mikpanko

One possible explanation: business owners have more skin in the game and care the most, so they are the most demanding and can’t tolerate waste. So they are the hardest to satisfy.

Additionally, they are not used to mincing their words because they don’t have bosses and are the most direct (and also egoistic).

According to NYT it seems like there were 2 controllers and “2 more in the building”. They also wrote that 2 seems normal for the late slower time of the night.

Not saying this is the right number of controllers to have, just sharing what I read in NYT.

I know about 2 big discontinuities in group dynamics, which are based on the limits of human cognition at specific sizes:

1) ~7 people. This is when each member cannot participate in the whole context and all important decisions. "2 pizza teams", limits of the working memory. Decisions cannot be done all together anymore. This results in hierarchies forming and people worrying about their positions in them.

2) ~150 people (Dunbar's number). This is when group members cannot all know each other anymore and have meaningful relationships. Max sizes of family-based tribes, an important unit size in the army. This results in inability to observe each other's actions well, so understanding who contributes a lot vs not shifts to indirect stories. Group members start building narratives instead of demonstrating contributions directly.

For those interested in going deeper on this topic, I recommend C. Thi Nguyen’s excellent book “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game”.

Beyond the common narrative on this topic, a factor to consider is that people might be more interested in hearing about death causes, which are not considered their own “fault”. These situations are less “fair”. Thus terrorism, homicide and accidents get a big focus.

Why do you think Glean and other top company GPT startups who are doing this for longer and have more resources cannot get this level of performance (helpful and accurate)? What makes your approach different and not easy to replicate?

Very cool. Curious: what is the minimum and maximum weight MacBook's trackpad can reliably measure this way?

Malloy is great. Why do you think it is not taking off if it is a clear significant improvement on SQL and even compiles to it?

Here is a trailer: https://youtu.be/EzuI5S-hTc4

I believe by “general-purpose AI” the report doesn’t mean AGI.

How do you verify accuracy of contributions? What stops somebody from submitting fake (overpriced) numbers for companies they don’t like (competitors)?

Unfortunately, the type of people who take personal responsibility for failures in organizations don’t end up climbing corporate ladders high enough to be considered for CEO positions. That’s just how large human groups work where contributions of each individual cannot be directly observed by everybody. Storytelling and making oneself look better start playing bigger role for promotions than actual results. Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in depth about it in his books about power.

Looks like Arica is over 500km north of Atacama desert described in the article.

It took the world decades to develop widely accepted standards for working with relational data and SQL. I believe we are at the early stages of doing the same with event data and sequence analytics. It is starting to simultaneously emerge in many different fields:

- eng observability (traces at Datadog, Sumologic, etc)

- operational research (process mining at Celonis)

- product analytics (funnels at Amplitude, Mixpanel)

As with every new field, there are a lot of different and overlapping terms being suggested and explored at the same time.

We are trying to contribute to the field with a deep fundamental approach at Motif Analytics, including a purpose-built set of core sequence operations, rich flow visualizations, a pattern matching query engine, and foundational AI models on event sequences [1].

Fun fact: creators of Scuba turned it into a startup Interana (acquired by Twitter), who we took a lot of inspiration from for Motif's query engine.

[1] https://motifanalytics.com

Does anybody know why Superset started trending today? Is there a major release?

There are very interesting improvements to SQL, which are much more ergonomic, extend functionality, and provide higher-level abstractions. Also backward compatible. PRQL and Malloy immediately come to mind but there are more. Anybody has good explanations why they struggle to get wide adoption?

We are extending LLMs from working on sequences of words to sequences of event data to help with various product analytics tasks, including the holy grail of finding levers for product optimization. Can be especially useful for growth and operations teams.

Happy to answer any questions.

Highly recommend Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books about power and leadership. He has developed a great mental model about how leadership works in the real world, which explains the pitfalls of common ways to think about it.

Humans want to believe in a just world and those in power are happy to provide narratives to that end. Meanwhile they are not correlated with how power is actually gained in the real world.

There seems to be some confusion in the comments. The cosmonaut didn't spend 878 days in space continuously but rather over 5 separate missions starting from 2008.

And he will reach 1110 days once he returns from the current mission in September.

Curious: what was Tesla’s initial justification for recording from cameras while the car is parked and charging?

How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees but it is not a tough decision.

Now Google is coming close to the ceiling of its ads market expansion, which fueled growth for 2 decades. Hard to maintain 20+% YoY growth, so the range of possible options and narratives is shrinking.

Can one sustain the same perks and culture narratives when their budget is suddenly cut by 20+%? That's the reality most companies face often but Google didn't have to worry about for a long time.

Disclaimer: worked at Google in 2010s.

Here is a great podcast interview with the post author on self-learning: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/andy-matuschak

Why is it taking Bluesky so long to launch basic features and allow more traffic? Are there some complexities related to using an open protocol?

Here is a fun Nand game inspired by the course: https://nandgame.com/

Curious how much it costs Netflix to serve 1 hour of a movie in high res. Can anybody with relevant knowledge estimate?

Apparently, Qatar Airways CEO of 27 years abruptly resigned in October and the new one stated that creating “a culture of trust and empowerment will be the building blocks of our shared success.” [1] So things might be changing.

[1] https://onemileatatime.com/news/new-qatar-airways-ceo/

I did a PhD in brain-computer interfaces, including EEG and implanted electrodes. BCI research to a big extent focuses on helping paralyzed individuals regain communication.

Unfortunately, EEG doesn’t provide sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to support good communication speeds outside of the lab with Faraday cages and days/weeks of de-noising including removing eye-movement artifacts in the recordings. This is a physical limit due to attenuation of brain’s electrical fields outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all commercial “mind-reading” toys are actually working based off head and eye muscle signals.

Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous. Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government approval for testing in humans (for a good reason).

If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech. It hands-down beat all BCIs I’ve heard of.