erdevs

Why do you assume computers would've needed to be involved? One can plot space-time warping by hand. Indeed, Einstein had no benefit of computer assistance in developing his theories of relativity and gravity warping.

Why assume a complete theory of black holes or wormholes was necessary? Clearly the concept existed. Clearly we had General Relativity. One could imagine a more speculative but still physics-based visualization of what might happen in traveling through such a nexus of space-time.

"Startup = growth"

:/

You'd rather they pick losers? Spread investments evenly without regard to any evidence?

> It is only with the advent of "civilization", i.e. agriculture, that we find great power differentials, including the power of men over women

That is exactly what I'm saying. Do you somehow contend that hunter-gatherers societies are more likely to have left written records that have survived to today?

> Pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies were primarily matriarchal and patriarchal societies only later became the norm with the rise of warlike/raiding and settled agricultural societies which co-evolved and co-depended on higher population densities.

Okay. Are hunter-gatherers or agricultural societies more likely to have left written records that survive until today?

The first recorded writer probably was a male, indeed.

That's because most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic. It's unlikely women were afforded the opportunity to be educated or trained in the scholastic, monastic, or financial professions which were most likely to leave some form of written record.

So, yeah, the odds, based on historical predicates, are that the first recorded human's name was a male name. But not necessarily (or even likely) because of the author's claim that males seem to be more prone to be early adopters.

Nor is it at all likely that many of the hostile commenters on this author's article have the right idea that women in ancient history were equal contributors to society's evolution. They probably were not. Not because of any intrinsic inferiority of women, but because of the male-oriented power dynamics that clearly dominated most ancient societies.

You make a great point which is spot-on overall. I wouldn't go as far as saying "the car part doesn't really matter", though. Having a viable primary vehicle (pun intended) to drive (heh) your technology forward is important. SolarCity + Tesla Battery tech would be much harder to pull off if they didn't have a large in-house initial "customer" in Tesla cars. This will help them identify and solve technology problems, achieve economies of scale to drive down cost, and prove out the viability of these technologies in-market. And the requirement to sign up other customers on the battery side is alleviated early on.

Tesla's showrooms are also a great asset in promoting both solar and battery tech for the home, and the car is important in rationalizing the expense of these showrooms (at least for now) as well. Moreover, a very consumer facing brand and product in the car helps tremendously.

Anyhow, not to nitpick. You're right on about the overall strategic rationale and why this makes so much sense as a combination. But it's too far to say the car doesn't really matter. In fact, the car is a very important part of the strategy and especially of the nearer-term tactics.

Yeah, Interstellar definitely scratched this itch for me, and I appreciated it for doing so.

Certainly the theory has developed greatly since then. But being even somewhat informed about the contemporary physical theory would've made the sequence even more impactful and satisfying, for me personally.

I don't think technique would've necessarily required greater complexity or difficulty. For example, one might have used the same planing technique, but used different patterning and colorization, based on more mathematically derived outputs. Not suggesting any kind of simulation or super-advancement. Just using the same technique, but informing the visuals based on more physical theory.

I can see that as a reasonable concern. Two points though:

1. Speaking personally as a user, I wouldn't mind this a bit. And would actually love the ability to provide feedback more readily. I often hate the content of my feed and I would feel much better if it seemed like I had greater input on its filtering.

2. Whether gathering feedback has a negative effect or not seems like a testable hypothesis and this could be tried and measured, rather than simply speculated about.

Given the above, I'm not sure if this would be a rigorous rationale for avoiding the active feedback experiment.

I did read that. They note that this passive feedback / preference inference was insufficient in terms of achieving their aims. Which is why I'm asking about potentially gathering active feedback / explicit preference.

The SolarCity combo is absolutely brilliant. The chattering class and peanut gallery bet against Musk on Tesla and Space X as well, and there will always be naysayers to quote in the press for bold moves like this.

The combo makes perfect sense for exactly the reasons Musk outlines in "Part Deux" of his strategy for Tesla and in the publicly disclosed rationale for this deal. If you're a long-term investor, which is rightfully the only sort of investor that Musk really cares about (at least for now, when he has the power and support to fend off activists and the like), this makes absolute sense and is a great bet.

As for governance... let's not forget the NetSuite deal involving Oracle and Ellison on both sides that just happened. This sort of thing isn't exactly unheard of, and the key question is not whether conflict exists, but whether the deal makes real business sense on both sides despite the conflict. Also recall that this was fully and properly disclosed before the deal was finalized, and that Musk got sign off from independent shareholders on both sides, even among those that were initially skeptical of the combination. One can't really do anything more than Tesla and SolarCity did here.

Also, one shouldn't be surprised that Musk had a conflict of interest here. Much as VCs sometimes rightfully say "no conflict, no interest"... part of the reason you invest in a market or begin a company is because you have a thesis about the space or the market overall. If you're taking multiple bets in that space, even if they start at different vectors, there's a chance they will collide or make sense to combine over time. For the same reason, one shouldn't be overwhelmingly surprised if in 10 years it ends up making sense to combine Space X with Tesla and Solar City as well. I don't see an explicit rationale for that today at all, but it's easy to see the possibility of a rationale existing in the future, depending on how things evolve. No one should be acting gobsmacked or thinking the SolarCity+Tesla combo is somehow a nonsensical, self-dealing arrangement.

The one thing I wish Musk would have done in addition here, or that I hope he'll do shortly following this combo, is introduce even greater provisions for his ongoing control. My biggest fear with Tesla is that it grows large enough to attract activist investors that are highly levered so as to have disproportionate impact and seek to exploit the stock. Musk may, at some point (at least temporarily) lose the halo effect, and that'll leave him and Tesla vulnerable to provocative moves form investors that do not align with long-term shareholder value, but rather seek to optimize shorter-term outcomes. So, if anything, I'm directly against the calls from people that are questioning governance here. I would prefer Tesla shareholders agree to cede more control to Musk and that the company limit executive liability. Most companies absolutely should not have these sorts of provisions, because most CEOs are not worthy of that sort of trust. But in Musk's case, the boldness of vision, correctness of long-term thinking, and overall trustworthiness in shareholder value creation and protection have been proven for long enough that I'd be more than willing to see this happen and actually actively hope for it.

You're absolutely right that this is a similar dynamic. At this point this is FB's MO and you have to be a fool not to anticipate it as inevitable in each ecosystem/market they develop.

One could cynically view this as an extractive measure, dressed as a user-friendly effort. In other words:

Sorry, Mr. Publisher. Your most effective titles are going to be exposed less frequently for free in your audience's feeds. However, you can of course always promote your stories with whatever title you feel is most effective when exposed to users! wink

I'm curious why FB chose to manually label the data vs collecting feedback from users. Eg via a dialog on a large sample of users and articles asking whether the article was clickbait, or asking users to rate it, or some such.

The benefits of this approach, besides a lesser degree of tedious manual data review and entry up-front, include: ease of retraining the system as clickbaiters inevitably adapt in this new arms race (can regularly gather fresh user feedback and feed the updated corpus and labels into the system), and perhaps also closer affinity with what users actually think qualifies as clickbait (as opposed to FB's internal definition). This soft of approach may also lead to more differentiated filtering on a personalized basis or an affinity-group basis... ie they'd have the opportunity to model user-behavior features and create differentiated filters based on user behavior/preferences.

I'm sure there were very good reasons for going this way, so I'm not second-guessing. Just curious what the tradeoffs were in the decision, if any knows or can make educated speculation.

This is often required work in supervised learning / any machine learning with labels. Sometimes you get better result with human judgment on the labels, and that means you have to grind through a meaningful corpus of data.

If you believe what you're doing is important and beneficial, it doesn't feel like too much of a grind. Ultimately this was probably about a week of work, if every labeling participant independently reviewed ~3-5K articles.

Some people might have chosen to mechanical turk this, or to gather feedback from a subset of users and use those labels. Doing that might be a better approach as it might not only be less labor-intensive up-front but also allow the system to be regularly retrained easily (ie by gathering new label information as clickbaiters inevitably try to adapt their headlines). I imagine there were reasons for starting off this way, though.

Thanks for this link. Really cool use case, and maybe Niantic will check it out, if they haven't already.

Ah, come on, it's pretty cool. :) And they do have a publications page: http://www.interactivedynamicvideo.com/publications.html

I'm all for science being promoted/marketed, even if it's in a(n endearingly) dorky way. And there are some fun use cases for this to boot (see the Pokemon GO / AR vid below).

As regards the wormhole sequence, one must appreciate the innovation in technique, meticulous execution, groundbreaking visuals, and also the incredible cinematic boldness in showing such a long, strange sequence in theaters at the time. Truly impressive and meaningful work, which left an indelible mark on cinema over the past 5 decades.

That said, a part of me has always wished this sequence gave more thought to the physics and what it might be like to visualize the experience of traveling through a gate/wormhole like this. I don't think the coloration, visual patterns, or sequencing represents much understanding of the then-current physics theory on what this sort of thing might possibly be like, and I'm not sure it even captures it well in the abstract.

Amazing cinematic work which moved the industry forward in a positive direction. I just always wished they'd somehow been able to go even further and applied the same brilliance of vision and execution in technique to an even more refined concept that incorporated some viable notions of the possible/theoretical physics involved in traversing through space-time like this.

Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning.

I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.

I think you are right on, on every point. (Including it being a dull article, at least for the audience of folks here.) This is great insight and it's something I've thought for the past few years as well.

Big cloud computing players will almost certainly move this way. Actually surprised we haven't seen more of this already. But TensorFlow and the Tensor Processing Unit were smart moves by Google and I think this is just a preview of many, many things to come.

I think IBM probably belongs on the list of top contenders to make a move. Between SoftLayer, IBM's hardware and chip design and fab partnerships, their cloud/saas businesses, and their Enterprise penetration, they're well-positioned to lead here.

I think that you're right as well that all these folks will push to create developer-friendly services and APIs backed by hardware. However, I think the real wins will come from capturing market share in the Enterprise sooner than later. If I were them and I had to prioritize between the two, I'd target Enterprise customers first and foremost. You can sell services to help them migrate and that helps you get out to market more quickly than creating a fully robust self-serve platform. Moreover, if your custom hw-backed platform can offer either better price or better performance, Enterprises will pay big bucks for it. Harder to get it right with self-serve first, but you certainly need to open up to self-serve as quickly as possible over time.

Until the deal is fully closed, or only ancillary closing conditions remain to be met, she kind of has to say that. Also for her golden parachute to deploy, she has to be let go so she can't sound as if she wants to quit.

Actually stay? I have trouble seeing it. Only if she's got some guaranteed line of sight on the VZW ceo gig, but Armstrong and many others will contend there.

It absolutely is unhelpful in anything more than short bursts. It is very odd how obsessed she seems with hours-worked.

Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)

Boy, I disagree with Mayer's take on sustained crunch => success. But she seems to repeat it.

> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom

This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.

> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success

No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.

And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:

> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a ­compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.

Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.

This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.

Moving onto totally different topics...

> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?

> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...

Here, here! Totally agree.

> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.

Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.

> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.

That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.

It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they'd been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets. If they ended up in a spot where they're splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time. Plenty of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo's investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).

Shame this didn't happen.

It has been interesting to watch US sex culture evolve the past several decades. Widely taboo in the 50s and before, partially romanticized in the 60s and 70s, more censorious in the 80s, then celebrated and promoted in the mid-90s through to today.

I'm glad that sex and sexuality are no longer as repressed. I think, though, that the pendulum now may have swung too far toward near cultural obsession and proactive promotion in recent years.

I'll be glad if we settle in a spot where sex is just a thing-- an experience with many variations just as with most of life. Neither censored nor overexposed. No real fuss, no real shock value, no special forbiddenness or "cool" factor. It feels like we're getting closer to that, which seems healthy.

Is there still any belief in serious circles that Wright is SN? Whatever happened to those credible thought leaders who initially supported his claim? I lost track of this after the initial splash announcement and immediately ensuing controversy.

From the article:

> "...Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a semiconductor chip of a given size doubles roughly every two years, has held true since the mid 1960s..."

I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012.

I believe Intel and others have stated that as of 2012 or so, with 22nm processes, transistor density now doubles every ~2.5 years and is likely to slow further within 5 years without more fundamental breakthroughs.

The related trend that processor clock speeds doubled every 1.5-2 years-- which is commonly mistaken as Moore's Law in lay press but is actually more related to Dennard Scaling, Koomey's Law and historical statements by Intel-- had ceased to hold as of the late Aughts as well, I believe.

Memsistors have been a promise for some time. I wonder how we will make the leap from current dense-transistor IC tech and processes to anything new, given the huge infrastructure investments in fabs, quality control processes, etc. It seems it will be difficult to scale out a new technology, whatever it is, and get it price-competitive with existing transistor-dense IC technology. Perhaps I misunderstand here though, and would be interested in thoughts from those with greater expertise in the field.

Yes, they are not always correlated. Obviously. What point are you trying to make?

> The two common examples of diversified survivors of the last GFC are Citi and JPMC.

Are you actually holding Citi and JPMC up as examples of some kind in regard to benefits of combining retail and investment banking? If so, would you similarly argue that because not all S&L associations had gone bankrupt or been shuttered by the late 90s, that's somehow an indication that S&L associations needed no regulatory reform? If there are 10 people on an island and all of them eat a particular indigenous fruit and then 8 of them die from it-- but two survive unharmed!!-- would you say it is wise to continue eating the fruit?

What terrible science. And terrible science journalism.

Link to underlying study: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/mktg/assets/File/Lambert...

So many holes in this. First of all, the study construction is contrived and the results are vastly overgeneralized. It's so shoddy it's hardly worth pointing out all the issues.

Here's a thought experiment, though: say a study with questionable methodology were published and it's conclusion was that females negotiate less effectively than males (just as this study seems to imply males are less likely to compromise than females). Then let's say that the study speculates that this is because females are attempting to adhere to gender normative stereotypes, eg being meek or some such. Then let's say that some journalist writes up an article saying "Women can't negotiate without men around"... what would the reaction be?

This is a gross study and a really poor write-up, which is disappointing to see in the WP.

> Are people going to be okay with getting no interest and instead paying large-ish fees every month to cover the cost of bank branches, ATMs, debit cards, websites, money transfers, checks, and so on?

Looks at bank statements: .... Zero interest, check. High fees, check. I'm pretty sure... that's how it already is? What bank do you recommend? Hook a brother up.

> If depository banks are going to be very risk adverse they won't be earning much on the use of those demand deposits

You realize that this is how it used to be, right? Up until 1999. I don't know about you, but I got more interest and paid fewer fees back then...

I think this is oversimplifying things overall. Higher risk doesn't necessarily mean higher return in general, and definitely not when dealing with tremendously large pools of capital as depository banks do. There is a limit to how much total capital you can invest in a given level of risk, and what return you can actually achieve in practice for that level of risk. It's fallacious to think that regulating the types of risk depository banks can participate in and how much total risk they can take on would necessarily lessen their returns over the long-term in practice.

Moreover, on an operational basis banks are more profitable today than possibly ever. So, those fees and low interest rates are paying for more than all their services, by a wide margin. (At least as of the last time I looked into this.)

You seem to keep taking my positions and reducing them to absurdity.

> So I do not think we can work on the assumption that we only need to worry about deposit taking institutions and let investment bank collapse.

I did not say that. Or anything like.

I'm consistently saying:

We should regulate both retail banks and investment banks more.

And part of that increased regulation ought to be splitting investment banking risk from retail banking risk again. Both are risky enough as is. Combining their (sometimes correlated!) risk is a really bad idea.

I agree with you that retail banks can cause huge problems (eg your UK examples). I agree with you that pure investment banks (or merely broker-dealers) can cause huge problems. Hence the need to regulate both and do what we can to prevent crises (not just treat them more effectively), while constraining economic activity as little as we can, of course.