fhe

if authors get an advance that's greater than the sale of their books, doesn't it mean that the publishers lose money, i.e. paid more for those books than the books sales?

Apple seems a counter example, no?

There are any number of smaller region/states that are already benefiting. Singapore comes to mind. Leading labs are all setting up in Singapore and both 1) internally-transferring their previously US-based talents on work visa to Singapore, and 2) using Singapore as a base for Asia hires, mostly notably from China.

Yes, this... all the hype from the leading AI companies just pattern-matched so many past cases where things didn't pan out. really giving me the bad vibes..

I want to thank you for the following reasons: - that's an amazing, mind-opening essay; - I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the world). I had pretty much given up on ever finding it, thinking it might have just been a niche toy that had ceased production. Words are not enough to describe my joy when I opened the link and saw images of Meccano pieces!

this article itself is AI dump...

because, as Musk once said, always bet on the more interesting outcome (because we live in a simulation)

I felt Hassabis' heart was never in consumer applications or even LLMs. He'd much rather be doing scientific research.

and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.

S&P 500 is already heavily skewed towards tech companies (Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc.). I think it's something like 40% of S&P500 is tech. If SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic are added, tech risks would be even more concentrated, which is bad for diversification.

based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.

for what it's worth, back when i was in b-schoo, the predominant theory for the existence of large, diversified Asian conglomerates (Japanese keiretsu is a prime example, but it's not unique to Japan. Similar entities exist in S.Korea and Thailand, among other places) is the friction of starting and doing businesses in these countries. Startups there have such a hard time getting funded and landing clients, that the financing aspect alone give the conglomerates enough of an advantage to edge out startups, despite the inefficiencies typical of large organizations (and in this the Japanese corporate giants are no better than IBM or GE).

this theory is typically mentioned when introducing the Theory of the Firm, i.e. why do companies exist at all? why not everyone just freelances, and when you need a marketing/finance/legal/coding person, you just contract one on the free market? the idea is that there are always frictions when doing business with someone new (is this person good? trust worthy? how do i find out?), and how much friction there is determines how big the firm will grow (to incorporate functions in-house, or expand to other industries).

in a perfect frictionless economy, it could indeed be true that business transactions all happen at the smallest unit, i.e. the individual. at the other extreme, there would just be one firm that coordinates all economic activities. all real world economies sit some where in between.

it was only after I had to manage others that I realized the logic for a lot of these simplistic metrics and rules. they are in place to hold accountable the worst performers. a simple example is when i introduced flexible work hours. it was fine with most people, but there are always a few members that abuse the system. they stretch it to the very limit to what can be interpreted as "flexible". as a manager it posed a dilemma for me. i didn't want to take away this privilege just because of a few abusers, but it was both unfair and set bad precedents if I allowed them to get away with this. and let's say they couldn't be easily fired. most of my peers simply ended up going back to a system where people punched in and out.

even if this were true, PG (who can code, and can tell if someone else can) didn't think it was an issue when handing over YC to Altman.

this function will be a must-have for all home security systems. I used to spend hours going through home security cameras to check if our cat went out the house when the door was accidentally left open (turned out it was just really good at hiding within the house).

my question has always been why (I think most vertebrates) stop at two? It seems that an extra eye here and there could be really helpful. Maybe it's because all verterbrates evolved from an ancestor that had two eyes, and once the template is in place, it was simply too deep a local maximum to evolve out of? Similar to the 5-digit hand design that all vertebrates share.

i'd love to watch its rendering of any of the recent big budget sci-fi productions

I thought this a pretty mature technique? I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way. Interestingly, they too used tilapia fish skin, and not any of the more common local fish species. I wonder if there is something special about tilapia fish skin, or it was simply the species on which the technique was developed, and nobody bothered to try using other fish species.

but then again in this day and age maybe marketing skills are more important than anything else...

one example is auto generating subtitles -- elements of this tasks, e.g. speech to text with time coding, have been around for a while (openai whisper and others), but they have only recently been integrated into video editors and become easy to use for non-coders. other examples: depth map (estimating object distance from the camera; this is useful when you want to blur the background), auto-generating masks with object tracking.

I am getting the sense that the 2nd deriative of the curve is already hitting negative teritory. models get updated, and I don't feel I'm getting better answers from the LLMs.

On the application front though, it feels that the advancements from a couple of years ago are just beginning to trickle down to product space. I used to do some video editing as a hobby. Recently I picked it up again, and was blown away by how much AI has chipped away the repetitive stuff, and even made attempts at the more creative aspects of production, with mixed but promising results.

I see the same, and there is a posting of that title (and linking to the correct paper) also on HN frontpage. wondering what's going on.

I wonder if it's really just a function of how much work is involved in taking care of pets. I have had pet turtles and cats for years. Cats easily require 10x the amount of work to keep them happy and healthy.

or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).

or it keeps monitoring the web and notify me whenever something that matches my interests shows up -- like a more sophisticated Google alert. I really would love that.

I have the same question. My only answer is that making a sleek product such as the Mac Air really is a lot harder than it seems, even in 2025.

this seems a domain that's distinctively suited for AI

another analogy would be: aliens abducting a bunch of humans and recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment and write up on human society based on that, which ends-up reshaping alien culture.

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR)

for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.

reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).

thank you for posting this... and this is a common enough pattern (looking up previous HN threads on the same or related article) that I wonder if it's worthwhile to automate this.