stg22

It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.

There is a great deal of death in a language.

Gawker flouted the law.

They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial

Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.

Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of deprived regions which caused industrial havoc in the South without providing much long-term benefit to the North. The root problem isn't that government didn't try extreme measure, it's that those measures failed at massive cost, so proposed ones are now subject to much more rigorous scrutiny.

Power in the UK is highly centralised in London, but that's not necessarily bad for regional economic development, e.g. the office ban mentioned above would not have been agreed to by southern devolved regions and the redevelopment of the former East Germany was driven by Bonn (former West Germany's capital city). Competition in government also isn't necessarily good for regional development and the corn laws and free trade that the author credits to Northern England's influence caused another famine in Ireland in 1879. It's also worth noting the North East England referendum of 2004, when London's project of devolving power to the English regions was blocked because Northern English voters overwhelmingly didn't want it.

British manufacturing suffered an unusually steep collapse relative to other western countries in the late 20th century that hit Northern England particularly hard, while the benefits of the slightly later financial services boom were inevitably focused on the country's financial centre in the South. The manufacturing collapse was partially driven by government policies, but not in the way generally thought - for decades, pre-Thatcher governments had been taking fairly regular extreme measures in response to various crises (balance of payments deficits, unbalanced regional development, oil shortages, strikes, etc.), that made life much harder for businesses. But the collapse was mainly driven by the fact that Britain in the second half of the 20th century was mind-bogglingly bad at manufacturing. I suspect that the failure of that entire section of the British economy would be a better starting point for an analysis of what went wrong in Northern England.

Viewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is.

Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.

He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.

He was a Communist until his death in the 1970s, but Communism is a pretty broad spectrum and his beliefs moved about it during his life. His public and financial support for Stalinism in France until the mid-1950s was a bad error of judgement.

Enshittification - they switched to artificial sweetener.

The two companies are not the same; their dominant positions are in different markets which means the anti-trust implications of them extending into a specific market have to be judged separately.

As an extreme example, Oracle had a dominant position in the enterprise database market in the late '90s, but it wouldn't have been an abuse of that position if they'd integrated a web browser into Oracle 8.

In general, the more direct the impact of your role on short-term revenue, the safer you are when your company starts sacrificing people to the gods of quarterly accounts.

Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.

The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s.

1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.

2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.

3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.

Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.

Social media sites have so many users/viewings that fixed costs for serving all their content don't really matter to them, but since ads don't pay much per viewing, they have to cut the marginal costs of hosting and serving content to the bone to stay profitable.

For every million pieces of user-generated content hosted, they get a certain number of copyright complaints, so handling those complaints is a marginal cost. Since the kind of uploaded content YouTube target is particularly prone to being a significant violation of copyright (e.g. entire films), handling the complaints cheaply is a particularly big concern for them. Handling them effectively and with common sense would require human processing of each complaint, but the effect of that on marginal costs wouldn't fit with the business model, so they go with a low-marginal cost, error-prone system instead.

Since the consequences for the business of wrongly failing to take down copyrighted content can be very bad, but the consequences for the business of wrongly taking down uncopyrighted content are negligible, if the system must be error prone, they want their users to be on the wrong side of any errors, not the complainants.

Any American rival to YouTube would have the same problem and would resolve it a similar way.

The CCP really don't want another Tienanmen Square and bend to public opinion when necessary, e.g. the ending of lockdown. Given that a lot of Chinese women feel strongly about this, their government can still prod them a bit, but too much pressure would damage the broader legitimacy of the system.

Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough) to make it as efficient as possible.

By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a lower priority.

No British crime report ever: "Well, the thief lets more people watch my television for free than I did, so it rightfully belongs to him."

Cameron denied that and the two people who made the claim admit their only source was a single anonymous member of parliament. But, because it's so funny and they knew Cameron wouldn't sue, it didn't matter to them whether or not it was true.

OS/2 would have beaten NT in the consumer and SMB markets.

95 dealt with every weakness of NT in those markets and provided developers, consumers and SMBs with a smooth migration path towards it. It had very good backwards (DOS and 3.11) and forwards (XP) compatibility, reasonable hardware requirements and the ability to boot into DOS (important for gaming and some other applications at the time). It also offered massive advances over 3.11 (proper multi-tasking, the best looking GUI of the time and greatly improved stability) that when combined with the above, pushed user adoption.

Given its design requirements, 95 could never have been as stable as NT, but it was a spectacularly successful interim solution for customers not yet ready for the trade-offs that would have involved.

"he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board" = "He lied to us about something important"

Murati's selection as interim CEO is a surprise and might be an attempt to distance the company from whatever the board is claiming Altman lied about.

mIRC is very powerful, but most '90s, Windows power-users needed some explanation of how to use it, whereas Slack's design language makes it install-and-play for even basic users.

Mobile design isn't just a response to the limitations of its hardware; as technologies become more prevalent, intuitiveness to increasingly inexperienced users has to be prioritised over everything else and this is a major trend that dates right back to the beginning of the computer industry.

Usability is much better today than it was in the past; it's just no longer targeted at us.

Yup. The crew and achievements of 11 are far more famous, but most people couldn't tell you which number their Apollo mission was.

Depending on the political situation in your country, your parents probably got the same knowledge of American life from TV series and films. America's monopoly of popular culture is weaker today than it was when they were growing up.

I don't think that's a common interpretation of the move.

Heaney spent a year as a guest lecturer in UC Berkeley in 1970-'71 and realised there that his daily life in Northern Ireland had become dominated by the Troubles to an extent that was harming his development as a writer.

After that, he moved south of the border and spent 4 productive years as a full-time writer in Wicklow (a rural county south of Dublin and quite far from the conflict). He called his time in Wicklow a "retreat" in the religious sense of the word, emphasizing how it was about getting away from the world. Then, from 1976, he started taking academic jobs outside of Northern Ireland, first in Dublin and then in America.

Since long before he left Northern Ireland, he'd have been considered a prominent Nationalist by both sides, so the move south should have seemed more like opting out of the conflict than taking a side in it.

If it does, there's zero chance that Microsoft know about it. When your company is worth $2,427,000,000,000 , you'd have to be insane to risk it all like that.

It's one of those tricky irregular verbs in English:

We dug our own grave.

You are fired.

He/She is fired.

You are fired.

You are fired.

They are fired.

So, that link answers "Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism?"

Communism seems to be his favorite example of something that can work initially from a good starting point, but fails over time, and he also believes that's true of Work From Home.

He might "hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees", but his limited comparison of it to Communism isn't strong evidence in either direction.

In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse Electric Company in one of the worst deals in history.

Westinghouse negotiated fixed price contracts to construct nuclear reactors and Toshiba provided financial guarantees, so they ended up on the hook for massive cost over-runs. In 2017 alone, Westinghouse reported an annual loss of $9bn. and declared themselves bankrupt.

Toshiba had to sell a load of businesses over the years to escape the Westinghouse black hole and repair their balance sheet.

Indian firms are importing Russian crude oil at a discount, mixing it with crude from unsanctioned places, refining the mix and selling it for full price on the open market as unsanctioned oil.

New Delhi is confident the US is so desperate for an alliance against China, it can't afford to do anything about it.

That's also why it expects no serious repercussions for assassinating a Canadian citizen in Canada.

China and Europe had been sending diplomatic and trade missions to each other for well over a millennium before there was any direct contact between the West and Japan (and also since long before England came into existence). It seems likely Japan's early knowledge of Europe, including England, came via the Chinese.

It's more complicated than that, because the DPC has to give the information to the specific person before it can instruct them not to leak it, though that doesn't completely eliminate the potential for abuse.

The US FTC has the same power, except the instruction must be signed by an in-house judge and the proposed amendment should have a similar safeguard.

If the headline was something like "Irish Gov Proposes Law With Inadequate Safeguards", I'd agree with it, but "Irish Gov Makes Critizising Big Tech and Irish DPC a Crime" is a false statement.

Read the amendment itself.

The proposal is that where the Irish DPC gives confidential information to somebody as part of an investigation, it can instruct that person not to leak the information it gave. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/2023-06-2...

It's possible to oppose the amendment without putting a dishonest spin on it like "Irish Gov Makes critizising Big Tech and Irish DPC a Crime."

Microsoft's OS business is a classic "cash cow". It's very big and very profitable, but has limited growth prospects and its revenue is currently growing at only single digit percentage points per year. Every MBA course teaches that the way to handle a cash cow is to milk as much profits from the users and spend as little money maintaining it as you can get away with. You do this to maximise the amount you have to invest in other, faster growing businesses that will be the future of the company, even if it causes long-term damage to the cash cow. MS have been milking their OS and Office businesses to fund their cloud and XBox businesses and, so far, it's a textbook example of the strategy succeeding; the cloud already brings in more revenue for MS than Windows and is still growing much faster than it.

The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses. The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.

MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.