TrainedMonkey

Can you cite your sources? My understanding is that based on past data there is strong correlation between special military operations, people working late in pentagon, and takeout places in the vicinity having a spike of orders.

It was an unserious response to an absolutist statement. I pointing out where such absolutism would lead if applied to other areas.

I don't think fingerprint scanner on guns will be effective as it tracks ownership and not legality of usage. However, a number of modern vehicles do have capabilities to perform autonomous actions, including overriding user input.

While we are at it, let's also get all the weapon manufacturers. How dare they hide behind "we are just making a tool" and "we are not responsible for what our users do". And don't get me started on people using cars to cause harm to others, why is nobody going after big auto?

Seems overly reductive, both supply and demand will determine what happens. So far demand for Waymos seem fine, they can stimulate it way further by lowering the prices. The problem is on the supply side, specifically unit price economics. Intervention per mile is just one part that goes into profitability and I doubt it's biggest one. I would estimate the costs to be in this order - vehicle cost, maintenance (and vehicle longevity), human intervention, charging, fleet management (cleaning, etc), and regulatory environment.

In particular, Jaguar Waymos are over 150k a pop. It seems far fetched that any of them will make ever break even. New generation is reportedly $75k per vehicle which is significantly better. I could not find any data for Zoox vehicle cost, but given how few of them there are it's a non-player.

Finally the elephant in the room. Outside of camera vs lidar holy war, Tesla seems well positioned to dominate supply side of the equation if the demand shows up. Robotaxis are reportedly under $35k, they own the factories and know how to build more, they also own the maintenance side.

Apparently the trick is two std::rotates : https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260101-00/?p=11...

As a side note, love how Raymond handled that, no fluff and straight to the point. Beginners mind and all that.

Withings smart watches are kind of insane with 30 day battery life, but the subscription farming in the app is infuriating.

All I want from a smart watch:

- Waterproof, wireless charging, at least a week of battery life

- Automatically track exercise and sleep, let me update the data if needed.

- Track my fitness trends over time, looking at you resting heart rate

- Optionally, learn a couple of recurring patterns to improve automatic exercise assignment. If I hike twice a week and you see an exercise session with a consistent heart rate profile you better believe I am hiking

Depending on the application you would generally use PTP to get sub-microsecond accuracy. The real trick is that architecture should tolerate various clocks starting or jumping out of sync and self correct.

Charge cycle capacity drops are generally not linear. If we start with 2x capacity and drop to 1.6x after 100 cycles, then we might end up with 1.2x after 1000 cycles. Some smartphone manufacturers would love that as you start with extremely superior energy density and then have a built-in obsolescence.

AFAIK cost here counts only the manufacturing side. While your conclusion that in the long run economies of scale will prevail, the lifetime costs are probably more than 30%. For example I expect recycling costs to be significantly worse for the Li-Ion.

> But part of this is the latest incarnation of the prosperity gospel, an early (and now pervasive) idea that wealth is a demonstration that you are favored by God. Another version of this is the myth of meritocracy under capitalism. So if you're wealthy, it's because you're better than all "the poors", by definition.

There is a whole industry that caters to ultra wealthy and one of their core tenets is that customer is always right. This is problematic because negative feedback is an important mechanism of personal growth and self development. Thus we end up with ultra wealthy people being mostly disconnected from the society.

> The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine?

This feels forced, there are obvious and good reasons for running that experiment. Namely, learning how it fails and to generate some potentially viral content for investor relationship. The second one seems like an extremely good business move. It is also a great business move from WSJ, get access to some of that investor money in an obviously sponsored content bit that could go viral.

Having said that, I do feels the overall premise of the blog - the world dynamics seems exceedingly irrational in recent times. The concerning fact is that irattionality seems to be accelerating, or perhaps it is keeping pace with the scale of civilization... hard to tell.

All journalist organizations, unfortunately, have an incentive to bias content towards maximum clickbait. The ones that don't end up being outcompeted.

Currently helping with hiring and can't help but reflect on how it changed over past couple of years. We are now filtering for much stronger candidates across all experience levels, but junior side of the scale had been affected much more. Where previously we would take top 5% of junior applicants that made it past first phone screen, now it's below 2%.

AFAIK compute heavy datacenter in space don't work. But if you already have a vast fleet of laser connected LEO satellites throwing some efficient SSDs into them can make a lot of sense. A large portion of the traffic is fairly static, e.g. video based content or even model weights. Caching that will save you ground to space side of the transmission. This will let you put more user beams on satellites and use less ground stations.

> we need a hyper-productive world where someone working a few hours a year generates enough wealth to secure a comfortable lifestyle up there with the best of them.

This is naive, productivity increases had decoupled from compensation a long time ago. See https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down. I think more likely than not, AI will further stratify our society.

I long had a similar idea for stocks. Analyze posts of people giving stock tips on WSB, Twitter, etc and rank by accuracy. I would be very surprised if this had not been done a thousand times by various trading firms and enterprising individuals.

Of course in the above example of stocks there are clear predictions (HNWS will go up) and an oracle who resolves it (stock market). This seems to be a way harder problem for generic free form comments. Who resolves what prediction a particular comment has made and whether it actually happened?

I feel like 50% of that is explained by the luxury housing build out bubble in Austin specifically.

Fundamentally because demand and supply curves are lagged. This drives DRAM flood and drought cycles. Right now high DRAM prices are driving fab investment up and demand down. In 3-5 years new fabs will cause DRAM glut that will drive prices down. Lower prices will stimulate demand via things like doubling DRAM size in consumer electronics as companies compete on getting the number bigger. Eventually demand curve will eclipse the supply and we will end up in the DRAM drought again.

This time things are further complicated by the fact that the world is investing a sizable chunk of GDP into building RAM hungry data centers in hopes of building a god which will convert the rest of the world into data centers.

Google having their own hardware for training and inference is newsworthy, but the link is pretty bad. Here is a much better source https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

For many large companies or even teams, there exists a class of bugs / issues / features where dropping 5-10k on a bounty is extremely cost efficient compared to working around the issue or internal development. That might not fund development outright, but at worst it would point out the features people want and serve to inform what to work on next. I think there are a couple reasons why that is not prevalent. Most important one is that highly compensated enterprise teams that would benefit the most from placing bounties tend to avoid software that is lacking features or has bugs. Secondary is not implemented here ego and general disconnect between people in the trenches that know what needs to be done and people controlling ability to place bounties.

Imagine FAANG assigning $500 per engineer per year to allocate to feature / bug bounties.

I noticed that people love pointing how far AI field has advanced in a few years and extrapolate next few years. While at the same time being dismissive of Chinese semiconductor manufacturing process. In similar vein I also remember claims that TSMC Fab in Arizona can never work, and yet it does. So I don't know man, I wouldn't underestimate what a billion of enterprising people can do. Especially when paired with the system that has a pipeline of funneling smart people into elite schools.

People want to belong. If you do not belong to anything that looks like a cult you operate outside of society.

It's more complex than that, a summary of my highly subjective understanding:

1. AI companies manage to build AGI and achieve takeoff. I have no idea on how to hedge against that.

2. The market is not allowed to crash. There will likely be some lag between economic weakness and money printing. Safer option is probably to buy split 50% SPY and 50% bonds. A riskier option is trying to time the market.

3. The market is allowed to crash. Bonds, cash, etc.

Depending on what you believe will happen and risk appetite you can blend between the strategies or add a short component. I am holding #2 with no short positions in post-tax accounts and full SPY in tax advantaged accounts.

> But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals.

My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing with parents first, and kept them around as pets. People love playing with tiger, bear, and wolf pups and keeping them as pets today.

It's hard to avoid putting my sarcasm hat on. There we go. Finally. The AI killer APP. Not only can we supercharge consumerism by automatically buying amazon slop for your loved ones. But there are whole new product landscapes to monetize - the gift slop stream, the shops optimized for AI to buy the gifts from, the ads for the AI optimized Shopify sites, the SEO for the ads for the AI optimized shopping. And there are even new frontiers to disrupt - what if we skip the AD and SEO middleman and pay chatbots directly for traffic. Amazing.

I am going to summarize with - they want you to use their app for monetization and ux purposes.

I think this is really cool, but math seems off:

> A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home > * You pay ~$100 down > * Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months

But also:

> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)

$1.5 week is $6 a month, not $60.

Maybe not so surprising as Norway summer temp averages get into mid 60s F (18C) at the warmest.

He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.

It would be really cool if that was true, but I would estimate the odds of quantum gravity enabling superluminal travel or comms as low. Occam's razor and all that.