spaceywilly

Echoes of Apple “leveraging” the Mouse/GUI interface from Xerox. I wonder if Google is at risk of going to way of Xerox, where they were so focused on their current business and product lineups they failed to see the potential new business lines their researchers were trying to show them.

This right here. I feel like the focus on just throwing more GPU at the problem is a mistake many of these companies are making at the moment. The real breakthroughs will come when we figure out how to use the current models and compute power more efficiently. If it’s prompt engineering that leads to this breakthrough, so be it.

The original article

>ValueAct’s chief executive, Mason Morfit, said Spotify’s costs had “exploded” and that it was “built for the bubble”

I would caution against drawing grand conclusions from these recent layoff rounds. Companies overhired during the pandemic, and now they are trimming that fat. It’s not necessarily a sign of any big strategic mistakes beyond “we hired too many people”

To me the key functionally for any language learning app is giving you feedback on your pronunciation and general understanding. I’ve been using Duolingo to learn Mandarin and when I try to speak to anyone it’s difficult for them to understand me, because my pronunciation is all wrong. The app is just feeding info to me one way, and I can try my best to recreate what I’m hearing, but there’s no way to know if I’m messing it up. They do have a speaking feature but it doesn’t work very well, certainly not to the same level as speaking with a real person who is fluent in the language and having them correct you.

I think a good use case for this would be auto generation of code documentation. There are many reasons to not want to upload your source code to a cloud AI service, but having an AI that was trained on your local code base so you could ask it “what does this foobar function do anyways?” would be killer.

Yeah... I worked on an embedded project with literally 2 engineers, and we had an A/B partitioning scheme, and a recovery partition (we fully qualified the recovery image and it was flashed to the units on day 1, it was guaranteed to boot and it would just sit and wait for the user to initiate a firmware load). The app on the device would reset a U-boot variable once it was successfully loaded, so U-boot could check the number of failed boot attempts. If it was >= 5 reboot attempts without booting successfully, it would go into the recovery partition.

There's really no excuse from Rivian on this, this is shoddy

Honestly, if you only are familiar with Python, it’s gonna be pretty tough to learn anything else. I would recommend spending some time learning literally any other language (Ruby is fine). Otherwise, if you just know Python, I think it will hold you back.

For example, ending an if statement with semicolon and then having the if block indented below is just not the normal way to do things. I’m not knocking Python, I use it all the time and it’s great, but it’s not a language you can carry over to learning other languages. It’s like if you know English, it’s pretty easy to learn Spanish. But if you only know Chinese, it’s going to be tougher to learn an “English-ish” language. Hope that makes sense.

Headline theatrics aside, this seems like a neat idea. However, the article doesn’t mention how this compares to systems that use electrolysis to generate hydrogen. In general the number of mechanical moving parts required for this system, and the idea of rusting and de-rusting these metals over and over doesn’t seem feasible compared to simply using electricity to separate the hydrogen. A quick google says electrolysis is around 70-80% efficient, I don’t see this setup ever beating that.

There you go. Seems like software could display this in a much more useful way than these labels ever could. Even the example in the article isn’t complete, it lists the data rate but doesn’t say anything about the amperage support for charging.

Just a simple information window that lists the max charging Wattage and data transfer speed of the current cable/charger/device configuration would suffice.

What a mess… couldn’t this be done in software instead? As in, if you try to charge your phone with a cable that doesn’t support fast charging, the phone could detect it and pop up an alert. I’m not sure the average consumer would know what to make of these labels, and that’s assuming the cable manufacturers would comply and put accurate labels in the first place.

I have a house in NH that gets plenty of sun in the summer but uses barely any energy. Then, in the winter it requires a ton of energy to heat the house, but gets barely any sunlight. My dream setup would be to have solar panels that then use the excess solar power to generate and store hydrogen, then in the winter the hydrogen could be burned directly or mixed with propane for heating.

To have batteries storing the excess energy needed to serve the house’s energy needs for the entire winter doesn’t seem like it would ever be practical, but with more advances in Hydrogen tech I’m hoping it will open up more possibilities.

I did find something here: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...

As I suspected, we can see a big shift comparing 1993 to 2019.

  Share of Homes Owned by Age
  1993:
  <35:  - 14.9%
  35-44 - 23.2%
  45-54 - 20.2%
  55-64 - 15.9%
  65+   - 25.7%

  2019:
  <35   -  9.8% (-5.1)
  35-44 - 15.7% (-7.5)
  45-54 - 19.0% (-1.2)
  55-64 - 23.4% (+7.5)
  65+   - 32.1% (+6.4)

Something I am curious to see is the "share of housing inventory owned by each age group" over the years. For example, "25% of housing is owned by people over 75 years old, 50% 55-75, 25% under 55", etc. broken down for each year.

Basically, I suspect that today a larger share of homes are owned by the older generations, making it more and more difficult over time for young families to find houses to buy. A crude way to phrase this would be that the older generations are hoarding all the housing supply. The older generations are increasing in numbers and financial means, and the housing supply is not increasing fast enough to give the younger generations the same opportunities to buy.

The end result of this seems to be a massive wealth shift to the older generations, leaving the current younger generations less well-off than their parents were at the same age. This seems to be the opposite of what you want to see in a well functioning society.

Not really, I just took my stuff and got out of there. It seemed like maybe they were new and they had had some other issues before, but I was just happy to get the stuff I paid for.

Seems like the justification would be to keep the type information when going back and forth to Ion. More like "multiple nullable types" instead of "multiple types of null"

userBirthDay: null <-- ok, but what type is it? String? Int? Timestamp?

userBirthDay: null.timestamp <-- ok, it's a timestamp typed variable, but we don't know the value. Yay, happy programmer.

I haven't seen anyone mention what to me is the biggest issue with self-checkout, false accusations of theft. I recently went through the self-checkout line in my local grocery store and accidentally left one item behind. When I went back to the store to retrieve it, they accused me of trying to take the item without paying for it. They said the person monitoring the self-checkout lines saw me put it in the bagging area without scanning it first. I had to go back to my car and get the receipt, which clearly showed I had paid for the item, but needless to say it was unnerving being accused of theft. I always use the staffed checkout lanes now, self-checkout isn't worth the trouble.

I think you are confusing “alien” in the sense of “not from our solar system” with the green dudes with big eyes. I think his argument that this meteor (IM1) was not from our solar system is pretty compelling.

It’s not “evidence of aliens,” it’s evidence of extrasolar origin of this particular meteor.

To me what’s cool about this is he came up with this theory about IM1, went out and figured out how to test his theory, and found exactly what he was expecting to find on the ocean floor. This is how you do science, kids.

“The key is to get multiple 400k offers in the same week”

Wow why didn’t I think of that!

There’s also a cost to getting a job using a recruiter vs. finding it on your own. The company has to pay the recruiter, which means less money available for you in the negotiation process.

I’ve worked for a hardware startup. We didn’t have the budget for a thermal chamber, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t test and anticipate temperature related issues. We had plenty of setups like the one in the blog with units in the fridge or on a car dashboard on a summer day.

The difference is we did it before the units reached customers.

2nd order effects

Maybe it’s just me but I always found the storyboards to be a nightmare. When it works it is ok, but I would argue no faster than just writing the code. When it doesn’t work and you have to attempt to debug an issue, hoo boy. I know how to code, just let me code the UI.

Here is an article from 2014 that discusses this trend:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/fashion/how-uber-is-chang...

One thing I didn’t see mentioned, why didn’t people just take a cab before Uber? Was it just too inconvenient?

When I was laid off security walked me from a conference room near the exit to my car. I was not even allowed to collect my stuff from my desk, had to have a friend bring it to me after.

I am surprised companies haven’t a done more with wireless EV charging. Wireless charging almost seems like a necessity for full autonomy, since the car can’t plug and unplug itself, but it could easily be programmed to drive over a charging pad when not in use.

As you mention, it is quite efficient. One thing people may not realize is current wired charging requires quite a bit of complex circuitry in the car to convert line voltages to the levels needed to charge the battery. With wireless charging, this transformation can happen at the interface between the two charging pads, so the efficiency is actually quite similar to a wired connection.

I wouldn’t be surprised if wireless charging eventually becomes commonplace, but my understanding is the current technology isn’t quite ready yet. It requires the car to be parked precisely over the pad, and isn’t able to charge as fast as current wired charging tech.

Maybe they can create a specific pattern people can enter in their Twitter bio, then build a crawler

Have to think about the future though when you’re dealing with running stuff in walls. Think about what would’ve been acceptable throughput 10 years ago. If you built your home network around that, you’d probably be kicking yourself today.

This is pretty standard procedure when a company gets bought. The new owners will conduct a review and decide who to keep and who to get rid of. They have probably been given a target of how many people they want to lay off and are evaluating who is worth keeping.

It’s not worth staying at a company that gets acquired, you’ll either get laid off or be asked to do the same work with less people, and awful morale.