cjenkins

In the US debit card fees are capped (https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-average-...). The cap is low enough that there isn't enough to fund rewards like we see on credit cards. IIRC there were debit card rewards when they first came out but those went away with the fee caps.

Perhaps far too optimistic, but if AI search gets pushed heavily and traditional search becomes less relevant, could we see SEO fade for traditional search and it become less polluted over time? Or will search engines just stop caring about traditional search and it will become an even worse cesspool over time?

Total side note, it's interesting seeing "Move fast and break things" become the dominant phrase vs what I remember initially as the "MIT vs New Jersey methods". Both describe the same thing where fast and sloppy wins vs slow and clean.

I agree. Super excited to see what people are going to be able to make as the number of people/resources needed per piece of work keeps going down. Are we about to hit a printing press/word processor moment for TV/film? Going to be wild to see a feature level piece of media with one author/credit.

WAN 2.2 FFLF2V (first-frame last-frame to video) could get you close to the tweening between key-frames today.

Looking back on history I think this will lead to meaningful art (and tons and tons of absolute garbage!).

The printing press led to publishing works being reachable by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have been able to get their works out.

I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too. Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both single creators IIRC).

Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort needed to make something will result in way more of it being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution of having to go through bigger groups first.

I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples skills in the creative process. There have to be people out there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills who don't have the resources/connections to produce what they're capable of.

Homeowners are typically going to be leveraged with a mortgage on their homes. This amplifies prices going up or down.

IE: I buy a house for 100 by using 20 of my own money and 80 of the bank's with a mortgage. If the house prices goes up to 120 and I sell, I now have 40 (doubled what I initially put in) after paying off the mortgage. If the price goes down to 50, I now owe the bank 30 (wiped out my initial 20 first then another 10 I'd have to come up with) if I want to sell.

At the classical 20% down 80% mortgage ratio you're in that 5x leveraged bucket for a long time (longer than you think due to amortization).

Bit of a tangent, but you might have better luck with hardwood vs. plywood. The glue in plywood makes it more difficult for CO2 lasers to cut through. I was super surprised when someone at work mentioned they were able to blow through some hardwood in a single pass but had a struggle to get through plywood.

https://www.plugoutpower.com/ makes a kit for the Prius (and others) to do just that!

My understanding is as interest rates go up prices need to come down as people only have $X/month to allocate towards housing. EX: If you have $100 to put towards housing per month you can put $90 towards the house itself and $10 towards interest on the loan in low interest environments, but only $80 towards the house and $20 in high interest environments. If people can only put $80 per month towards the house you're selling that ultimately means the house price can't be as high as when people are able to put $90 per month towards the house.

For the renter with a lot of cash this means you can come out ahead if you're able to minimize the loan or outright purchase in cash a house. The renter with a lot of cash gets to benefit from the lower prices from higher interest rates while minimizing the downsides of higher interest rates.

How much does the cost of labor really factor into a 20B factory? Assume 200k fully loaded at 3000 people is 600M a year on labor. That's not nothing but it seems pretty insignificant if you can save enough on the actual buildout of the fab(s).

Just a note, we're getting close to fiscal year end (9/30) for a lot of companies. Maybe totally anecdotal but I've noticed in the past that I see a lot of these kinds of announcements this time of year presumably to get these done before the next fiscal year.

I'm pretty sure that's the one! Takes a bit to get to the punchline but the idea that you want to look for tests that are unhackable is the big idea (and making a good product to get lots of users is the exemplar for an unhackable test).

Thanks for finding that!

Since we're commenting on a pg essay, IIRC startups are said to be the place where you CAN play it straight and get rewarded justly. The core idea being you can't fake or politic your way into making something users want.

I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).

I'll second that. The lack of humidity really helps keep things comfortable outside when it is cold. That specific heat of water is killer in a Midwest winter.

Low humidity is also why we get the really powdery snow that is great for skiing.

There has been controversy around them paying third party developers to release their game exclusively through Epic Games Store. From what I recall these are timed exclusives so the games do eventually end up on other store fronts but people seem to be really up in arms about it.

The specs seem fairly detailed (at least to a non-HVAC person) on their website [IE: 1].

Cost on the other hand doesn't seem to be readily available (my guess is expensive since they seem to be targeting businesses vs consumers).

[1] http://www.coolerado.com/m50-energy-efficient-air-conditione... (Downloads tab)

Evaporative cooler owner here. Thought I would add a few data points in case people were curious. We live in Denver, CO (arid climate, typically mid 90Fs in the summer but can reach over 100F. We tied the all time record of 105 in June FYI).

We inherited a MasterCool evaporative cooler (think big metal box where the evaporative pads are made of aspen fibers) when we bought our house. It wasn't very well sealed so we were only able to drive the temperature down ~10-15 degrees F so it would get pretty uncomfortable once it got above 90.

Replaced recently with a Breezair unit and it's been way better. The air it draws in seems to all be going through the evaporation media so we've been able to maintain 72-75 degrees in our old drafty house throughout the summer so far. I mostly don't mind the added humidity as I get fairly dry skin but we have a few doors which swell and stick due to absorbing the additional moisture.

I really wanted to get a Coolerado unit but they only seem to be readily available for commercial applications. The difference with this unit is that it is an indirect evaporative cooler so the air it blows into the cooled space has no added humidity (and it claims to be able to achieve > 100% wet bulb temperature due to its design [1]).

[1] http://www.coolerado.com/pdfs/PowerMagMCTCfiguresCooleradoTI...

Are you sure you're not thinking of Phil Fish? That seems much more likely to me.

That's an impressive die shrink as well. Seems like Intel can make the 4 core Ivy in about the same die area as the 2 core Sandy. Considering the 4 cores are going to sell for quite a bit more that has to be great for margins.

I haven't looked at it in a while, but you might check out Robert Virding's Lisp Flavored Erlang at https://github.com/rvirding/lfe.

He's definitely familiar with Erlang as IIRC he was one of the original authors.

I've always thought it strange to think that ARM (or any other CPU design) company could take out Intel.

Worst case in the ARM scenario, Intel buys a company with an ARM license and is still a step ahead on process and fab technology.

To boot, increased mobile device usage (even on ARM) is probably good overall for Intel as it helps drive demand for the servers powering the services those devices consume.

I can't say for sure, but possibly fiscal quarter/year ends?

One cool thing is that the Google Android App Inventor is built out of Kawa. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Inventor)

I believe Kawa is also currently a bit friendlier on Android as Clojure has some overhead. (More at http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Android+Support)

I like it for screen real estate purposes. The shorter stuff is, the more text I can view in a single window.

I wish monitor real estate progressed at the rate of Moore's law, but I suppose we'd need bigger rooms to put them in before too long.

I'm always curious how Magic Online (http://www.mtgonline.com) gets left out of these virtual goods conversations. It had an 8 year celebration this past July and by a rough calculation (http://robowarp.com/2010/10/29/another-revenue-datapoint/) was pulling in 150k per day during release events for Scars.

Ever since I started tracking news on virtual goods it's always boggled my mind that it never gets mentioned. Perhaps it's just a little bit too different in that there's an incredibly small free portion and a huge premium portion and it's a direct translation of a physical product.

(I digress some but they seem to have the ideal customer breakdown. Very few freeloaders and a huge number of people who pay ~$15 to draft each time.)

I'm not sure how the API compares to FFTW, but if you're on Nvidia hardware the toolkit comes with the CUFFT library http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_2_toolkit_rc.html which is tuned for their hardware.

I seem to recall needing to transfer the data to GPU memory and other things like that when I last used it, but that was prior to toolkit 2.0 IIRC.

This comment resonates with me especially well today.

I've been attempting to work with GWT and the serialization issues are entertaining (did you implement IsSerializable? is there a no-arg constructor? Do all of the classes your class depend on have the same? Did you remember to recompile the GWT/JS code to update the serialization white list? etc.).

It makes me appreciate more playing with Erlang a while back and shooting data around being so simple.

Depending on what you like from Ruby, you could also check out Lisp Flavored Erlang at http://github.com/rvirding/lfe. IIRC Virding was one of the original creators of Erlang.

I believe the reference to unified address space is in reference to #6 in the PDF linked below and caches #4. I agree that the unified memory address space will be wonderful as managing all the various hierarchies by hand is a pain.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/PDF/fermi_white_papers/D.Patte...

In a similar theme, virtual reality has been tested to relieve phantom limb pain from missing limbs.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/29102443.html

It's amazing how adaptable the human body/mind is sometimes.