code4tee

Not surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works.

More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.

Add another tombstone: https://killedbygoogle.com/

The “E6B Flight Computer” is a slide rule designed to perform various navigation calculations and is still a part of flight training for many pilots today. Once mastering it the old way student pilots are then allowed to use electronic versions or iPad apps that do all the calculations instantly.

A good lesson to all to fact-check what you read. Especially if your source of news is some random guy on Twitter.

At least they’re issuing the refunds. Have bought products from other startups that went bust and they just send an email saying their product won’t work after X date, have a nice day.

Because AWS honestly cares more about having a happy loyal customer for the long term than making a few bucks in the short term. That’s why. It’s a rare mindset among large companies these days.

Universities are starting to sound like car salesman.

Look at this great deal! Now we’ll just add on the winterization fee, rust prevention package, delivery fee, admin fee, admin recovery fee, tag fee, boat payment fee, tire rotation fee, coolant flush and closing costs and we’ll get you on the road in a jiffy!

Indeed. The article uses “fees” to include tuition but yes usually it’s called “tuition and fees.”

Few would argue about fixed costs of libraries, but you be hard pressed to explain how libraries etc. are responsible for the cost of higher ed increasing far far faster than inflation to levels that are increasingly hard to justify. That has a lot more to do with the number of “Assistant Vice Provost of Underwater Basketweaving” type non-teaching non-research roles and positions that have developed over the years at many schools.

It’s a story similar to Healthcare in the US. It’s so expensive because so little is actually spent on healthcare vs paperwork and administration.

The Pandora’s box here is that far too little of these “fees” actually went to in-person instruction vs. bloated admin and other things not directly linked to core educational activities. Unless universities slash those bloated admin and other costs then they’re not really in a position to be giving everyone a “remote learning” discount.

There’s a big difference between stealing actual IP and executing on someone else’s idea (even if the idea was “stolen”).

The sour grapes here seem to be coming from those who thought they “owned” having an idea but failed to fully execute on it. The winner is the one who actually does it.

Great job. Handmade detailed models are always very impressive. Making it out of an odd material makes even more interesting.

COVID-19 will likely be a watershed moment for higher education in the US. Many colleges and universities will likely never return to what they had before. There will be immense pressure to rethink how the whole system works and the cost structures therein.

At many schools the cost increases over the last few decades have very little to do with increasing the quality of education and a lot to do with unnecessary expenses and ever growing administrative bloat. It’s going to be hard for schools to justify their cost when they’re running essentially an online school and that’s the first step towards the whole house of cards falling apart. Expect to see a lot of changes in the coming years. It will be painful but for the best in the long term in getting schools back to basics of providing education.

Schools like Harvard will be fine but outside the top tier it’s about to get real ugly.

I see that but I think the broader point (and the point of the article) is that too often “success” in finding some less obvious link actually comes at the cost of overlooking the simple stuff. In the end there’s an argument that while neat the fancy ad targeting actually fails to meet the core business objective of maximizing ad performance.

I’ve always thought that the “advanced tracking” touted by some in AdTech was:

1. Generally not that advanced (yes I searched for hotels in Florida and so yes I’m probably taking a trip to Florida... don’t need fancy ML to figure that out.)

2. Not that smart. (Hey we actually got back from our Florida vacation two months ago... don’t need to keep seeing hotel offers for Florida!)

It totally makes sense that just “dumb” targeting (show people adverts related to the content on the page they are currently looking at, which requires no tracking) might actually work better than all the black magic products companies promote.

There was a time when McKinsey could probably say they “hire the best of the best” but I’m not aware of anyone that honestly believes this to be the case today. Top talent doesn’t want to work for consulting firms anymore.

Seeing lots of evidence indicating that prices are falling in cities and it’s very hard to sell.

Meanwhile in the suburbs around cities the market is booming in certain segments. Lots of people who vowed they were always city dwellers are suddenly keen to live in the burbs. Hearing lots of stories of houses in desirable suburbs getting multiple competitive offers the first day they go on the market.

In the rental space in suburbs and vacation communities heard lots of stories of places being rented at above market prices sight unseen by people just looking to get out of the city for the summer/year.

Things will probably pick up in cities once things start to return to normal, but like a lot of things it’s likely going to be a very long time before things get back to where they were before all this started.

"Privacy is at the heart of everything we do"

Really?

A more accurate statement is probably:

"Privacy is at the heart of everything we do. Unless we think we can make money off your data. Then it’s a feature providing great targeted user experiences not a privacy issue. You know, how we block the ‘bad’ trackers in our products, just not our own. We make money off your data with our trackers so it would be silly of us to block those. But other than that sure, yeah, privacy is important. Our marketing people tell me I should keep saying that.”

But you know, details.

For better or worse money talks. Advertiser pullouts have been an effective change mechanism in many other cases. TV personalities doing controversial things were typically done in when the advertisers pulled their money. Until then nothing happened.

Facebook does a lot of cool things but it’s only sustainable as a business if the advertising dollars keep flowing. Shut that off in any appreciable quantity and things will get ugly there real quick.

This seems to be the norm for many companies. Everyone is throwing in the towel on 2020 so far as the office goes with the goal to take a fresh look for 2021 at the end of this year. Many will likely never go back to the setup they had before.

If you’re in the market for commercial office space you can probably get some killer deals moving forward.

To be fair isn’t this probably the case with just about every laptop? Kit it out with some crazy totally impractical cooling setup and you can squeeze out a bit more performance. Even after all the craziness they edged out enough performer to detect it on a stress test but probably not enough to materially impact user experience.

This video sort of misses the point that real-world design is balancing multiple factors, not just over-optimizing one factor at the cost of others.

People don’t buy a MacBook Air because their looking for the fastest processor performance processor. That’s not the point of the product or the market it’s made for.

Just think of all the “snow” products as a modern version of sneaker net (it used to be faster to run down the hall with a disk than transfer files over the network because networks used to be really slow).

The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx.

Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks.

The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model.

Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.

The SAT has always generally been a test showing how well you prepared for the SAT. For top schools all viable candidates had very good scores so it wasn’t much use.

It was just one of those things everyone did because everyone did it. With more opting out that momentum goes away and increasingly now people are asking “so why did we use this test again?”

Likely won’t be long until the SAT just disappears entirely and replaced with nothing, or subject tests or some other exams more practically linked to placement in certain programs.

In probably 99% of AI/ML use cases the AI/ML is basically just a commodity item and the real “expertise” comes from getting and preparing good datasets for analysis, and having a clear problem to solve. The strategy behind something like AWS SageMaker is based entirely around this idea.

The problem is that too many companies believed it was the opposite so they built and hired all these AI/ML “experts” that just wanted to “built models” but didn’t want to focus in the messy hard stuff like finding and cleaning data. Nearly all of these AI/ML “experts” inside companies were also broadly just applying off the shelf tools and algorithms, perhaps with a bit of ensembling, rather than actually building new AI/ML approaches.

As a result, the big investments inside most companies produced a flash and puff of smoke that got people briefly excited followed by a lot of money spent with little business value returned.

I’m a big believer in ML approaches, but in most cases companies need to be focusing in their data first against clear business problem and just use off the shelf tools for the rest. That’s good enough for nearly all needs.

There’s a big bubble at the moment with all these “AI/ML” teams that’s going to crash hard as businesses realize the above and reset to focus on stuff that works and generates tangible value for the business.

I think we agree. Saying fake identifies = not cool. Gaming the system (without fake identities) may not be nice but probably not illegal (in most places).

“Insurance is not a financial instrument”

That’s just not correct. There are plenty of insurance policies where people buy them as an investment with the hope of profiting off the payout when the insured asset has a loss. Credit default swaps being one such instrument.

Not saying that’s a good thing, but it certainly exists.

The scores of fake identities was clearly wrong but just “gaming the system” is generally not a crime. Look up the story about chocolate pudding and airlines.

Back when CDs paid a real return and credit cards gave free cash advances with 6 plus months no interest (neither of which exist anymore) had a lot of friends that would just use their good credit to get a bunch of cards, get “free” cash for 6 months, buy a CD with it (Sometimes from the same bank that gave them the free cash!) and just sit back and let the bank send them free money... then pay off the card when the CD matured after 6 months.

It was totally gaming the system but if the banks were dumb enough to let it happen then it’s sort of on them at some level.

These are valid concerns but in 2020 very easy problems to solve. There’s little reason why a small consortium of institutions couldn’t build a very robust system to accomplish all that. Use digital signatures and distributed mirrored storage and problem solved. Charge a very modest fee to members to cover fixed costs and make it free to the public. Heck a few we’ll organized S3 buckets with a search engine attached would be better than a lot of what’s out there today.

Not to pick on academics but the commercial publishing houses basically prey on the stubbornness of the academic community here. In the pure private sector someone would come along tomorrow and make Elsevier and others obsolete and they would go bust quickly. MIT is making the moves that might just whip something into shape to remove Elsevier’s role in the market.

On “high impact” if the top universities in the world en-mass unsubscribe from the commercial players that will change quick.

LinkedIn is mostly full of people trying to reach or impress other people who are broadly not really using LinkedIn.

Most people have a profile but few people I know spend any time on the site unless their activity fits the description above. Thus it’s never really clear to me what the point of it all is.

Can’t imagine any serious tech environment still allowing non-temporary creds. If they do, good luck when the security audit happens.

You’re not the target user here. In highly secure environments you can’t just “pip install your-thing”.