increased cost, but it's not clear if it would be worth it.

Secondly, having multiple distinct UIs makes it difficult for someone to transition from a "casual user" to a "power user". If someone who has only used the "simple" UI switches to the "power" UI, they have to re-learn everything from scratch. Additionally, if there are any features limited to the "power" UI, it's extremely difficult for a "simple" UI user to discover those features even exist.

That doesn't mean that creating multiple UIs isn't ultimately the right solution for MS Office. It might be! But doing that comes with downsides, and I can understand why Microsoft doesn't want to go in that direction.

This is the reason I don't envy the UI designers on products like MS Office. There are professionals who use products in the MS Office suite every day, but there are other users who only need to create the occasional spreadsheet or powerpoint. Even if you think Microsoft has done a poor job with the UI, one can't deny that reconciling the differences between casual and power users is a difficult job.

Yes, this could have been done with CGI, but that seems unlikely. As others mentioned, doing this level of CGI destruction is super expensive, and destroying stuff is pretty cheap.

But there's also the bigger factor that, if Apple didn't destroy a bunch of stuff, why haven't they said so? It seems to me that if this ad was entirely CGI, Apple would admit that to minimize the backlash.

Therefore, unless Apple says something (or someone does some very convincing analysis), I'm inclined to believe this ad was done primarily with practical effects. That's just where the evidence is pointing right now.

What's this going to do to content that expects or incentivizes the user to pause the video?

Some youtubers put little gags that you only get when you pause the video (Jay Forman does this frequently). Others put "info blasts," where they put non-necessary info on screen for a second, so that people who are interested can read it, but others can safely ignore it (Tantacrul does this occasionally). Still others explicitly tell you to "pause the video" to solve a puzzle (Agadmator, does this so the viewer can determine the best move in a chess position).

There's likely other use cases that I haven't even thought of. Will these just have to go away due to the new pause ads? This seems like an obnoxious way to serve even more ad content, which will make the content on Youtube noticeably worse and less creative.

Realistically, the US government would nationalize Boeing before they let Boeing outright fail (and they'd probably only do that if bailouts didn't work). Boeing is a huge strategic asset for the US, and I don't think the US is willing to deal with the consequences of Boeing shutting down.

I'm not really disputing your broader point, but this:

> Porn is what got VHS to succeed over Beta.

Is just not true. For one, porn absolutely existed on Beta. But more broadly, by the time the content available on each format mattered, VHS had already won the format war.

That's because both Beta and VHS were primarily developed and marketed as a way to record TV to watch later. Tapes were way too expensive to make selling pre-recorded tapes viable when both systems launched. Pre-recorded tapes eventually did become popular, especially in the rental market. But that only happened well after VHS clearly won the format war, mostly due to VHS's longer recording time.

For more details, Technology Connections has a long rant about this misconception in this video: https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?si=X-FYCRAzowXOdqBb&t=931

I own 2 VR headsets, primarily for gaming. I've had a lot of fun with stuff like Beat Saber or Superhot VR, and Half Life Alyx is an incredible experience that could only exit with VR.

Despite that, VR is pretty much just a cool toy. Yes there are cool and interesting experiences in VR, but there are also a lot of limitations, not all of which are technological. I think VR will stay around for a while, but I don't see it moving past the "cool toy" stage anytime soon.

A better example would be Conrail, the US owned railroad that took over the Penn Central. Although in this case Penn Central was completely bankrupt, and I'm not sure if the US government actually paid anything to Penn Central's shareholders.

While there were absolutely people who thought the iPhone would fail, the idea that most people were skeptical about the iPhone is simply ahistorical. The iPhone had a huge amount of hype from the moment it was announced, and it was pretty clear from the outset that this was the direction cell phones were headed.

The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.

I'm kinda surprised it took this long. On a broad level, there's nothing that Apple really brings to the table that would help them build a successful car. They don't have the internal expertise necessary to help with the practical elements necessary to build a car, like fine tuning a suspension or manufacturing brakes that work. And they don't have the logistics infrastructure necessary to handle actually manufacturing a car.

The main thing Apple had that could help them build a car is a lot of money. But they could also use that money to get into food delivery or manufacturing CNC machines. Realistically, if Apple invested their cash into car manufacturing, they'd just end up with a whole lot less cash.

Probably the biggest barrier to a new creating a new commercial airline manufacturer is that there just aren't that many new planes sold each year. There aren't that many customers for commercial airplanes, and existing airplanes can last for decades when properly maintained.

Combine all that with the inherently high costs of running a commercial airline manufacturer, and there just isn't enough demand to support more companies in the space. Changing that would require huge technical breakthroughs, or fundamental changes to how passenger air travel works. Neither of those seem to be likely in the near future.

> It took ~5 years from when people in the NLP literature noticed BERT and knew the powerful applications that were coming, until the public at large was aware of the developments via ChatGPT. It may take another 5 before the public sees the developments happening now in the literature hit something in a companies web UI.

It also may take 10, 20, 50, or 100 years. Or it may never actually happen. Or it may happen next month.

The issue with predicting technological advances is that no one knows how long it'll take to solve a problem until it's actually solved. The tech world is full of seemingly promising technologies that never actually materialized.

Which isn't to say that generative AI won't improve. It probably will. But until those improvements actually arrive, we don't know what those improvements will be, or how long it'll take. Which ultimately means that we can only judge generative AI based on what's actually available. Anything else is just guesswork.

The problem is that (in the US) an overwhelming majority of car journeys (and traffic) occur during rush hour. And it's difficult to see how autonomous vehicles could reduce the amount of cars used during rush hour. Rush hour traffic involves a lot of vehicles moving to similar destinations, during the same time window. While some cars could certainly be used for multiple journeys during the same rush hour, most cars would likely sit in parking garages all day, just like today.

Both Google and Epic are large for-profit companies, and are primarily concerned with maximizing investor returns. Neither company should be considered "the good guy."

Despite that, I'm still glad that Epic won this case, as I believe they're in the right. But just because I think they're in the right with this court case does not mean I think that they're "the good guy," nor that they're concerned with gamers. Epic clearly has their own agenda, and in this specific case it aligns with my own.

Part of it is the ubiquity of advertising, and the ability to gamble from anywhere using your phone. Both of which make it much easier to develop a gambling addiction, and much harder for and addict to stop gambling.

Sports betting also has the unique issue of introducing corruption into sports. A league like the NFL has a huge number of players, coaches, referees, and league staff, all of whom can influence the outcome of a game, and all of whom are potentially susceptible to bribes. A notable case of this happening is the "Black Sox" scandal, where the 1919 Chicago White Sox blatantly threw the World Series in exchange for bribes from a gambling syndicate. The more prolific sports betting is, the more likely events like this are.

The Wikipedia page on "Criticism of Israel" [1] has an extensive section on critics of Israel accused of antisemitism, if you'd like a good starting point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Israel#Suppressio...

Israel and pro-Israel commentators have spent a lot of time and effort trying to ingrain the idea that Israel == Jews. Of course, not all Jews are Israeli, and not all Israelis are Jews. And there are many Jewish Israelis who are critical of the actions of the Israeli government.

Of course, a lot of criticism of Israel is rooted in antisemitism. But saying all criticism of Israel is antisemitic deflects legitimate criticism, and makes it harder to identify legitimate antisemitism.