Me three...
174 karma · joined February 15, 2013
By complicated I mean problems that can be decomposed into well-understood tasks with clear constraints, measurable completion criteria, relatively predictable dependencies, and short feedback loops. Think designing and building rockets, factories, data centers, going to the moon, etc. With these types of challenges, his style and strengths make a lot of sense:
- rethink from first principles
- identify the bottleneck
- challenge industry assumptions
- assign ownership
- remove the constraint
- iterate very quickly
Complex problems are a different story, and he doesn't seem particularly well suited for them. A complex problem has unknown unknowns, contains problems that cannot necessarily be decomposed because they are novel and not yet well understood, and has feedback loops that produce emergent behavior. You can't simply solve problem A, move on to B, and then C, because solving C can change the assumptions you made about A.
Examples of complex problems would be would be FSD, the Twitter ecosystem, curing some types of cancer, politics, etc.
The problem is that a lot of its supporters and investors cannot distinguish between solving complicated problems (the ones Elon Musk excels at) and complex problems (the ones Elon Musk is trying solve now: FSD, robotics, etc...).
For reference, a complicated problem is one that you can break down into pieces and solve each individual piece within some tolerance and as a result solve the whole problem. For example, how do I build a rocket that can get X kg of load at a given orbit or how do I design an electric car to transport 4 people 200 miles.
Complex problems are problems you cannot break into pieces and plan for before hand, usually because you have unknown unknows and you have a lot of feedback loops (when you change something it changes something else you though you had already solved). This are the types of challenges Elon is taking on now: FSD, robotics, etc...
Russian is top down innovation with a thick layer of corruption. No matter how much you want to claim strategic depth, they are always several steps behind Ukrainians. No matter how many advantages due to size they have.
Sorry you picked the wrong team.
That people will go with what is easier and works?
That open source and open standards don't win by default? That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.
Until a couple of years ago, AMD was in survival mode, fighting Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other. Two rivals that were making money hand over fist while AMD was bleeding money.
AMD picked open standards and made investments on open source frameworks and libraries commensurate with their financials, the hope being that the community could help pick up some of the slack. The community, understandably, went with the proprietary solution that worked well at the time and had resources behind.
The net results is that the Nvidia ecosystem has gained a dominant position in the industry and benefits from being perceived as a quasi-standard. On the other hand, open source efforts by AMD or others get viewed as "not serious".
The financial situation of AMD has improved somewhat over the last couple years. So AMD is "taking AI more seriously now". But it might be too late and the proprietary ecosystem has probably won.
Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products.
I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump from tall buildings. While economics is not an exact science (probably not even a science), you cannot ignore its principles.
If protectionist policies worked, we would have figured out by now. The truth is that limited protectionist policies might work to give a push to a nascent industry in the short to medium term. But it does hurt the country as a whole in the long term.
If the wine cellar wants their customers to trade wine, I'm sure a centralized ledger based on a SQL DB would be much easier and cheaper to implement and scale to millions of transactions.
In theory, with SQL any executive could write his own report instead of having to wait for weeks for those pesky software guys to write the reports.
For many decades, different waves in the industry have tried to bring tools to the market to allow non-programers to write programs. The thinking is that the tooling or the grammar are the obstacles for regular people to write programs (applications).
The issue is that it is not the syntax or the tools that are the barrier. The barrier to write programs is that the author has to thing about all possible states and conditions and handle them. That requires patience and a certain mindset. If you are not able/willing to be that exhaustive, you will not be able to write general programs. Conceptually you could write programs (or web applications) that have been narrowed to very specific choices of workflows with most of the conditions already taken care of for you.
Creating a website with drag-and-drop tools is not that difficult; until you start to consider: what happens if the user shrinks the window below certain width? What happens if he views the site on a phone? What happens if I have to change the length of a piece of text?
And as others have mentioned, there are other mechanisms to defer the tax payment based on the house equity.
The real cruel thing is to lower the bar for the "have" (as in have a house in SV) and higher it for the "have not".
The noob faces a double whammy, he needs to put a lot of money for the house and he has to pay a higher tax rate (and he has to live there because his livelihood depends on it). The established has an incredible investment in his home with a big market value giving him many options.
Nope. A retired person should have the CHOICE to pocket the $3.5MM the Googler is ready to pay for his house in Palo Alto and buy an even fancier house in Livermore knowing that his property taxes is not going to substantially change much.
But with the present system instead, another Googler, let say the food service employee, will never be able to pay the mortgage for a one room apartment PLUS exorbitant "nub" real state taxes. At least the retired guy has a large amount of equity in the house and choices.
Prop 13 doesn't change the property tax rate, it changes WHO pays the full "nub" rate and who enjoys a "nobility" rebate.
It disincentives home owners from moving, even when their new jobs are far away, increasing commuting time.
It also creates a resource allocation imbalance. Folks that are retired and don't benefit so much by living in highly concentrated job areas tend to remain there. Even when younger people who would benefit more from living in these areas would be willing to pay more, providing an incentive for retired owners to move to a less concentrated area and making a profit.
But with Prop 13, we have instead a system that artificially distorts the housing market(and not in a "just" or "deserving" way).
So, if you are a native speaker or you are fluent in the language, listening at a higher pace shouldn't be an issue.
Intel's Data Center Group – 29% of 2016 revenues
Source: Wikipedia
That is 84% of their business.
If Intel manages to keep AMD market share below ~18% in the next couple of years, then probably not.
The value of the stock revolves around how much money AMD is able to generate and the biggest variables here are volume of sales and margins on those sales. AMD's variable costs are probably higher than Intel's since they outsource their manufacturing to TSMC, but their fixed costs dwarf Intel's.
Intel AMD Revenue $19.2B 2B
Earnings Q3 $6B $0.12B
Keeping aside the fact that AMD's numbers include GPU sales, notice how AMD's earnings to revenue ratio is very small compared to Intel's. Also notice that Intel's market cap is almost 7 times AMD's (again, AMD has a GPU business too).
So the key is really, do you believe that AMD will be able to break the ~18% market share (in particular in high margin segments)? My back of the envelope calculations indicate that at around 20% market share AMD should be able to generate earnings close to the billion dollars per quarter, making AMD a buy. If they cannot break and sustain a market share close to that, my answer would be not.
Disclaimer: I have AMD shares and I don't plan to buy or sale given current pricing.
I'm genuinely curious. My father is retired and has some savings and that would seem like the ideal investment for him.
The Bart cost was $1.586 billion (according to Wikipedia) or around ~$10 billion of today's dollars.
Let say that back then we had put that money ($1.586 billion) into an annuity in perpetuity and given the money each years to the riders so they will find alternative means of transport.
So if instead of building bart back in the 70's we had put the money into a perpetual annuity, we would be receiving the sum of $63.5 millions a year from the annuity (your own numbers seem to indicate a 4% yield). That is less than 50 cents per ride (according to Wikipedia Bart gives 129 million rides a year).
I don't think the cost is insignificant compared with the level of economic activity that the 400.0000 daily riders generate for SF and the Bay Area in general.
And now imagine 20 years from now how much $63.5 millions a year will buy you compared with the benefits of mass transportation.
The thing is that the cost of such projects is an investments and a legacy for future generations to enjoy. Imagine if we had to build the BART or the highway system in this they and age. How much would it cost? How many buildings in highly concentrated areas will need to be taken down to make way? Do you even believe that BART was on budget or on time?
Would it be any cheaper to build a high speed rail system in 10 years? In 20 years? Should we throw the towel and decide that future generations will only have the option to fly to LA or should they have to build it themselves at an even bigger price tag?
I know the HSR project is going to be over budget and the ROI won't be there for my generation. But in the same way that I can commute to SF on Bart, I want future generations to have the option to travel to LA in HSR.
Not to mention PlayStation Vue could become Apple Vue.
- Universal Studios
- PlayStation (aka a big foothold in the living room) and some of the most creative game studios
- Awesome displays (TVs)
- Bigger footprint in the consumer electronics market
- ... and most important of all the best camera sensors in the market (including camera phone sensors).
The main advantage of using JSONB on Postgres over MongoDB is that you can create tables that mix regular fields (varchar, number, date, etc...) with JSONB fields. Then you can do joins of your table with other tables (no need to map/reduce or other insane processing for a simple join).