Periscope was in closed beta when Meerkat launched. Neither was a clone of the other. Just two teams with the same idea at the same time.
335 karma · joined July 15, 2017
Hacker news has become a much more depressing place post-Covid. Musk, Zuck, the All-In guys, Bezos, Altman. All of them role models for the people here, and all of them have gone mask-off to one degree or another in their pursuit of power and wealth and public adulation.
One side of the hacker/startup coin is "look at how I [built this company|escalated privilege|retired early] by [twisting the rules of the system|exploiting a loophole|penetration testing]", and that ethos isn't entirely that far away from "did you know you can get the laws changed just by spending $50k on a senator?" or "Twitter only needs 50 engineers as long as they're all H1-B hostages".
It really feels like what we've lost is empathy and humanity.
Anecdote time: I joined a not-quite-FAANG in an acquihire. Some of my teammates negotiated hard on the way in; I did not. After I got into management, I learned that they're perfectly willing to give you an extra $10k on your initial salary offer, but then you just get a lower raise after the first year, so everyone ends up in the same spot almost immediately anyway. The $10k was a rounding error in the total comp, and anyway they preferred to have steady employees who could be happy in a good situation for many years, rather than mercenaries who were more likely to chase vanity metrics and leave half-finished projects when they left in 18 months. Equity comp was generous and non-negotiable.
You've been capitalism-pilled. Sometimes it's worth funding things that "aren't worth funding". Not everything needs to return an easily measurable 10% YoY. Investing in the richness of experience for your population or student body or community is a good thing, even if it doesn't always pay itself back in an obvious way. Well-rounded people are happier, more resilient, and yes, more productive.
Don't blow the whole budget on underwater basket-weaving, but investing a bit in enrichment and supporting niches is an important part of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
I'm not reading the arguments closely enough to make a judgement, but the reference is to an imagined moral imperative to spread "civilization" and whatnot to "lesser" cultures and peoples. We covered it in high school where I grew up.
Like Manifest V3, which explicitly makes it harder to strip out Google's own ad products on websites you visit?
> without Google all that BS would get bundled in the browser.
Or maybe it wouldn't. There are already lots of other browsers that don't.
Absolutely not. This is an obvious bad faith interpretation of my comment.
> Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI.
Again, you're just obviously completely factually wrong to anyone who has even a modicum of casual interest in the history of these technologies.
> Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".
And one more time for the people in the back. Anyone with any amount of actual knowledge on the topic at hand can immediately dismiss your entire argument because it isn't based in anything resembling fact. It's just you wishing or hoping that it might be somewhere close to true. This is just that scene from Billy Madison: "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
But the "billions" didn't precede the "millions". They're just completely incorrect, and anyone that knows even a tiny amount about the actual history can see it immediately. That's why these comment sections are so polarized. It's a bunch of people vibe commenting vs people that have spent even like an hour researching the industry.
The history of semiconductor enterprise in the US is just a bunch of private companies lobbying the government for contracts, grants, and legal/trade protections. All of them would've folded at several different points without military contracts or government research grants. Read Chip War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_Wo...
You're missing the point. It doesn't "know" anything. The only thing it can "know" is the statistical relationships between tokens in its dataset. It doesn't "know" anything about the meaning of those tokens. It doesn't even "know" whether it "knows" anything or not. The best it can do is "Here's a recursively generated string of ASCII codes that are statistically likely to follow each other according to the data corpus."
It's Rashomon. It can point you in the right directions a lot of the time, but there's no getting around the fact that you have to double-check its answers with external sources.
> Or at least this is how I interpret the term.
That's not a very useful interpretation because it's not grounded in technical reality.
> [learning a language is] only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.
This is a person who doesn't understand actual face-to-face communication, like, at all. Even though translation apps are amazing, in a social interaction, there's no getting over the imposition of the halting, hesitant back-and-forth of device-assisted translation. Sure, you can almost always eventually get your point across, but you're never going to set the other party at ease in the same way as speaking their language yourself.
Thank you for making it so easy to completely ignore the rest of your comment.
Have you ever worked on a military contract? Or even just a regular government contract? It's a whole other type of sales, contracting, and fulfillment process.
Almost daily, Michigan’s Arab Americans voters in precincts of heavy concentration are receiving glossy mailings with messages like: “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff: Unwavering Support for Israel” or “Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff, the ultimate pro-Israel power couple” or “Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotkin [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan]: The proven team we can trust to stand up for the Jewish community.” And targeted video messaging on social media sites saying things like “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”
Meanwhile, in areas of Pennsylvania where there are heavy concentrations of Jewish voters, homes are receiving messages like: “Kamala Harris will embolden anti-Semites” or “Donald Trump always stands up for the Jewish people.” And targeted video messaging on social media platforms saying “Kamala Harris will not be silent about human suffering in Gaza” or “Two-faced Kamala Harris: Standing with Palestine and not our ally, Israel.”
These mailings and social media posts are paid for by a dark money group, Future Coalition PAC. Researchers have identified that one of the major donors to this group is Elon Musk, the principal owner of X and a strong supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid.
First, the history of chip design and manufacturing is the history of modern weapons design[0]. As long as chips have existed we've been sticking them in brand spanking new weapons systems precisely because it's a matter of life and death. Chip makers of all kinds live and die by defense contracts.
"Because it's a matter of life and death" as a roadblock only makes sense if you don't think about it at all. If I offload some of my SIGINT processing to my brand new 3nm nodes and they don't work, won't my scheduler just mark them bad and reallocate the work back to the machines I had before? If my first shipment of 3nm drone chips doesn't deliver as promised, I've still got my existing inventory of 5nm drones and plenty of suppliers. You balance the inherent riskiness of new technology via redundancy, not avoidance.
> A 2025 tank isn't going to use chips made using TSMC's cutting-edge 3nm node.
No shit. But 2025 servers can, so can 2025 drones, so can 2025 bombs, so can 2025 satellites. Do you think whoever figures out how to communicate via quantum entanglement[1] is going to just not do it because "it's a matter of life and death"? Hell no. They're going to use it to run circles around their enemies while it's working, and they'll fall back to older communication channels when it isn't working.
[0] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0310bombs/ [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-reaches-new...
I agree with your broader point about low confidence in an AI-powered quantum leap, but in my experience this point about repeated playthroughs is actually backwards. Lots of the most popular and/or heralded games in recent years use procedural generation to enable repeated playthroughs as a core mechanic. Balatro, Hades, Slay the Spire, Diablo, Helldivers, Civilization, etc etc. Even things like drafting in MtG or board layouts in Settlers of Catan use procedural generation to increase replayability.