dotnet00

As someone who codes in CUDA daily, putting out and maintaining so many different libraries implementing complex multi-stage GPU algorithms efficiently at many different levels of abstraction, without having a ton of edgecase bugs everywhere, alongside maintaining all of the tooling for debugging and profiling, and still having regular updates, is quite a bit beyond "barely passable". It's a feat only matched by a handful of other companies.

There's a lot of software involved in GPUs, and NVIDIA's winning strategy has been that the software is great. They maintained a stable ecosystem across most of their consumer and workstation/server stack for many years before crypto, AI and GPU-focused HPC really blew up. AMD has generally better hardware but poor enough software that "fine wine" is a thing (ie the software takes many years post-hardware-launch to actually properly utilize the hardware). For example, they only recently got around to making AI libraries usable on the pre-covid 5700XT.

NVIDIA basically owns the market because of the stability of the CUDA ecosystem. So, I think it might be fair to call them an AI company, though I definitely wouldn't call them just a hardware maker.

Probably just a more fine-grained permissions system. Like allowing location to be viewed if your phone hasn't been touched in a configured amount of time, or if you're on your regular route home from work, or maybe you're specifically going out to be social and are fine with friends finding you, etc.

>Why not?

I'd be fine sharing my location with my immediate family, but they refuse it. When they wonder how close I am to being home, it isn't supposed to be such a serious thing as to have my precise GPS location. It's a reason to think about me or message me.

I've come to think that it's one of the many "problems" that many people don't actually want to solve, and being so heavily connected is taking away some of the "magic" of social behavior and replacing it with efficiency.

As a random example, waiting for a date to show up is probably more exciting than having a precise read of their location. Or, when my parents were visiting, they'd often say they were just thinking about how I'd be getting home soon.

The nice thing is that everyone has the ability to decide if they want to share their location or not. But even on social media, I only reveal my current location when I'm somewhere that I'd be open to running into people. Otherwise I intentionally wait till I'm somewhere else before posting about where I was.

That's not tough love, that's just dodging a topic you dislike by insinuating that anyone who disagrees must be mentally ill.

Really just comes off as projection of your own insecurities.

PhD students are typically only paid by the university if they provide labor in the form of being a teaching assistant for undergrads, guiding lab sessions and grading assignments and exams. Alternatively they're paid through their advisor's grants, in which case the student brings in revenue in the form of the large overhead cut the uni takes.

The alternative would be hiring dedicated employees to help with grading and lab sessions, and they won't tolerate the $30k/yr a PhD student does. This would have immediate impacts too, as there's no way a lone professor can keep up with grading for the class sizes in early undergrad.

I think this varies a lot depending on the person and the relationship. When I was younger, I couldn't put up with ribbing at all. I always took it as bullying. I still think very negatively of some of the people I was "friends" with at the time due to that.

On the other hand, I have ~3 friends I made as an adult that I have been talking to very frequently (with some, daily), for a decade or so, and there, any level of ribbing is fine.

I don't think it's about us knowing each other's worst qualities and being fine with it, as a lot of our banter is on things we can't change about ourselves. I think it's just a matter of trust.

PhDs are probably the leanest degree for a research school to support.

They don't attend classes after ~2 years, mostly operate independently besides consulting with their advisor, don't take anywhere near a professor's salary, teach or TA classes, act as lab technicians, and bring in money through grants.

The costs are mostly upfront in the form of providing the necessary research facilities to attract research-oriented faculty and students, and the administrative staff needed to ensure compliance with grant terms.

How about you start by turning off your own computer?

Long term stability is pretty important and C/C++ has a pretty good record of that. A lot of the bad press is also for ideological reasons, not entirely practical ones.

Finally, I think it's because the C/C++ manages to stay hidden. You don't need to know that it's written in C/C++ to use it.

When I lived in Iran as a foreigner almost 2 decades ago, it was common for foreigners to try to sneak a satellite TV box and receiver in their luggage. They'd arrange payment through someone in their original country, and obtain the dish locally (plus having a local electrician set it up for them).

It was illegal, but for the most part tolerated. Yes, it was just one-way geostationary communication rather than internet access, but it wasn't like people were doing anything special to hide the dishes on their roofs.

I think most authoritarian regimes tend to tolerate some low level violations of these kinds (VPNs were also illegal yet openly sold) in exchange for the public allowing them to stay in power.

With Starlink it probably helps that even the previous administration, despite their conflicts with Musk, turned a blind eye to Starlink being supplied to Iranians even given the Iranian government's protests (IIRC).

I think the key point is they did it with a superconductor. My understanding is that while superconductors have zero resistance, there's still a limit to how much power you can dump into them before superconductivity breaks down.

Probably just saying that people can be even more stupid than you think

Just be a rich tech worker with a remote job /s

This is the same ridiculous dynamic that keeps American manufacturing in the dump. People whine about wanting local manufacturing, then complain it doesn't pay enough, and then are surprised that the rest of the world doesn't pay their price (and funnily enough, are mostly unwilling to bear the price themselves too).

My impression is that Americans are having a hard time coping with the fact that Europe and Japan aren't bombed out husks anymore, China has developed, and India is slowly getting there too. That's why over the decades, Americans have slowly gone through hating every one of them.

Thus, the socialism hating capitalists seek strong isolationist market controls, as anything that doesn't have them winning must actually be unfair.

Why do you expect someone who hasn't yet become a citizen to say otherwise? My sister assimilated, got used to the idea that she would settle in the US and live like an American, then her green card application got rejected (something about repeated errors by either her employer or attorney). 2 years later, she's still gradually recovering from the mental health impact and rebuilding her life elsewhere.

You can't both have a system that can kick people out on a whim with zero recourse AND expect those people to be fully devoted to being American before they actually become citizens. They have to avoid committing fully before them, and especially nowadays with the unnecessary cruelties of the current administration (the entire "fly back within 24 hours or pay a fee that we don't yet have a process for" thing)

What were those repercussions? Besides just being fired for not doing what their employer wanted (indicating complicity from the company rather than pressure from the government)?

What changed recently? Until the latest admins, most platforms didn't change their stance on what is and is not allowed all too much. I'm not trying to imply that dichotomy, just saying that simply banning nazis is not effective, because they just retreat into their echo chambers and fester until they can trick enough people into giving them power. I don't know what the ideal solution is, but simply banning them doesn't seem to be it, and neither do the two extremes mentioned seem reasonable.

Robbery is a crime, so why should people take any measures to protect their things from being stolen? Murder is a crime, so why care about death threats?

New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.

It's a tough problem, everyone believes themselves an expert on everything, plus trolls and disinformation campaigns. There's also a significant information asymmetry.

It's funny you mention opioids as I just recently came across a tweet claiming that Indians were responsible for getting Americans addicted to them via prescription. In one of the buried reply chains, the poster admits they have no evidence and are just repeating a claim someone made to them sometime. But how many people will read that initial post and reinforce their racist beliefs vs see that the claim was unsubstantiated? And when that leads to drastic action by a madman, who's going to be the target of the blame? The responsibility is too diffused to target any specific person, the government obviously won't, madmen don't act in a vacuum and so the blame falls on the platform.

Yes, no one should have the power to determine what ideas are and are not allowed to propagate, but on the other hand, you could still go to other platforms and are not entitled to the reach of the major platforms, but then again, these platforms are extremely influential. At the same time there's also the problem that people in part view the platforms as responsible when they spread bad ideas, the platform operators also feel some level of social responsibility, while the platform owners don't want legal responsibility.

In cricket, yeah, the umpires can ask for the review themselves.

Sometimes it isn't really clear, like, if the ball is caught very close to the boundary line, given the size of the field, it can be tricky for the umpire to tell if it was caught over the boundary, representing the difference between the current batsman being caught out (meaning either the next batsman has to come take his place - assuming there are any of the 11 left) or adding 6 runs to his team's tally.

Some of the most memorable cricket games have had such situations.

It also adds some suspense to games as everyone waits on umpires to review data to make their call.

Musk owned Twitter for years of the Biden admin, at least one year of that was him openly simping for Trump.

So... what sort of threat was this, that suddenly disappeared when Musk bought it? How credible was the threat if Musk was able to release the Twitter Files without repercussions from the Biden admin?

The 1st amendment doesn't prevent the government from making suggestions to private companies. They aren't allowed to coerce them into censoring things. So it still isn't a crime.

What the Biden admin did was not acceptable, and even at the time I got plenty of heat from HN for thinking that it was a sketchy loophole for the government to use, that it was against the spirit of the law.

I'm trying to emphasize the distinction because the companys' self-serving language is going to be abused to claim that the current admin - that has just threatened to sue a TV channel for bringing back a show they tried to threaten the channel into getting rid of - is actually a defender of free speech.

With medicine there's pushback because the vast majority of the time, someone's scamming you and you likely don't actually know what you're talking about, we had a ton of this during covid, radioactive jewelery that was supposed to protect you, cow piss (I personally know people who tried this...), 5G towers (actual damage done to all sorts of towers), Ivermectin, Hydrochloroquine and more. People who are sick or have a sick loved one are especially vulnerable to these sorts of things (there's an example of such a victim in the comments), and often end up making things worse by waiting too long or causing further damage.

With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate? This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.

They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.

The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.

They claim a 5% reduction in spread with cloth masks and a 12% reduction with surgical masks. I think 1 less case out of every 10 or 20 is pretty acceptable?

Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.

The language they're using implies the Biden admin pressured them to censor (which, as pointed out, doesn't make sense because they were doing it before Biden too), rather than just admitting that they were complicit with the Biden admin to do it.

As the other reply mentions, that's where the "in your face" part comes in. Many of the diseases that can be prevented by vaccines are in living memory for those countries.

On top of that, 'poorly educated' in those countries often means never having been to a proper school, never having finished basic schooling, being illiterate, or lacking access to information (be it the internet or social programs). That kind of skepticism is easier to help, because it stems from a place of actual ignorance, rather than believing oneself to be smarter than everyone else.

The implication of saying they were "pressed" by the Biden admin (as they claim in the letter) is that Google was unwilling. I don't buy that. They were complicit and are now throwing the Biden admin under the bus because it is politically convenient. Just like how the Twitter files showed that Twitter was complicit in it.

Anti-vax was enough of an issue that vaccine mandates were necessary for Covid.

It also isn't convincing to be claiming that racism isn't as big in the West given all the discourse around H1Bs, Indians (the Trump base has been pretty open on this one, with comments on JD Vance's wife, the flood of anti-Indian racism on social media, and recently the joy taken in attempting to interfere with Indians forced to fly back to the US in a hurry due to the lack of clarity on the H1B thing), how ICE is identifying illegals, a senator openly questioning the citizenship of a brown mayoral candidate and so on.

I agree that denying something is the easiest way to convince people of the opposite, but it's also understandable when social media companies decide to censor advice from well known individuals that people should do potentially harmful things like consume horse dewormer to deal with Covid. Basically, it's complicated, though I would prefer to lean towards not censoring such opinions.

They're into folk medicine, but their anti-vax issues generally come from people who don't have any means of knowing better (i.e. never been to school, dropped out at a very early grade, isolated, not even literate). Typically just education and having a doctor or a local elder respectfully explain to them that the Polio shot will help prevent their child from being paralyzed for life is enough to convince them.

Meanwhile the 'educated' Westerner, to whom Polio is a third-world disease, will convince themselves that the doctor is lying for some reason, will choose to take the 75% chance of an asymptomatic infection because they don't truly appreciate how bad it can otherwise be, will use their access to a vast collection of humanity's information to cherry pick data that supports their position (most likely while also claiming to seek debate despite not intending to seriously consider opposing evidence), and if their gamble fails, will probably just blame immigrants, government or 'big pharma' for doing it.