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I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues.

How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.

By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.

Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.

I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to.

The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.

Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.

So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.

As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.

Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.

Also, as a reminder, leaded gas (avgas) is still used all over the United States pumping lead into the environment. If you live near an airport you are especially at increased risk of lead exposure in the environment.

I don’t think that is specific to Amazon. If anything I think the whole paradigm of “over analyzing communications with vacuous update suggestions that don’t matter” is probably the most consistent thread I’ve found in all of corporate America. I’ll never forget early in my career we had huddled around a coworkers computer with our entire team including senior manager writing an email to a VP and the senior manager was making punctuation and the most inane wording updates you can imagine. I once thought there is no way the absurdity of the cost to benefit of that situation would be topped, but how naive I was - turns out generally companies seemingly can’t avoid that kind of atmosphere.

As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these polls and spit out some data. It's easy to hand wave and think some new information is being revealed, but ultimately it is just a "garbage in garbage out" situation - you are entering polls as input, some hand waving is going on, and you get some forecast as a result.

I think part of my cynicism comes in the wake of the 2016 election, in which the forecast rightfully counted some scenarios in which either candidate could win, upon which conclusion of the model was basically "the result fits in with the forecast, because either candidate could have won according to the model" - in which case I personally concluded, if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here? We can simply look at polls and understand who is generally ahead, and not be any better or worse off.

I wonder if there is a big disconnect partially due to the fact that people are talking about different models. The top tier coding models (sonnet, o1, deepseek) are all pretty good, but it requires paid subscriptions to make use of them or 400GB of local memory to run deepseek.

All the other distilled models and qwen coder and similar are a large step below the above models in terms of most benchmarks. If someone is running a small 20GB model locally, they will not have the same experience as those who run the top of the line models.

Well you have to keep in mind that Nvidia has a 3 trillion dollar valuation. That kind of heavy valuation comes with heavy expectations about future growth. Some of those assumptions about future Nvidia growth are their ability to maintain their heavy growth rates, for very far into the future.

Training is a huge component of Nvidia's projected growth. Inference is actually much more competitive, but training is almost exclusively Nvidia's domain. If Deepseek's claims are true, that would represent a 10x reduction in cost for training for similar models (6 million for r1 vs 60 million for something like o1).

It is absolutely not the case in ML that "there is nothing bad about more resources". There is something very bad - cost. And another bad thing - depreciation. And finally, another bad thing - the fact that new chips and approaches are coming out all the time, so if you are on older hardware you might be missing out. Training complex models for cheaper will allow companies to potentially re-allocate away from hardware into software (ie, hiring more engineering to build more models, instead of less engineers and more hardware to build less models).

Finally, there is a giant elephant in the room that it is very unclear if throwing more resources at LLM training will net better results. There are diminishing returns in terms of return on investment in training, especially with LLM-style use cases. It is actually very non-obvious right now how pouring more compute specifically at training will result in better LLMs.

When it comes to comparing market cap, the more apt business relevant to AMD's MI line is Nvidia's data center division, and investors are probably rightly assessing that AMD will not dent Nvidia's market position any time soon. That said, AMD's data center GPU is growing at an extremely healthy pace and enjoys high profit margins, so they have proven their ability to execute in this space to a degree and as a business it shows a promising future.

When looking at the market cap, there are three main pillars of valuation - revenue growth, profit growth, and net income. If all three are growing, you are an industry darling. If two are growing, you are still likely to be valued highly. If you have only one, you are much riskier. If you have none, it's a red flag.

As of the latest earnings report, AMD profit, revenue and net income are all increasing. Intel, they are all decreasing. If analysts assume trends hold, AMD can grow into its valuation and Intel is currently heading towards being worth nothing unless they change their business. Simply put, a business that is losing all three of revenue, profit margin, and net income is simply headed on the wrong path for investors, and will be punished in an outsized way when it comes to predicting it's future value (ie, market cap).

I honestly don't think there is any algorithm. For all the bluster and commitment to being "data driven", none of the companies I've seen mandate RTO have provided any sort of data-driven reason why it needs to happen. Amazon's policy might as well be "Jassy feels it in his gut that RTO is better for the company so we are doing it".

All the communication of RTO invokes the most fanciful and vague references to "magical hallway conversations" and "increased collaboration" without a single data point to back up any of the claims.

It has been almost humorous to watch such stalwarts of "data driven decision making" turn up a giant goose egg with respect to actual evidence on such a huge, impactful, and far reaching decision.

I encourage you to read the linked decision I referenced which references this exact case:

https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2012cv1...

The judge ruled there was no violation of their constitutional rights, explicitly because Congress was involved in authorizing military action against the wider threat and specifically in this case Congress was in the approval process for authorizing individual targets.

There was no violation of checks and balances here. That is not to say other uses of the so-called "disposition matrix" might be challenged in the future, but at least in the cases of these individuals, the courts have ruled that no rights were violated.

A relevant decision by a Federal judge regarding the legality of the disposition matrix, concerning specifically US citizens abroad:

https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2012cv1...

It's an interesting read, but part of the argument was that there were Congressional checks and balances in place for security threat review and congress authorized force against the group in question which essentially gave the executive branch authority to add the specific targets in question.

The legality of the disposition matrix at large can still be tested and re-tested depending on the specific actions of the executive branch.

This is not really true though. Congress is responsible for granting authority to the President regarding valid military targets. This is why drone strikes are only legal against targets recognized by Congress as security threats. It cannot realistically happen for the President to start targeting individuals outside of Congressional authority.

For your hypothetical situation to arise, Congress would have to declare members of Congress themselves as valid military targets.

It's really impossible to understand and determine before hand how the court would rule on any of these theoretical cases that may result as a consequence of this decision. It is up to further cases to actually establish was constitutes "official" versus "unofficial" capacities as President and we can absolutely not guess before hand what that entails. From the decision, it seems that only those duties constitutionally mandated would fall under the "official" capacity, with quite a lot of leeway for determining how to evaluate individual actions.

Also I think we should all be reminded that there is separation of powers for a reason. The President is ultimately largely beholden to Congress. The government cannot sink into a dictatorship without the explicit approval of the majority of Congress. It is Congress' duty to remove Presidents from office that it feels are a danger to the country.

All these checks and balances still exist and will still be enforced. The President can not unilaterally go off the rails as many of these extreme hypotheticals seem to be implying.

AWS also recently ended support for Mysql 5, so if you had an RDS instance with that version running past the cutoff, your support costs ballooned exorbitantly.

My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.

In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.

One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.

Like a lot of language we use when discussing things at the universe scale, the word “expanding” operates as a placeholder with analogs in day to day life but isn’t a perfect representation of what we mean.

The “universe” itself is space and time. When we say “expanding” we simple mean that galaxies are observed to be moving farther away from each other. That does not at all imply some kind of “expansion into another space” - space itself is exhibiting this property and we are observing it. That’s all.

The “balloon” analogy and the usage of the word “expand” in this context are both imperfect metaphors for physical phenomena we are observing.

It is a bit like trying to discuss what happened “before” the Big Bang - there is no “before” - time was created.

There are many phrases you can construct which may seem like they “make sense” but are actually combining a set of word concepts in ways that are self-contradictory.

“What is space expanding into?”

“What happened before time was created?”

Etc.

It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere

Could you expand on this a bit. Whether someone speaks with a sense of inevitability or not, why is it important either way? Why is it "important" to remind people we haven't (yet) found life on other planets?

Why are the existing gaps in abiogenesis "important" to point out?

What is so "important" about these things?

Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation

Just want to comment on this point. The research in this field is pretty esoteric. It doesn't really benefit us to understand how this process came about (ie, there is little practical gain here, no medical advancements or otherwise), and moreover it requires a simulation which can estimate behavior over hundreds of millions of years. The usefulness of cracking the early earth/life creation part of our history is really not immediately clear, and thus research is limited.

That said, the Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) showed animo acids organizing over conditions similar to early earth, and a follow up experiment dubbed Planet Simulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator) was extended to show the organization of protocells as part of this early earth environment.

It seems only a matter of time before science can connect the dots along the rest of the hundreds of millions of years regarding this process to show the line between chemical young earth evolving to be biological.

As an aside, why do you think it is "important to remember" that we haven't found life or that we don't fully understand the process by which biology evolved from chemistry? Why exactly is it "important to remember" such things?

This is assuming people's viewpoints don't evolve as they get older.

“Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.”

A quick search shows the quote originating in the 19th century.

basically you dont consider the experience of the non trafficked providers

I do consider the experience of non-trafficked providers, but legalization has implications for both that group and other groups - it takes a holistic approach and recognition of all the effects of a policy change to make an informed decision - you cannot make a policy change in a vacuum only considering one side of the coin.

their experience is not cancerous

To be clear, you are straw manning my views. I do not assume a lack of agency of participants of the prostitution industry. I do not view prostitution itself as a cancerous industry. The cancerous industry is sex trafficking, which as has been demonstrated, has grown in countries which have chosen to legalize prostitution.

you continue to cite “evidence” as “failure” because the state has a poor implementation problem in the labor rights organizations, as if you were previously waiting for data instead of this all being window dressing for your view that all prostitution is inherently cancerous

Do you or do you not recognize the fact that countries which have made prostitution legal have growing sex trafficking issues? Actually I would be quite happy with data which shows that legalizing prostitution reduces sex trafficking, that would be a feather in the cap of pushes to legalize prostitution and would silence what in my opinion is the largest argument against legalization.

In reality, the countries which have legalized prostitution have seen growing sex trafficking problems. So while you want to imply that I am the one who is insincerely waiting for evidence, it is actually you who are not dealing with the pragmatic reality in the world that shows legalization of prostitution is related to an increase in the size and scope of sex trafficking. Again, these two things cannot be tackled independently - they are intimately and irrevocably related.

If legalizing prostitution increases the size of the vulnerable population being exploited, then on balance it is not a benefit for society.

on the contrary, dealing with trafficking can be improved and those improvements will extend to all laborers. you’re latched in and doubling down on the state being incapable of policing trafficking because you found a study that matched your preexisting discomfort with prostitution existing at all and keep pushing that into absurd territories.

Again, you are making statements that you wish to be true, but are not borne out by the reality of the facts. If dealing with sex trafficking is easier when the industry is legalized, why is it that countries are facing increasing problems with sex trafficking after making it legal?

I think our main disagreement is in the recognition of the fact that sex trafficking and prostitution are irrevocably linked, such that you cannot meaningfully tackle one without considering the other.

Your approach would be to consider both in a vacuum. Let us legalize prostitution because according to you it is axiomatic that a legal framework will necessarily be better for participants of the prostitution industry, and we can consider sex trafficking as a wholly separate independent problem.

I fundamentally disagree because based on available evidence, legalization of prostitution exacerbates the already existing sex trafficking problems which have demonstrable negative results in countries which have legalized prostitution.

I also disagree with shoe horning sex trafficking into the existing umbrella of "labor exploitation" since sex trafficking is at a scale where it demands it's own consideration for solutions and ways to contain it's growing influence, and yes, one of those techniques is to outright outlaw prostitution to stymie the growth of this cancerous industry in the world.

Fundamentally, you are making a trade off here - you are saying worker rights for prostitution trump stopping the spread of sex trafficking. You could argue it is a fair trade, but there is also an argument that it isn't on balance a societal benefit to make that trade off. Saying "we need to target sex traffickers better" isn't an answer, because countries are already trying and failing to do that - what is the magic secret sauce we can invent as a policy to stop it when there isn't an example to follow? Saying "we need to prioritize worker rights" isn't convincing, because if overall exploitation increases you are increasing the scope of vulnerable people being exploited, and it isn't a good trade off for society.

expanding access to labor rights, labor organizations, and the government prosecuting traffickers is a more productive use of resources than the rhetorical solution to the “mountains of evidence” you pointed out

Except counties that have legalized prostitution have tried this and failed. Again, there is evidence that legalizing prostitution increases the amount and scope of sex trafficking operations in said counties which have legalized. It isn't "Labor trafficking issues" - it is sex trafficking, and a very specific issue with legalizing prostitution.

obsessing over that is odd, if you're not doing that in the rest of the employment market too.

Can you expand on why? Sex trafficking is a very specific form of labor exploitation which is tied up with prostitution - and it has been seen to demonstrably get worse after prostitution becomes legal. Why should this evidence be ignored or tied up with the broader umbrella of "labor exploitation"?

a better use of energy to exercise any discomfort around possibly trafficked people is allowing sex workers access to the same labor avenues as the rest of the employment market allows them agency to better navigate everything you’re (ostensibly) worried about. even expanding what those avenues are.

I think advocates of legal prostitution like yourself like to say things about legalized prostitution that they wish were true, but reality tells a difference story. If it was better and easier for law enforcement and/or prostitutes to navigate sex trafficking when prostitution is legal, one would think we wouldn't see a marked increase in sex trafficking when prostitution becomes legal. What you keep doing here repeating "it's better for prostitutes to operate in a legal environment" is ignoring reality and sticking your head in the sand regarding the very real consequences for the 150$ billion a year sex trafficking industry which has very brutal and effective ways for suppressing/exploiting/manipulating their victims even in regions where prostitution is perfectly legal.

Again, I totally agree that two consenting adults who aren't hurting anyone should have legal recourse to do what they want, as long as that situation exists in a vacuum. If there are huge externalities involved, such as 150 billion a year sex trafficking industries that can capitalize on legalization and which no country in the world has figured out how to suppress after legalization - well, that should at least be considered in any effort to legalize.

I would agree with you if the entire issue really did exist in a vacuum where "consenting adults" were truly the only variables, but as we've demonstrably seen from legalization efforts worldwide - legalizing prostitution is highly correlated with an uptick in sex trafficking.

Determining if two parties are actually "freely consenting" is notoriously difficult, given the way that sex trafficking rings operate - and as has been proven over and over again, determining if an individual is "freely consenting" is not at all a simple thing for law enforcement to figure out and making it legal does not make it easier.

So while I agree in spirit with "two consenting adults should be able to do what they want if they aren't hurting anyone else" - reducing prostitution to those terms is an overly simplistic way of looking at it and is ignoring mountains of evidence that legalizing it increases the rate of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation for those countries which made it legal already.

New engineers are falling behind.

That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.

I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.

Snap consistently has excessive SBC - their stock awards are top in the industry.

If Evan sold Snap to Facebook when Mark wanted to buy it, Snap would have been turned into what is Instagram today. Mark & Facebook really only have one trick when buying companies - turn them into a newsfeed and make everything public and push celebrities and public figures to use the platform.

Instagram and Snapchat today are two fundamentally different products, and Snapchat is estimated to capture more of the younger demographics in more markets.

Sure, you can say that Instagram today has about 100 billion valuation compared to 15 billion for Snapchat, but the race is far from over. Snap recently exceeded a 100 billion valuation as recently as 2021.

The challenges at Snap seem to have nothing to do with interest rates and more to do with a challenging ad market, which has affected pretty much all the major players, including Meta & Google.

I don't think it's so much that Snap hasn't figured out a business model - they make a billion dollars in revenue per quarter, how many companies can claim that? - it's that Snap hasn't developed a rational balance sheet due to excessive SBC. If it wasn't for SBC, they would be making money hand over fist.

Snap & PINS are two interesting case studies in how companies in a similarly challenging ad market can have potentially different strategies and outcomes. Both have very depressed stock prices, but both have a clear path to having a sustainable and highly profitable business.

Again, interest rates seem pretty irrelevant to the fate of both companies, only as much as low interest rates encourage economic investment and can fuel the digital ad market.

You aren't comparing apples to apples with those numbers. Bing has 100 million active daily users. Apple has about 2 billion registered "active" devices, which means they were used within a 30 day period. In this case, you are comparing daily active users for a particular service with monthly active users for an entire device. It's not clear if any Apple service reaches a lofty DAU.

Apple hasn't released daily active users for any of it's services, but it has argued recently that iMessage has less than 45 million active users in the EU (https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/04/imessage-app-store-gatekeeper...). Meanwhile, some estimates put Bing's monthly active users over a billion.

Why was there such a heavy handed approach to moderation in the first place though? Why not let the community ask the same question over and over again, and let the answers naturally shift with the time?

I'm just not sure what value there was to have a team of people volunteer their time to making sure there were absolutely zero duplicated questions/answers? What problem is that solving? If anything, it is adding problems by not letting the content naturally evolve in time.

If people want to assess the quality of answers, it's better to have multiple data points, and SO could have invested those resources in algorithmically linking similar questions and making it easy to navigate by both answer reputation and time.

Along similarly lines, it seems best to tackle the people trying to game the system algorithmically as well - if content is word for word duplicate, that's a problem which can be solved by computers instead of people (similar text is a solved problem).

It seems the only use case for moderators on SO is for removing truly inappropriate content - it's wild to me that moderators were spending significant amounts of time actually removing technical questions and answers.

It reminds me a bit of reddit moderation, where reddit communities enforce these non-sensical rules and by extension require hugely heavy handed moderation to 'curate' their communities. Like, the headphones subreddit disallows pictures of headphones in boxes. Why? If the community is interested in headphones, what's the difference if it's a box or not? It's not like if you take it out of the box the headphones look different than any picture you can find on the internet.

Seems like many of the problems of moderation are artificial rules endlessly being enforced by real people which ends up just being pseudo 'make busy' work.

the startup equity is theoretically

But there is nothing theoretical about start up equity in companies that have raised money. They have a very clear valuation, and especially Series D, that valuation will already be pretty mature.

AirBNB did a Series D with a valuation at 10.5 billion in 2014. They are currently around 91.66 billion market cap. That is a nice 900% return, but that's not a completely different ballpark than other LargeCo's (Apple had about 800% return, Amazon 700%, Meta 500%) - the question is, do you really think your Series D start up is going to be as successful as AirBNB (which is among the top 100 biggest American companies by market cap).

The point is, there is really nothing "theoretical" about the value of those start up shares - they have a well determined value, and for many start ups, even the appreciation of those shares between Series D and IPO can be less than the appreciation they would have gotten from LargeCo shares with top of market compensation and potentially even bigger dollar value equity stakes.