absolutelastone

It has always seemed to me that level of strategic direction doesn't come from the CEO's brain, but from the big investors. The CEO's job is to execute what they want.

Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant.

The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.

I agree the legal restrictions (and liability) should be looser. But other countries are pretty bad about this too in my experience. It's more of a medical establishment monopoly thing it seems.

Also you can already buy home ECG devices for a couple hundred bucks. Not sure if there is some history of being banned in the past or whatever, but otherwise I'd guess the main problem is just a lack of much interest in the market.

I suspect it's probably worse than that in reality. From a quick search on state of the art ECG results (the full system of leads attached all over your torso) it looks like around 90 percent specificity (True negative rate) and under 50 percent sensitivity (true positive rate). So it's only pretty good at ruling out heart attacks, but still misses them sometimes. But is pretty bad when it comes to false alarms. I think they use it along with multiple other tests and consideration of symptoms in triage at the hospital.

If you trace back through the executive orders (on then off then on again...) regarding DEI, it starts with Obama. Biden did have several and it seems like things started really getting mandated and serious then, perhaps due to BLM. We seem to have an unstable oscillation going back and forth here until it breaks.

But yes it wasn't just top-down. The diversity statements in faculty hiring started about ten years ago and started becoming mandatory and used for screening at many places about five years ago.

The first rule is still to stop digging. Of course you can't spend four years pushing an extremely unpopular position on an issue and expect it to not matter the next day.

Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.

Doesn't the CPI produce an average estimate of what everyone is already paying for housing as opposed to the full sticker price for a new entrant? Meaning if most people are living in houses they bought in the past at much lower prices and interest rates, then the CPI will be heavily weighted towards their costs as opposed to the much smaller fraction of renters and first-time buyers.

There was a massive tech boom in that time with technologies like cars, electricity, and communications.

So your argument is that nothing is communism? The fact that it's a single large organization allocating resources is rather key to the whole point. That the same organizational structure doing it is interesting to me anyway. I suspected this line of thinking is too triggering for some people though.

A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...

South Korea has the lowest birth rate. Japan has an older population and higher death rate, so a faster shirking population currently.

Seeing all the recent tariff fights and actually finding out what the story is behind some of the different industries, I am becoming much more of the opinion that other countries take over industries as the result of specific agendas targeting those industries and maintaining a large degree of monopoly over them. The US has not reacted much because each country only took one industry or so and it was a way to manipulate them or appease them or whatever, but it is turning into death by a thousand cuts. I definitely think the US government needs to be a lot more involved than they have been in a range of ways. That list of ridiculous-sounding cancelled NSF grants wasn't it though. If you're talking about the SBIR program, that is pretty tiny. I assume it will continue, it is legally set to be at 2% or whatever.

Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning.

On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.

That difference in difficulties is kind of the point. Imagine, as an extreme, a company makes a machine with certain functions performed based on which button combinations you press. A second company gets a patent for using the first company's machine for doing various tasks by pressing various button combinations, which are new uses of the machine no one had thought of yet. Now the second company has all the bargaining power in the market and so gets giant margins, despite doing a tiny fraction of the work it takes to make those tasks possible.

I wonder if our current system ended up this way because it is the most efficient in terms of specialization, or because the patent system drove things in this direction where the people last dealing with customers (i.e., those making the software layer) have the best info of what tasks the customers want to do with their computers, and hence patent the solutions first. Leaving hardware vendors no choice but to serve the software monopolies (one after another since the 80's).

You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column. Seems simplistic to me, but you can believe what you like. Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI. 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".

I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.

I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.

It wasn't just that by itself. There was a list of several undisclosed data tweaks and manipulations. None were particularly fraudulent or anything, but once you have them all included in the paper, as the former author was complaining, it seems more likely that they just manipulated the theory and data as needed to make them match. There's a big difference between predicting something and demonstrating it in experiment, versus showing your theory can be made to fit some data you have been given when you can pick the right adjustments and subset of data.

one point is a collection of size 1. It is always data.

If you don't know the value of what you are buying you are most likely to get even less than what you payed for. In the story they basically got scammed by overseas shops who probably pocketed most of the money and farmed out the effort to minimally-skilled and minimally-paid developers who were in way over their heads.

They probably just combined all phoning home information into one. Usage monitoring includes version used, which leads to automatic update when needed (or when bugged...).

I think the person you are responding to is criticizing the original "mantra" quote not the author's criticism of it(?)

As I read that, "more than a screwdriver" was to make a point about how hard it is to even fulfill the requirements for "assembled in the USA". "Made in the USA" is even stricter. And they were going beyond that and claiming secure supply chains with western distribution. It did seem a little like a marketing pitch since it focused on what they did versus what the final gap really was, but apparently they sell it to the govt for that big markup. Presumably you don't want to try and sneak things past such a customer.

If you're just thinking of price, the farther down the supply chain you go the less impact of tariffs.

I do kind of recall the last US airport I went through internationally that there was weirdly no customs lanes or anything after baggage claim, just big one-way doors.

Not that you can reach that point without stating your declarations on the record. I think it was one of the kiosk stages.

You always need to be careful when it comes to customs really. Some minor things like certain foods and OTC medicines can have big ramifications in many countries, including losing your visa. If you're a business person counting on using a multi-year visa to do your job, you can screw up your career by getting it revoked.

Of course I think people should get second chances, especially naive students. The professor should also have been mindful of this risk and made sure she complied with the rules too.

You can go online and do everything before your flight or get a paper form at some point at the airport.

But not exactly the same people which is the point of motivating behavior. There is at least some degree of flexibility in what you can buy.

Insane rates will of course have insane effects. Which is a separate issue.

Depends how you look at it, but fatal things should have a clear explanation for why they kill you. We can survive longer without food and that one is easy to explain.

A bigger pupil would work better for dim light vision. Light through the iris would sacrifice daylight vision. The light skin on the other hand does have an obvious benefit in that climate for Vitamin D.

I think it's three at this point? With the first one coming online this year.

Maybe it's suspicious in Silicon Valley, but I know plenty of people who make minimal use of their phone. In Japan, flip phones are supposed to still be fairly popular.