pdinny

Retrospectively framing technologies that succeeded despite doubts at the time discounts those that failed.

After all, you could have used the exact same response in defense of web3 tech. That doesn't mean LLMs are fated to be like web3, but similarly the outcome that the current expenditure can be recouped is far from a certainty just because there are doubters.

Often the discussion around these kinds of tech/AI dwell on the wrong things: questions like "will GenAI put artists out of work?" or "should photographers worry about AI-generated headshots?" miss the point that headshot photography probably only accounts for work for a small subset of working photographers, or that most artists are not making the same things that people use GenAI for.

Did Google Translate put professional translators out work? Probably not so much. Certainly not based on the discussions I've had with professionals, who may use AI translation but spend more time on copy-editing the results now.

Most of the time the AI-generated outputs are fine when you don't value the results more than the cost of getting better results. If you're doing translation of legal or technical documents, getting more accurate results is worth paying for.

Same thing for headshots: if they're important you probably pay for them, if not you weren't going to pay for a professional to do them anyway.

More than though: the whole point of portrait photography is displaying the individual, in all their idiosyncratic differences that make them distinguishable from others. These headshots have a blandifying effect of making the person look less like themselves the individual and more like a smoothed out, generic version of themselves.

This is my experience too. I frequently require a single queue for some very specific task but it does not form part of a greater application.

My current work (data engineering) is such that I don't have a relational database instance that it would make sense to use instead. SQS is very straightforward and just works.

None of this is to say that I would necessarily advocate for a user-facing app to be _based_ on a queue-based architecture.

This is adjacent to "why would I need EC2 when I can serve from my laptop?"

In terms of maturity of solution and diversity of downstream applications you'll go much further with BigQuery/Athena (at comically low cost) for this amount of data than some cobbled together "local" solution.

I thoroughly agree with the author but the comments in this thread are an indication of people who haven't actually had to do meaningful ongoing work with modest amounts of data if they're suggesting just storing it as plain text on personal devices.

I'm not advocating for complicated or expensive solutions here, BigQuery and Athena are very low complexity compared to any of the Hadoop et-al tooling (yes Athena is Trino is in the family, but it is managed and dirt cheap).

I do sincerely apologise for omitting the word "often". My point remains that generalisations should not be made based on the views of a minority.

I have noticed that US media in particular presents a very one-sided accounting of protests. Axios, for examples, implies that Pro-Palestinian protests at colleges are a form of anti-semitism.

Again, I apologise. That was in error, not malice.

This is, by definition ("the protesters" used to generalise to all protesters), a gross generalisation. Based on what evidence? All the protests I have been to people have taken great pains to make that distinction.

Comments like the above merely reinforce what I'm saying: the basis of criticism is never engaged with in terms of its own merits or content but is dismissed using ad hominem.

This type of conflation is extremely dangerous. Criticism of the actions of the government of Israel is not the same thing as anti-semitism (a real and very bad thing).

To make this claim essentially gives the government of Israel the go ahead to do absolutely anything without any possibility of criticism, because that criticism is never engaged with on the basis of its content but dismissed as anti-semitism.

I think that dipping into the history of design (both industrial design and architecture) go a long way to explaining the general trends.

It is important to also distinguish between minimalist design (motivated by aesthetic and philosophical choices) and utilitarian artefacts such as streetlights. The latter may be informed more directly by minimizing total cost and may not have ever had some creative input from a designer.

Thank you for this edifying comment. As someone who has, at best, an extremely surface level understanding of anarchism, I found some aspects of what I understood quite appealing but I thought that it may be impractical or too idealistic. This has sparked my interest to actually go deep.

The types of arguments discussed here ("once someone predicted a bad thing and didn't happen therefore no bad things will ever happen") seem to be based on vibes more than logical statements. Twitter is rife with specious arguments that may have an appealing ring of truthiness to them but dissolve under the slightest scrutiny.

Trying to fathom what kinds of people would seriously believe that the underlying basis for the argument holds is to misunderstand the audience and their modality of reasoning.

It is indeed disappointing that most people end up with ideas and opinions that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny but it is also the world that we live in, so we shouldn't be terribly surprised by it.

Microliths, if you will.

Personally, I'm all for macroservices (no joke).

Apples in South Africa are not likely to come from the Netherlands. SA exports about $736m in apples and pears, imports about $284k, not from the Netherlands.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/apples-and-pe...

A more relevant measure might be median income per capita/household, adjusted for purchasing power. On that basis Austria does quite well.

Additionally, quality of life amounts to more than measures for disposable income etc. If you consider access to education and healthcare the picture might take on greater depth.

There is important missing context from this extremely biased article that leans heavily on the opinion of an anonymous person. It has always been illegal to serve in a foreign armed force for South Africans. I forget the name of the act, but this isn't new legislation, it is enforcing existing legislation.

I'd like to hear the fully-fleshed out position about why these particular examples are an indication of some broader, deeper problem. If possible, please do not use the word "woke" as a shorthand, explain it in full. Same for DEI.

Is there some suggestion that these obviously wrong examples are intentionally ahistorical or intended to erase history? Is this a plot of some kind? How common are these issues relative to all the other images being produced? Apparently the tool seems to be reluctant to produce images of white people at all. What should the appropriate frequency of white people be? That last one is a serious question that should be answered with an actual number, because that is the central concern here (unless I'm mistaken).

What seems very likely to me, is that in an attempt to not make the tool embarrassingly only produce images of white people they overshot. Bear in mind for a second, that for anybody who isn't white and is trying to generate an image of a person doing a thing (with no historical context to infer a race for that person) it would possibly be deeply frustrating to only get images of white people.

I'm a big Calvino fan and can thoroughly recommend Cosmicomics as a great collection of shorts. If you enjoy Calvino you may also enjoy Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

This is very cool! I came across this while scrolling to see how my Streamlit movie recommender on Show HN was doing.

I'll spend some more time with your recommender and get back with some thoughts.

Putting aside all things Elon: Tesla was arguably incredibly overpriced (pick your reasons) and in a falling market that price is correcting.

We like to construct simple narratives in which causes are few and their effects are clear. The real world is far messier than our stories about it. Perhaps Elon's actions at Twitter have played a factor here but to pretend that that is the sole (or even primary) cause would require some greater evidence than anecdotes of users who changed their minds about buying a Tesla.

It would be great to see some debate about this story in the spirit of traders discussing the merits of the business rather than a fans-vs-haters style discussion about Elon.

While all of the mentioned companies are tech companies they also encompass other considerations. Many of the challenges that a company like Twitter faces are not purely technical. Twitter is in many ways like a media company and is also a large and very varied community.

Both of these facts present very different challenges to manufacturing and developing software used in very different circumstances. There are some obvious cases in point here: the pricing for Twitter Blue net of App Store/Play Store fees doesn't make sense as a replacement for lost revenue from advertising. Having a comprehensive understand of, for example, supply chain management for manufacturing cars doesn't necessarily provide any direct benefits here.

Regardless of how one might feel about Musks's decisions at Twitter it strikes me overly reductive to say that Tesla and SpaceX are both tech companies therefore his decisions are good, even if they seem questionable to us poor imbeciles who haven't been CEO of a tech company before.

If anything I take this is a grand illustration of the dangers inherent in playing at being a CEO when you don't have to actually do it. It is very easy to sit at my desk and propose some strategic changes for Twitter that I think might legitimately be for the best in the long term, but it is another matter entirely to be in the position of putting those into practice and living with the consequences.

I agree that it would be nice if more platforms facilitated this kind of exchange . I don't see Twitter doing this at all. The majority of my observations suggest ideas being lobbed at high speed, attached to a heavy object.

Besides that I'm unconvinced that this kind of platform for spreading new ideas is what most users on Twitter want from Twitter. The metaphor has become repeated so often that it almost sounds like it is Twitter's reason to be but I rather doubt that it was designed with that in mind.

I find the frequent invocation of a town square a bit perplexing. It evokes the idea of a place where strangers may gather to have an exchange of ideas, which sounds quite pleasant at face value.

However this is not something that I've ever done IRL and I rather doubt that most of those who invoke this idea do this regularly either.

The kinds of discussions that you might imagine having in public with strangers who might have different values and backgrounds would be wildly different from the same discussions online. The metaphor is quite a broken one and at this point about as useful as pretending that the screen I'm looking at is an analog to my actual desktop (which mostly one exists to hold the screen).

While this may come across as mere pedantry I think it is actually quite important to ensure that when we discuss platforms that are going to be nothing at all like a town square that we are more realistic about what kinds of conversation and interactions we might want to encourage or discourage.

I've found some really interesting reading on are.na. Something that I particularly enjoy about that mode of discovery is that it is more about curation and discovery. The smallness of the community (it feels small at any rate) means that there doesn't seem to be a big incentive to degrade the overall quality by using SEO-like tactics.

As mentioned in multiple other comments: context matters. Some commenters have presented more extreme contrasts of context (737 Max, B2B etc etc) but I also think the context matters even for products that might be quite close.

While the specific strategies employed at Facebook (or Google or wherever else) may have had a direct influence on the current position there are many other factors to consider when contemplating the fate of some of the most extreme outliers.

An obvious example of this is all the companies who started using (or frequently misusing) OKRs because Google uses OKRs. Using OKRs won't make your company the next Google.

I can get behind the sentiment of "A Bias For Action" or "Speed Matters" but these principles need to be applied appropriately too. I've been in startups where "Speed is the most important factor" has been used to hire faster. The costs of hiring poorly are very high. You can't just revert the breaking change and go back to BAU.

I strongly agree.

The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering.

Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will.

A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like:

Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha)

We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time.

OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).

Hence the bait and switch. IMHO increasing the scope of Airflow (or any tool) is a challenging proposition. Would you rather use very few mega-tools with very broad scope (and potentially more challenging domain to navigate) or fewer more specialised tools that interoperate well together?

Obviously there are trade-offs with either approach, but then I'd argue that making Airflow solve more problems will introduce more trade-offs too.

The post feels like a bait-and-switch in the sense that it presents itself as about Airflow's shortcomings but focuses mostly on problems that Airflow doesn't attempt to solve.

Airflow can certainly be frustrating and it doesn't solve _all_ workflow orchestration problems. Surely the same thing can be said of many tools? This seems mostly like a mismatch of expectations.

TikTok doesn't feel social at all

I agree entirely but I'd argue that this is a feature rather than a flaw. It's more like community TV than a place for dialog with social connections.

It feels entirely too performative.

I think this depends greatly on the niches of TikTok that you have led yourself to. Some is definitely very performative and it can feel like you're on the receiving end of an endless stream of pitches for your attention. But other parts are far more laid-back. SynthTok, for example, is mostly just context-free synthesizer jams.

[GTA 6 - Jersey Shore - GTL]

You get to play out storylines from Jersey Shore, with original voice actors. Mini-games include gymming, tanning, laundry, making food when you get back from the club. Missions at the club.

[GTA 6 - So Many Side Hustles]

You play as a struggling human, trying to scrape together a living by picking up jobs from various apps on your phone. Maybe you're doing some kind of Task Rabbit mission, or plain food delivery. Maybe you're delivering something else. Maybe on foot, maybe on a bike.

It should be an open world exploration in a dense urban environment and many, many different ways to be exploited.

RNA Vaccines too!

The above comments seem to assume that progress is limited to consumer goods.

As for progress in terms of atoms (rather than bits) behold the elaborate global supply chain.

DAU and MAU are tricky metrics partly because even when they're known to be problematic (perhaps the definition of "active" is too permissive to be useful for certain purposes) they are very hard to change because they are reported at such a high level (frequently without relevant context such as whether or not they are counting accounts or users) so historical changes are trickier to get support for.

Also people want that number to be defined to yield the highest number because Goodhart's Law and we ship what we're incentivised to ship.