noogle

The criticism from the second camp stems from the fact that the WHOLE job is to not drop anything.

A fence with a hole is useless even if it's 99% intact.

A lot of human jobs, especially white collar, are about providing reassurance about the correctness of the results. A system that cannot provide that may be worse than useless since it creates noise, false sense of security and information load.

We need to shift from thinking of solar/wind as "electricity sources" to thinking of them as "fuel sources". The marginal cost of producing a transferrable fuel from solar/wind is already lower than current electricity prices. The challenge is the capital expenses on equipment (hydrolyzers, fuel cell etc.)

No. A car can cost much less than $400. Hence I own a car instead of taking taxis.

I had the opposite experience: using taxis/Uber/Lyft was far more expensive than owning a car so after Uber stopped subsidizing rides I had to buy a vehicle. That was in a city with a metro system, living in one of its main boroughs.

Even today, a cab to anywhere (even 3 miles) would cost me at least $10 each direction, and we have at least 5 such trips weekly. This easily surpasses the cost of the car, including depreciation and fuel.

"prompt engineering" is a self-destructing field. If you use any rigorous approach to optimizing the prompt, you end up with essentially supervised machine -learning: models can (and do) learn the optimal prompt once there is a yardstick for the goodness of the model's response. That's a classical for a data-scientist, but the skill set has little to do with prompts.

If you are not rigorous, then what you are doing is essentially "black art". It may work for some tasks ad-hoc, but with the rapid pace of model improvement your skill will likely become irrelevant/not needed quickly.

The government printing the fiat money that fueled a lot of this seems to be one.

Besides, the "free market" is not a goal on its own. It's a method that is frequently the most beneficial one, but not always.

I guess for the same reason most of them keep buying from Intel - their market position allows them to pass on the cost to their customers, so it's not worth the distraction.

OpenAI is more of a "one-(very impressive)-trick-pony", so they have a stronger incentive.

That's a broader question, but in general: it doesn't matter what I think about Nvidia's business. I could be correct all the way, but if other people disagree with me, they won't pay me for the shares.

It's also not necessarily about the 2021 peak but why isn't Nvidia bigger? allegedly it's a necessary component to a technology that can replace hundreds of millions of people (worth trillions in economic output). And unlike OpenAI, Nvidia wins no matter which company wins the model competition.

It's the ecosystem - everyone else is using CUDA, so you need a very good incentive to stray away from that ecosystem. a x2-3 cost of hardware won't justify such move.

The cryptomarket was less favorable to Nvidia because it harmed the loyal customers (gamers, AI) for a temporary market (crypto) that indeed largely declined.

Why not? They seem to be a lot of leeway before any specific company will find it cheaper to design their own chips, or even to move to AMD (ROCm is not as well supported).

Perhaps someone like OpenAI has both the expertise and incentive to do so, but not many others.

Cryptocurrencies still had high barriers for entry for the public at large - not really a means of payment, and high risk as an investment.

Generative AI is used by millions, has very low barrier for entry (it's even free!) and most importantly does not require a network effect so can be valuable immediately.

Should we buy Nvidia stock then?

The greatest technological advancement in recent years critically depends on the hardware from a single company with no competition. yet Nvidia stock is still below its 2021 peak. How so?

Gas jerrycans. Either one kept at your garage for emergencies (cost: $5), or the gas station scaling horizontally by using/selling jerrycans.

Haven't seen any solution for instantly increasing charging throughput, and an on-line power is needed, while it is more likely to fail exactly in the kind of events that require mass evacuation.

That's the thing about cars: their real test (or importance) is not the 90% of the time spent in the "happy path" (short, planned drives after a full night charge). It's to address those edge but critical cases - long trips, unexpected drives, off-the-beaten-path routes.

Another thing rarely raised is the correlated nature of traffic issues. Charging is fine now, mostly because it seems there is a huge over-provisioning of chargers compared to EVs on the road. What happens with busy days? An evacuation order sending 1M people on the same route at the same time? For ICEV there is an easy solution. Not for EVs.

It's a different risk: if your novel DVD player did not work, you could just watch something else. If your novel EV doesn't charge, you may be left stranded, miss a flight or fail to reach medical care. Moreover, no government planned to ban VCRs using those early problematic DVD players as a justification.

1. Flexibility. For a rental car you need to plan ahead, pick it up on time and return it on time. Traffic jam delaying you? too bad. You now pay a surcharge.

2. Cost: the rental cost is actually only a small portion of the cost. Extra insurance and other fees end up more than the rent itself.

Your car will depreciate regardless of that road-trip, just by virtue of time passing. Rental companies won't subsidize the wear and tear for you, so you have to pay that anyway.

So the article seems to be right - wait with EVs until they improve. Why suffer the pains of an early adopter?

The question is not whether you can make it work, but how much effort do you have to put into using an EV.

Vehicles are bought to make life more convenient. To introduce constraints and time waste you can just use public transportation.

We will have no choice.

Cities need to become denser to accommodate the growing population and reduce footprint. Efficient public transportation (trams/subway) are no longer regulatory or financially feasible enough to build (how is the second avenue line in Manhattan going?). Robotaxis and ad-hoc buses are a potential solution.

Autonomous cars are a localized regulation, so can be adopted gradually. The cities that will innovate will reap the benefits and those that will still dedicate their human resources to driving will lag.

Parents already use technology (TV, tablet computer) to alleviate some of the burden of caring for their children. Why not use a far more engaging product?

Labor is not the only requirement for production. Resources will become the limiting factor, and their price will rise above what non-AI-owning people will be able to afford. So back to square one of scarcity.

Models are re-trained periodically (months, weeks, even days), and new architectures/implementations come all the time. If a better algorithm appears, practitioners will adopt a new platform (e.g. Transformers for NLP models), so many systems can already plug-in new tools. GPUs are very expensive so there is also a strong incentive to make this little effort.

How much of a moat is CUDA?

It's indeed ages beyond any of their competitors. However, most ML/DS people interact with CUDA via a higher-level framework. In recent years this community has consolidated around a few (and even only one platform, PyTorch) framework. For some reason AMD had not invested in platform backends, but there is no network effect or a vendor lock-in to hinder a shift from CUDA to ROCm if it is supported equally well.

The current (legal) answer is "unclear". There are indications that training is fine, but producing and using the generated content is questionable at least. As many IP issues, it will solved only when someone will try that in court and go all the way until a verdict. Some cases are actually being processed but it might take years to get an answer.

Sounds similar to Kotlin's and TypeScript's approach.

The basic issue exists - how to handle unknown values. It goes beyond programming language constructs.

Why? There are various search engines that perform sufficiently well, all ran by start-up (Neeva, Kagi etc.).

Android is a suitable alternative for iOS.

The absence of European tech giants might reflect the consolidated nature of software rather than the competence of the EU.

You miss one thing - positive feedback. It's easier to be laid-back and relaxed when "the world smiles at you" at first sight for your looks. When others treat you like a creep for any move you make, you eventually become bitter or intense, which as you said, repels people regardless of looks.

The dating experience of (heterosexual) men and women is worlds apart. Being on the non-initiating side blinds women to the amount of rejection involved in the process. Men, on the other hand, are not exposed to the amount of unwanted attention it involves since men only interact when they initiate.

Which is why the general advice to men "adopt a hobby" to meet a girl generally doesn't work. It's transparent and therefore defeats its purpose.

It's very simple - there is a need for a dispatchable and transferrable form of energy. So far, this need has been fulfilled by fossil fuels, and if arguments against P2G solutions prevail, will probably continue for a long time.

But at least we will be physically efficient.

And the rest of the world? And when extra energy is needed because of a cold/heat-wave, new project, or just an event in a forest?

These scenarios, both large and small, are covered currently by fossil fuels, and are not answered by permanent grid solutions like HVDC.

The generation price of solar energy is ~$0.02/kwh. Even with 33% overall efficiency hydrogen could be very competitive at $0.06/kwh electricity. , But overall efficiency is a red-herring. The important thing is COST. With solar, the cost of energy itself is the smallest part - providing it at the desired time and place are the more expensive parts.

Fossil fuels are very inefficient, yet for hundreds of years they have been a cheap option (and thus widespread). The same argument applies to hydrogen - if it's cheaper, in terms of money, time and pollution, efficiency doesn't matter a bit.