nostrademons

Down $13+ (about 4%) after hours, and the drop was apparently after they mentioned the search revenue miss on the earnings call because it was flat when I looked an hour ago. So not entirely priced in.

IIRC there was a search revenue miss last quarter too. Likely because of AI cannibalization of search results. Classic search is very heavily monetized, and a monopoly ad market. AI mode is currently lightly monetized, and a much more segmented market, and one that is harder to target ads for. Plus there are easily half a dozen LLM vendors now, while Search was a clear monopoly.

This is something investors should be very concerned about. It's not at all clear that whatever comes post-Gemini will be nearly as profitable as Search has been for the last 20 years.

I had an LG TV for work because my team developed some of the software on it. Similar experience - it got progressively worse (including the software my team developed, which in true Google fashion was deprioritized, discontinued, team laid off, and left to rot without anyone bothering to tell LG that it was no longer being maintained) until by the time I left that team it was nearly unusable as a "smart" TV and all I did was run Netflix and Disney+ on it. Then my kid broke it with a well-placed whack of a plastic sword.

Would definitely not buy with my own money. I actually really like a lot of LG's other appliances (we have a washer, dryer, and dual ovens from them that are great), but for a TV, I just want a dumb screen that I can hook an HDMI cable to and run off a computer.

It's really refreshing to see someone publish a null result.

I think the point of the article is that that is your life, so embrace it. There's no sense struggling against or resenting it; instead, find the joy in what you have, so you can enjoy the moments you get.

A good pop-culture analogue is the movie Mr. Holland's Opus. Mr. Holland was a struggling but talented young musician; he dreamed of composing his magnum opus and leaving his mark on the world. But he has take a job teaching music to support his wife and young son, who turns out to be deaf. The job requires long hours and he finds himself lacking much time to connect with his son. 30 years later, he's laid off. His former students come back to stage a performance of his symphony in the high school auditorium.

The point is that the students were the opus. Not the music, which is thoroughly mediocre. The music was just the vehicle to bring the students together. A lot of critics wonder why symphony at the end isn't more impressive, it being Mr. Holland's life's work, but don't realize that that's the point of the movie. Your actual life's work is in the decisions you make, day in and day out, in response to the constraints that your life actually presents you, not some image that you may have formed based on a platonic ideal of no constraints.

All you have to do is promote policies that make the problem more palatable but don't actually solve it. Treatments instead of cures. As long as the problem needs treatment, the organizations dedicated to treating it will still be around, but as soon as it is no longer a problem at all, those organizations will cease to exist and everyone working on it needs a new job.

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.

For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

It's quite a bit more than that. I get total taxes paid of:

Federal: 1240 + 0.12 * (50400 - 12401) + 0.22 * (105700 - 50401) + 0.24 * (201775 - 105771) + 0.32 * (256225 - 201776) + 0.35 * (640600 - 256226) + 0.37 * (1200000 - 640601) = 399938.83

State: 0.01 * 11078 + 0.02 * (26264 - 11080) + 0.04 * (41452 - 26265) + 0.06 * (57542 - 41453) + 0.08 * (72724 - 57543) + 0.093 * (371479 - 72725) + 0.0103 * (445771 - 371480) + 0.0113 * (742953 - 445772) + 0.0123 * (1200000 - 742954)

SF property tax on a $4.5M property: 1.18268325% for a total of about $53,220.75

Total: about $493K for an effective tax rate of about 41%, assuming this hypothetical SF resident is single and just purchased their $4.5M property this year.

Don't forget taxes. In that bracket, in California, you're paying 50% of your income in taxes, and so $100K/month is actually $50K/month.

I think OP is overselling the point, but not by nearly as much as people think.

Not OP but also worked on Google Search once upon a time. I'm not sure if I'm remembering the same issues as OP, but basically the two biggest issues are:

1.) What they do to your 95th percentile latency. Users are often very sensitive to tail latency: a service that responds in 150ms 19 times and then takes 2s on the 20th is still perceived as annoyingly slow. With job queues, the reason for that slowness could be as simple as "it was the 20th request to arrive during a period of high demand, and backends couldn't keep up". The whole point of queues is so you can gracefully handle this case without overprovisioning your backends by a factor of 20x, but if the user is still going to consider this a miss anyway, you have to overprovision the backends anyway. There isn't really another way to handle this other than having spare backend capacity. Also note that in many cases the user hitting "refresh" doesn't cancel the existing queued job, it just adds another one to the queue. Which brings us to...

2.) They can turn simple failures into cascading failures. There were several postmortems that went something like "Service X became overloaded because of an unexpected flood of requests, leading to several individual replicas shutting down. This led to more requests being routed to the remaining replicas, which overloaded them too and led to all of Service X going down. When SRE attempted restart Service X, requests queued in the job queue were all retried en masse, which led to an overload of the partially-restarted service and a subsequent failure. SRE had to limit requests upstream and manually drain all job queues and bring Service X back cluster by cluster to restore service health."

The root principle here is that any distributed system needs a concept of backpressure. When critical downstream dependencies are overloaded, they need to pass this information back up the stack to the entry point, which needs to start denying requests from the user or do a simpler fallback that doesn't put load on the overloaded service. Naive queueing does not work, because the requests are still sitting there in the queue waiting to overload the downstream service once it becomes available again.

You can bolt backpressure onto a job queue system (by eg. rate-limiting requests to a service that has just come back up, or rate-limiting based on response time, and/or falling back to simpler algorithms), but at that point, it's a backpressure system, not a job queue. The semantics are very different from a system that guarantees eventual delivery, just not sure when. You need to be able to handle partial failures and adapt with different algorithms at multiple points within the system.

Interesting to watch the interplay between the AI bubble, rate expectations, and the Straight of Hormuz crisis.

Higher interest rates could absolutely deflate AI capex. Indeed, other than CIOs deciding en masse that AI doesn't actually save them money, it's possibly the only thing that could deflate the AI bubble. Higher rates decreases the availability of capital; the bulk of the marginal capital losses are in "risk-on" assets like (currently) AI investments; there goes the funding source that's been used to build all these data centers. It's very much like how the 1.75% increase in rates from 1999-2000 caused the dot-com bust, or the 4.25% increase in rates from 2004-2006 caused the 2009 crash, or the 5% increase in rates from 2022-2023 caused the last tech crash.

After the initial set of hostilities ended, the market largely shrugged off the Straight of Hormuz crisis. But now that it's 3 months later, the Straight is still not open, and if anything hostilities are intensifying, the market is finally starting to price in higher inflation and higher rates. That's why 10Y Treasuries have started creeping up almost to 5%, and GOOG has fallen 12% since its $400 high a couple months ago, and why MSFT is down more than 20% since its 2025 high. The memory chip makers are more exposed, with more of a bubble, and so they could potentially crash even harder if rates start to rise.

Note that Amazon has some cultural misfeatures that require unlearning at other employers.

I've hired ex-Amazon engineers at Google who believe that your job is to fuck over as many other teams as possible in the name of delivering your feature as quickly as possible so you can climb the ladder, and who believe your manager's job is to back you up while you fuck over those other teams and steal credit from other engineers on them. They tend to struggle in Google's more collaborative culture, and I'd imagine they'd also struggle in other companies that are a little less sociopathic. The problem is particularly acute with people who have never worked anywhere but Amazon; older employees coming out of Amazon are more like "Well, that's just how Amazon is, I'll adapt myself to whatever culture my current job has", but junior engineers are often shaped and molded by it because they've never known anything else.

I'm often a big fan of going to industry early because a.) you make more money early which can then compound and b.) you actually do learn a lot of tacit knowledge working in industry, very often more relevant than what you'd learn as a student. But if the choice is between Amazon and Cambridge I would probably do Cambridge.

I've noticed that Google Maps has started sucking a lot lately, routing us onto routes that take 2-4 minutes longer when a faster route is clearly available or taking us on nonsensical detours, and I wonder if this experiment is a reason why.

There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.

Steve Jobs has a classic interview where he addressed this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

When the war started, it certainly looked like it. Russian soldiers were in Kyiv at one point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kyiv_(2022)

It was the failure of Russian logistics and the triumph of Ukrainian logistics that beat them back.

Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.

A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.

If you like meta-songs, you may be interested in "Title of this song" by Da Vinci's Notebook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco&list=RDHgmUgFEFz...

It's not really analogous. One of the hypothesized ways that microplastics are harmful is that they disrupt the immune system; there has been evidence found of this in bivalves. Another is that they cause inflammation, which is also mediated by T-cells. A null result on the impact of microplastics on human T-cells is directly relevant to these hypotheses.

The mechanism of harm for asbestos is known to be that the fibers enter the lungs and can't be expelled, eventually leading to cancer. Its interaction with T-cells is quite irrelevant there.

Explain how they differ, in a practical way that's relevant to this discussion?

It's not unbelievable at all, and it is well-known. It's been publicized that Microsoft sends every URL you visit in Edge back to Microsoft servers, tied with all the IDs on the device:

https://www.itpro.com/security/privacy/355029/microsoft-edge...

Not using Chrome is a better bet for privacy than not using systemd or D-Bus. If you sign into Chrome (which by default happens any time you sign into a Google product), your entire browsing history is logged on Google's servers, and tied to your email address, Android ID, and any other machine identifiers Chrome can read.

Anyone serious about privacy is using Firefox or Tor Browser, with various settings to harden it against tracking.

Somewhere else in the comments here, someone else remarked "Individuals perhaps [move to the new models], but not organizations."

That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively.

We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:

1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.

2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.

3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.

4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.

It's a pretty terrible way to go. Death doesn't come immediately; you seem fine at first, and then about 3 days later you suffer intense abdominal pain and vomiting. At about 4 days you realize your liver is irreversibly shot and you're a dead man walking unless you can get a liver transplant. Then you enter multi-organ failure as your body and brain shuts down.

Acetaminophen poisoning actually featured on two episodes of House, and one of them had the suicide plotline. In S05E11, "Joy to the World" they suspected an overweight teen OD'd on acetaminophen trying to kill herself, but the actual diagnosis was eclampsia from an undisclosed pregnancy. In S06E10, "Wilson", a friend of Wilson's suffers acetaminophen poisoning while trying to manage his back pain.

https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Joy_to_the_World

https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Wilson_(episode)

It's not true that there has never been a recorded death from THC. A quick literature search turned up:

B. Hartung, S. Kauferstein, S. Ritz-Timme, T. Daldrup, Sudden unexpected death under acute influence of cannabis, Forensic Science International (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.02.001. Case report of two otherwise-healthy 20-something men who died of cardiac arrhythmia's following large marijuana doses.

https://3402974.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/3402974...

Noble, M. J., Hedberg, K., & Hendrickson, R. G. (2019). Acute cannabis toxicity. Clinical Toxicology, 57(8), 735–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/15563650.2018.1548708. Clinical review of 253 Poison Center cases involving acute cannabis poisoning; 8 patients were admitted to the ICU, 3 were intubated, and 1 died.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30676820/

There's also a Heyndrickx 1969 paper that everybody cites (including my original reference on hazard ratios), but I can't find an abstract or full text anywhere on the web.

Cases of cannabis poisoning fatalities are extremely rare, but they do exist. Your citation was apparently unaware of (or possibly published before) the other cases.

The therapeutic index for ibuprofen is considerably better: it's around 10, fairly similar to alcohol. Accidental overdoses of ibuprofen are rare.

The main issue with ibuprofen is that it can have fairly annoying (but non-life-threatening) side effects like stomach upset and GI bleeds even with normal dosing.

Yes. 4g is generally considered perfectly safe and is fairly commonplace dosing. 7g can kill you. Hence a therapeutic index of < 2.

This is why you have to be very, very careful. If you're doing 8 500mg Tylenol pills and then you also do 6 doses of DayQuil or Mucinex without realizing it's also acetaminophen, you can end up needing a liver transplant.

The article kinda glossed over it, but one fact under-appreciated by the general public is just how dangerous acetaminophen overdoses can be.

Scientists often talk about the "therapeutic index" or "safety ratio" of a drug. It's the LD50 (dose at which 50% of recipients die) divided by the effective dose. Common hard drugs like heroin or methamphetamine have a safety ratio of about 6-10 [1]. "Soft" drugs like marijuana or LSD often have safety ratios of about 1000.

The safety ratio of acetaminophen is under 4. A typical dosing schedule for an adult is 4-6 500mg tablets within a 24 hour period [2], for a total of no more than 3g. 7g of acetaminophen can kill you, and 12g is likely to [3]. Acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S, causing 50% of cases and 20% of transplants.

When they tell you "don't exceed 6 doses daily", they really mean it, and it's across all acetaminophen-containing products. The margin for error is narrower than heroin.

[1] http://politicsofsin.50megs.com/risk/Toxicity.Comparison_Add...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3585765/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/

You absolutely can react, but in general, in a functioning competitive market, you can not alter your competitors' actions.

Examples of the former: cutting prices yourself; increasing product quality; differentiating yourself; spending more on advertising to get the word out about your product.

Examples of the latter: crafting exclusive deals with your distributors to prevent your competitors from getting shelf space; politically influencing regulatory bodies to declare your competitors' existence illegal; making direct agreements with the leadership of opposing firms to not drop prices or hike wages; assassinating, extorting, or kidnapping rival business leaders.

Basically it comes down to "control yourself, because you cannot control others". In a functioning market, you have no control over what rival firms offer. Your only legal reaction to competition is to improve your own offering until it is the best it can be. In pathological markets where the assumption is (as in the paper) that you can punish rivals for not colluding, you actively make your competitor's offering worse.

Those pathological markets exist today, but if you're analyzing markets economically, your root assumption should not be that pathology is normal and only the lack of information keeps it in check, it should be that information is abundant and it is the lack of ability that keeps it in check.

The paper seems to be based on an invalid assumption. From the abstract:

If P != NP, the collusion detection problem is computationally infeasible for markets satisfying a natural instance-hardness condition on their demand structure, rendering punishment threats non-credible and collusion unstable.

...and then from the paper:

Stigler (1964) famously argued that the “chief difficulty” of collusion is detecting “secret price-cutting.”

The thing is that Stigler's insight is far from proven, and indeed, the primary difficulty in collusion is often not the detection of defection. Firms know they're being undercut all the time. The problem is that very often, there is nothing they can do about it. Markets are specifically structured as firm-to-firm transactions, where competing firms have no leverage over what your firm can do or what sort of transactions you can conduct, and as long as this condition holds it doesn't matter if you know that a competitor is fucking you over, you can't do anything about it.

I'd argue that the increase in collusion and anticompetitive behavior lately is because these conditions increasingly don't hold. When you intersperse another party in the transaction, eg. a regulatory agency, permitting body, or exclusive distribution deal, you introduce a leverage point for incumbents to punish competitors who choose to undercut them.

This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939.

I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.

I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.

It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.

The jury, maybe.