1,374 karma · joined March 3, 2017
and
On the other hand that idea that "companies exist to make money for shareholders, to ONLY make money for shareholders, and doing any other than maximizing shareholder returns is bad" is pretty commonly accepted (and, I believe, enshrined in US law)
Shrinkflation is a thing, which people suddenly started noticing in the past 5 years.
There's also "the Schlitz Mistake", which I've heard summarized as "most customers won't notice if you take your product's quality from A to B (or C), but they definitely will if you take it from A to J (or A to M)"
At this point I kinda assume that any company releasing year updates to a physical product that _doesn't_ take the opportunity to trim costs / reduce quality would be vulnerable to a shareholder lawsuit for leaving money on the table...
Yes! That's it exactly! Carbon Copy!
Except from email, not rip-offs :)
/s
(And: agreed on this being a terrible name!)
I apologize - I know that the "Citation needed" meme is mostly a way to say "I disagree" but in this case you literally left out your citation :)
You make a claim ("most monopolies don't actually raise prices") you use the end-note citation format ( "[0]" ), but then the end-note is a parenthetical comment that starts to restart your claim and then trails off.
In all seriousness: If you or anyone else can list examples of efficient monopolies I'd be curious to know.
Off the top of my head: local utilities are often given local monopolies. Telecom seems to often be a local monopoly (I've got one option for Internet access, and that's reasonably common here in the US, especially outside of metro areas). I feel like the utilities are reasonably efficient but the telecoms aren't, but I don't have any specific data to back that up.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :)
I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.
I say this as someone who's watched a bunch of woodworking videos but hasn't actually done this myself :)
I had no idea this reference existed, or that it's a a fun, though dystopian, read.
Thanks! :)
Why offer erasers on these things? The procedure described below has nothing to do with using these as pencils, and at $500 for a pack I can't imagine anyone, anywhere casually drawing with these.
(Is there another procedure, similar to the one described below, except instead of dragging the pencil tip across a surface you drag the eraser across it? )
First people practiced L33t3cod3 problems for interviews
Then people built AIs to build software
And now the AIs are studying L33t3cod3 problems
Specifically: they suspect that the motivation for trying to hack their site (for at least some people) is that they wanted early access to numbers that folks were betting on in prediction markets. Since they've got those numbers they can just bet on them, then benefit from their perfect knowledge.
On the one hand this does seem incredibly unethical (it's clearly insider trading). On the other hand the CEO of PolyMarket has said that insider trading is part of the point of PolyMarket: https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?si=ztyTtgjeHSJbNjSZ&t=1566
I get that they're in very different businesses, but for both don't they have the issue that once a client gets big enough the client might decide to move the services in-house? Based on how much of the internet went down when that AWS data center crashed the answer is clearly "No" for AWS.
Is that because of physical, real-world infrastructure? Are there no open versions of their APIs? Is it too hard to migrate to something else once a client has achieved that size?
The part about "depending on the situation and state you are in." is doing _a_lot_ of work there. Here in WA state, for example, if you go into a private meeting and record the thing without getting folks consent first then you're guilty of a misdemeanor.
Another example: in my old neighbor we had a nuisance neighbor who we all thought was engaged in Crimes, Plural. The immediate neighbor wanted to put up a video camera to catch them in the act but was told that they can't film the neighbor's yard directly. Filming their own yard and the field of view happens to catch something in the adjacent yard might get by a judge, maybe. So even if you can stand on the sidewalk and see past the trees into someone's backyard that doesn't mean you can film it.
(To be clear - I think this probably a good rule. I don't want folks filming me in my backyard :) )
Clearly, the tl;dr is that if this really matters to someone then they should check with a lawyer first.
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
Ok, now I'm hooked :)
What's your blog? I don't suppose it has an RSS feed, hopefully? :)
I assumed that too, back when i thought that getting an e-ink pad would be cool.
Right now Amazon is quoting me $450 on a 10.3" reMarkable, but the price goes up for the 11.8" model and/or for bells and whistles. It looks like an 11" ipad is $450 and up (based on https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/), although you need to buy the $80-100 iPencil separately.
So yeah - I was hoping that e-ink things would cost less, but they're still pretty expensive and certainly competitive with the iPad.
And once they do so they'll have solved two big problems! :)
And that one room where they had periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and such) but you had to read those there in that room.
And encyclopedias, for kids to use for their research reports.
And a story hour for kids (and, let's face it, for the parents).
And that one computer in the back that had Oregon Trail and Summer Olympic Games on it.
But mostly I remembered the books, and that's what I felt like libraries should be about.
Now I feel like a library's purpose is to support it's community. Mostly they lend books because that's what they're known for and they're very good at it. They're expanding into eBooks because that's another big thing people read today. And music CDs and DVDs which is very similar to lending books, and people like those.
Expanding out to lending things is a bit of a mind-bender for me too, but I think it's in line with what libraries have always done - help the community.
For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?
I can't believe that in our timeline Europe has to think like this, but here we are.
Most of the other comments are basically saying this ("the pay is too low for too long for not enough reward").
Anecdotally: I'm teaching a course in "How To Be Successful In College" (not it's real name) at the US community college where I teach Computer Science. I've got more than 1 student who are going to get a credential for nursing because there's just no way they can spend 8-10 years in school to become a doctor.
Would they be good doctors? The question is moot because it's never gonna happen.
I thought "fine-tuning" meant training it on additional data to add additional facts / knowledge? I might be mistaking your use of the word "tune", though :)
Humor aside, you're not wrong - spending an hour setting up and then 10 minutes per player to actually play was a lot more fun when I had a lot more free time
Like, I could see some people noticing that the book they're reading has dashes that are a bit longer than normal, but what made you think "That must be it's own thing, separate from a normal dash" as opposed to something like "In this font the dashes are very long"?
Any chance folks in the US can use these, in the US?
This is a genuine question, although I don't have my hopes up. It would be nice to have some actual competition / choices