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HotHotLava

442 karma · joined April 2, 2020

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HotHotLava··on Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol
Taxis and B&Bs and Hotels all still exist and compete with Uber and AirBnB.

Even at the same price there are valid reasons why many people prefer an Uber over a Taxi, in particular the predictable pricing and globally consistent UI.

HotHotLava··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
If the problem starts to become big enough, I'd expect airsoft venues to offer special streaming or non-streaming times, depending on which group is bigger. Similar to how Saunas offer special clothed or women-only days.
HotHotLava··on Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s
H200 rental prices currently start at $2.35 per hour, or $1700 per month. Even if you just rent for 4h a day, the $200 subscription is still quite a bit cheaper. And I'm not even sure that the highest-quality open models run on a single H200.
HotHotLava··on Anthropic raises $13B Series F
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't talking about the management hierarchy, but "from the top" in the sense that it was big established companies inventing the cloud and innovating and pushing in the space, not small startups.
HotHotLava··on Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
For me, I actually feel much more motivated to write good and accurate documentation knowing there will be at least one reader who is going to look at it very closely and will attempt to synthesize useful information from it.

Same with my old open-source projects, it's kinda cool knowing that all the old stuff that nobody would have ever looked at anymore is now part of a humanity-wide corpus of useful knowledge on how to do X with language Y.

HotHotLava··on 'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says
That's why it's just "mostly" false, but 'empty' is a word with a specific meaning, and claim here was that the port is literally empty of ships. (or, in the case of the Twitter message they show, that there's only one single ship in the harbor)
HotHotLava··on Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads
Sure, but then it's less of a fun side business and just becomes straight up smuggling.
HotHotLava··on Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US
The playbook is obvious - if Trump loses, Vance refuses to certify the election results due to "fraud", Republican states will produce alternate lists of electors that vote for Trump, and he will claim that in reality he just won reelection with the biggest margin in history.

How do we know this isn't just crazy conspiracy theory? Because they already did attempt the same thing in 2020, and this time they had the chance to vet the VP candidate for this scenario.

HotHotLava··on Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI
That comparison also shows that a recognizable brand alone can easily be worth more than 100 billion; Coca-Cola also has competition that offers similar products and zero tech advantage, but they still managed to keep their number one spot for decades.
HotHotLava··on OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
Used to. If they're going to start a trade war, pull out of NATO and invade Greenland instead, there'll not be much soft power left to drag Europe anywhere.
HotHotLava··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
The literal first sentence of the announcement is:

> The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years

HotHotLava··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.
HotHotLava··on UK's hardware talent is being wasted
EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.

Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.

HotHotLava··on TikTok goes dark in the US
Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.

HotHotLava··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.

I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.

HotHotLava··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?

The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.

HotHotLava··on The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps
Unlike 40 years ago these commits will be reviewed by an experienced colleague and automatically unit and integration tested, so there's no benefit anymore to training people separately before being allowed to touch the real codebase.

Back in the day people with SVN/CVS commit access would push directly to the main branch after testing locally, and testing would be done as part of preparing a release, so it was more necessary to have a "safety" period where new people could get used to the new codebase.

HotHotLava··on Placing #1 in Advent of Code with GPT-3
You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.
HotHotLava··on The coming tsunami of fakery
Even if your neighbor hosts a website for your local football club or whatever, it will almost certainly use some hosting service and not a local machine. The number of websites self-hosted from a residential home must be a tiny, tiny fraction of all "interesting" websites.
HotHotLava··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
There are several power companies in Germany that are offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense that they're committing to constructing or buying new green power plants with a generating capacity at least as high as the amount sold X years ago.

The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.

HotHotLava··on Using the “Z” symbol could lead to prosecution in two German states
There isn't really a slope here, this completely in line with earlier applications of the same law. For example the IS flag and various Nazi symbols are also banned. This is part of the tradition of "wehrhafte Demokratie" (defensive democracy) that was established after the bad experiences from the Weimar republic with anti-democratic forces abusing the democratic structures.

Keep in mind that Germany is not the US, and human dignity is actually placed above freedom of speech in the German constitution.

HotHotLava··on Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing
No, the definition of a monopoly is "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service."

A company that is not easy to undercut could just be an efficient business that operates roughly at cost without excessive margins.

HotHotLava··on Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
According to whose definition? If Tolstoy, Marx and Beethoven count as geniuses, I don't see an argument for excluding Asimov, Musk or Eminem.
HotHotLava··on Invasion could drive 5M Ukrainians to flee abroad – U.N
Feel free to cast the first stone after you've voluntarily submitted yourself to years of torture to defend your idealistic positions.
HotHotLava··on Germany shelves Nord Stream 2 pipeline
The relevant part of the statement, per the official source linked above:

> Minister Habeck said: "The idea of including fossil gas in the taxonomy system is also questionable. The European Commission does at least make it clear that gas from fossil fuels is only a bridging technology which needs to be substituted by green hydrogen. New gas-fired power plants must already be equipped for conversion to hydrogen, and from 2035 they must be operated on the basis of green hydrogen or low-carbon gas. This is ambitious and will require large amounts of hydrogen. Incentivising sufficient investment in the transition towards hydrogen, establishing the necessary infrastructure and ramping up hydrogen production are some of the major challenges we are currently facing."

HotHotLava··on Audiblegate
> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.

If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.

HotHotLava··on An ancient geometry problem falls to new mathematical techniques
I think this is overly narrow: Anaxagoras considered the problem of turning a circle into a square of the same area, and these mathematicians shed new light on that problem. He was probably thinking of compass and straightedge because it was the only language he had for attacking the problem, but it's not he published a paper with the precise definition of the terms and the theorem he tried to prove.

From what I can tell from a cursory search, there is no surviving fragment concerning squares and circles from Anaxagoras himself, and the mention on Wikipedia goes back to a quote from Plutarch:

> There is no place that can take away the happiness of a man, nor yet his virtue or wisdom. Anaxagoras, indeed, wrote on the squaring of the circle while in prison.

HotHotLava··on I hacked SONOS and YouTube the same day
The ownership question is orthogonal though, a Sonos speaker is also able to play your self-hosted music collection from a local samba share.
HotHotLava··on My dishwasher won’t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi
Yes, that's true for literally every possible innovation in every field - it is possible not to use it.
HotHotLava··on My dishwasher won’t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi
I don't have a smart dishwasher, but I think an API to display the current salt level and a web UI that has some space to display and comfortable configure the various settings instead of 6 incomprehensible buttons would certainly be things I'd be interested in.
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