HN user
The top comment has a counter example though https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709
I think it's not even about the ability to steer the AI. Just the ability to ask the right questions
If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)
I agree with the author that engineers need to recalibrate and say yes more often but the zirp connection is a stretch and unnecessary.
Good engineers will say yes and no thoughtfully and will adjust to the new reality anyway. So it feels kind of pointless since no one is really a just say yes or just say no person, though it is well written.
Does anyone have insight into how waymo is actually doing as a business? It seems to be unaffordable in the bay area. 2-3x the cost of Uber/lyft whenever I've checked. It is very cool, but I can't imagine they're doing well at that price point
It's marketing plus perception of how expensive it is. Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.
Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.
What can we do to keep these companies accountable? This is so frustrating.
This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.
In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.
I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).
No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.
With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.
I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.
My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.
I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.
How is "firing people" more clear in intent than "Reduction in force"? Reduction in force/cutting costs is usually the intent. People getting fired is a side effect. "Firing people" is a more vivid picture, which is exactly why it is not the right term - it's too personal a term for something that usually is not personal. Performance-based layoffs = Firing. Cost/business-outlook-based layoffs = RIFs.
illai in Dravidian languages
"most accepted theory of physics is that the universe started from a single point": This is not true. The most accepted theory is that the universe was extremely dense, but it is not accepted that it was literally a "point" of zero volume. Our laws of physics are thought to break down beyond a certain density of matter, so we don't have any reliable predictions about it. The "dense" universe could still have been infinite even back then. Just super dense and infinite in all directions - and now all of it has expanded and it's still infinite (a bigger infinity?).
The article does not touch upon this, but there is a fascinating theory that life on earth originated in deep sea vents. Highly recommend reading the very accessible "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane for more on this.
I was with you until "It is just customers in US are richer and are ok to pay more for the same service." How did you reach that conclusion? The other reason (which seems more likely to me) is that it is because the free market is not functioning because of monopoly/duopoly created by regulatory capture.
Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.
Wait what did Slack do?
Why is it the corporation's fault though? We live in a society and governance structure which encourages corporations to consider revenue over everything else. Why would they act differently? What should Google do? Sorry I understand the human cost of layoffs. But it is a reflection of what this society values. If you want corporations to consider the human cost, you need to make it feature in their financials. Or the government should offer better protection to unemployed people.
Given we spend a significant portion of lives at work, I think it's a good thing that people find life partners at work and a loss from remote work
I personally consider Linear algebra to be foundational in AI/ML. Intro to Linear algebra, Gilbert Strang. And his free course on MIT OCW is fantastic too.
While having strong mathematical foundation is useful, I think developing intuition is even more important. For this, I recommend Andrew Ng's coursera courses first before you dive too deep.
How do you know that? I don't disagree that many projects are futile. But it is usually only apparent in hindsight, and humans are very good at justifying their own jobs and by extension, their team's jobs.
I think you are describing all big tech companies. But what's the solution? I think it's just a result of having a large org. 20% of the org delivers 80% of the value. But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%. When times are tough, it doesn't.
Thing is, everyone's value system is different. What is busy work for one person can be satisfying for someone else. So the bottom line is to do work which you derive value from. If you are working on a team of 100 people working on a feature which you believe is pointless, but it is still technically challenging and you are learning and you are having fun, then that's fine. It is paying the bills and you are getting something you value out of it.
e.g, there are people who think Metaverse is pointless. Does that mean all the engineers working on it are wasting time? Of course not, they are all getting something of value out of it - may be money, chance to innovate, chance to work with amazing people.
This is such a gross simplification. First, even people who you follow might post both wanted and unwanted content, and the platform will be more useful if it can somehow show me the things I want to see. Second, it overlooks content creator side of things. How does a new person without any followers start gaining them, or vice-versa a new person who doesn't know whom to follow yet. People keep saying this is what they want from Twitter. But Twitter is not only for them, it is valuable for these other use cases.
Wow, that's eye-opening as an Android user and helps to put the anti-tracking initiative into strategic perspective. Apple is leveraging user trust to claim that it's ok for them to track users, not not ok for anyone else.
Engineering at FB/Google has not shown any dearth of innovation, even recently. The premise is just wrong.
[1] https://research.facebook.com/publications/ [2] https://research.google/pubs/
It's hard to draw the boundary. We could say that AI should only be given access to exactly the same information that humans have access to. But AI will have magnitudes more memory and compute resources. So for example, an AI could only have the 2D view but it could store, access and process the 2D view in ways a human cannot.