ppsreejith

This. I recall in their earnings report, they gave a similar answer, I.e the more this technology is made accessible, the better the content put on social media becomes. They also pointed out that any improvements made can be incorporated into their stack like what happened with open compute and PyTorch.

I wrote a reply but since it became too long, posted it as a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37266563

1. Modern digital ads can be very well measured. At least the ones focused on direct conversion and not branding. Advertisers can measure the impact of their spending independently and the results can be seen fairly quickly. (Again, not brand advertising).

2. Advertisement match-making isn't perfect (which is why I wrote "in an ideal world"). There is some time and signal buffer till we get enough signal to show the right ad to the user (if ever). The intentions of the ad platform also have to be taken into consideration (Often not the case for Big Tech but even here).

3. Advertisements do have negative consequences. We can also target drugs, cults, gambling etc more effectively as well. Often the law has to play catch-up with the more controversial categories. Advertisers can also dupe/defraud buyers with false/misleading advertisements.

Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points:

1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots.

2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only big businesses could afford them.

3. In Digital ads where ads can be personalised to users, there are now a lot more ad slots and small businesses could effectively reach out to niche buyers who otherwise wouldn't be aware of them. The ads are thus cheaper as their budget is better focused on the right users.

4. Digital ads are broadly of 2 types: Intent ads, where the user submits their intent (Eg: Google search, Amazon, Maps etc) or Discovery ads, where the user is typically not present for any single intent (Eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc)

5. Discovery based ads in particular can help open up completely new behaviours (in an ideal world) where the seller wasn't aware of the buyer's product but found it very useful (i.e. The unknown unknown problem)

6. Both Intent and discovery ads can be harmful to the user. Intent ads basically charge a tax to prioritise their results (i.e. rent seeking: pay more to jump the queue). Discover ads degrade the user experience (i.e They could've shown you something more interesting but decided to show you something less interesting to you and received money for it from a 3rd party).

Some opinions below:

1. Making digital ads more like physical ads (Eg: By removing personalisation) will probably benefit big businesses by increasing ad prices and making it harder to match sellers to buyers. It's often small businesses who have a niche which increase competition in a market (The Innovators Dilemma)

2. In the EU's case, the ads can be personalised, just not based on behaviour but on context. So this will probably still increases prices but still not change digital ads fundamentally (i.e. they can still be personalised somewhat to the user) at least for now.

Wealth was definitely created in the colonies but the native inhabitants were almost always adversely affected. In the current wealthiest country in the world, it was the European migrants that benefited while the natives were mostly killed or eliminated.

It's seems this was a garbled sentence in the first edition. Here was Graebers response:

> There was a garbled sentence in the first edition that I didn't catch in proofreading but was instantly removed as soon as anyone noticed it. DeLong has seized on this and endlessly reproduced it, quite possible hundreds of times, pretending it's still in the text.

> Why does he do this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea. I've never seen anyone else behave remotely like it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17250282

The original iPhone sold some 6 million units from what I can google.

Steve Jobs himself said 200 days after the launch of the first iPhone that they sold 4 million units.

Source: https://www.macworld.com/article/188823/liveupdate-17.html

Excluding the profit motive, different cultures had different ideals about work and not all despised/avoided work. One interpretation from the Gita is to find purposeful labor that is motivated by our inner divinity.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1394795-you-have-the-right-...

> You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

> Perform every action with you heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

> Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.

Interesting that nobody from Meta has signed this (tried searching for FAIR, Meta, Facebook) AND the fact that it seems to me that they're the ones releasing open code and model weights publicly (non commercial license though).

Also, judging by the comments here, perhaps people here would be less distrustful if the companies displayed more "skin in the game". For e.g: pledging to give up profiting from AI or committing all research to government labs (Maybe people can suggest better examples). Right now, it's not clear what the consequence of establishing the threat of AI as equivalent to nuclear war/pandemics would be. Would it later end up giving a powerful moat to these companies than they otherwise would have? Perhaps a lot of people are not comfortable with that outcome.

Fun fact: If you google "Chicxulub crater" you see an animation of an asteroid crashing.

> It's not clear it's even possible to effectively monetize pure messaging platforms like WhatsApp

Well, WhatsApp is moving beyond "pure" messaging with payments and commerce (Eg: JioMart integration in India).

Another approach would be to compare with wechat with 1.2 billion active users generating an estimated 15+ Billion in revenue in 2021 (https://www.businessofapps.com/data/wechat-statistics/) without much North America / EU presence and being banned in India.

Thirdly, click to message ads are already a "multi-billion dollar" business with "strong double digit growth" as of 2022 (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/07/why-meta-and-mark-zuckerberg...)

To add to people's experiences in this thread, there's also some selection/sampling bias to consider:

- Indian immigrants are selected from the top 0.1% of Indian society (often urban, educated Indians with significant social, economic, and knowledge capital who speak English growing up).

- Most Indian american immigrants are knowledge workers/students (Medicine, Tech, Science) coming to the US through the two govt blessed visa routes of University and Business.

Depends on the impact distribution, I'd imagine? I.e they could go after the most impactful bad actors which, assuming a power law (typical for social networks), would have vastly more reach than other accounts. Or it could be that they're catching the low hanging fruit (careless accounts). Wish they'd share some numbers (i.e followers/reach of these accounts etc).

Could you share a source for this? Couldn't find much after a bit of googling.

Just curious but does it do anything beyond Dall-E 2's capabilities?

I remember this being true in my home place (Kerala, India) till ~2016. Local autos/taxis were unreliable in some parts or would charge you exorbitant fees depending on your situation (Eg: if you were a woman traveling home at night). Uber really changed things in terms of reliability. Local taxi drivers would often resort to violence against Uber drivers for encroaching on their turf. Example video: (The driver eventually steps out of the car and gets beaten up).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okqxNEVYu7E

> let me recall that it’s controlled by Zuckerberg who spent $419 million to influence US election administration in a seemingly partisan way

For more context, from: https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/policy/zuck-bucks-consp...

> He offered nearly half a billion dollars in grants to any election official who wanted one, as long as those officials spent it on what a lot of people would consider mundane essentials: ballot sorters, drop boxes, poll workers and — because it was 2020 — hand sanitizer.

> And when those election officials applied for more money than he originally offered, he kicked in another $119 million to satisfy the rest of the requests.

> At a time when Republicans are rapidly restricting access to the ballot box in states across the country, spending nearly half a billion dollars to do the exact opposite of that is tantamount to a partisan choice. Or, at least, it was bound to be viewed that way.

You could delay division by 2 until the end. I.e ((2 * S mod N - n*(n+1) mod N) mod N) / 2

Where S is the sum of the array achieved through iterative addition with every addition mod N and N > 2n.

From the first line of the article

> Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC).

Also, the effect this would have on reducing rent and cost of living.

Update: I stand corrected, see comments below. He served with the communist POUM and sympathised with the anarchists.

> Orwell was serving with a Marxist militia in the fight against fascism, in Spain

Orwell actually fought on the side of the anarchists and their side was (later) betrayed by the communists as he mentions in the book: “Homage to Catalonia”

Some Quotes:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7293191-philosophically-com...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7663572-the-fat-russian-age...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7455290-it-is-impossible-to...

From: https://www.metacareers.com/life/what-remote-and-flexible-wo...

> As of June 15, Facebook is opening up remote work to all levels across the company. Anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work.

A recent reddit video seems relevant here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/sx7by...

From the title:

> An Indian Yogi filmed by Indian Army personnel while patrolling in the Himalayas. The Yogi can be seen Meditating, chanting the name of God and bursting with ecstasy while being accompanied by a dog in the beyond survival clime of Himalayas.

From the wikipedia page of Robin Li, co-founder of Baidu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Li#RankDex

> In 1996, while at IDD, Li created the Rankdex site-scoring algorithm for search engine page ranking, which was awarded a U.S. patent. It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating the very similar algorithm patent filed by Google two years later in 1998.

From a quick Google search, Facebook pay was launched in 2019. Has anything changed?

I’d say profiting off those ideas would probably be a better test (which seems to be what Thiel focuses on i.e profitable secrets). Also, he has many failed investments too so it’s not like his status comes from predicting more wins

IIRC, a black swan event highlights the problem of induction when there is _no_ prior event that you can use to learn from. Eg: humans thought all swans were white until the first black swan was encountered. So not just exceedingly rare but outside what you know AND extremely rare. Eg: Neither the housing crisis, Fukushima, supply chain crisis, nor the pandemic are black swans (they were seen before and was predicted/theorised) but the internet is.

Dupe (oldest with most comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184104

Dupe 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184560

This book is so underrated! One of my favourite parts is when overworked archangel Uriel loses his shit when trying to load New Zealand from a backup.

Relevant quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8050527-please-asked-the-gi...

“Please?” asked the girl.

“I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.”

“I…didn’t know it was broken.”

Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster.

“IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.”

What if they're in different cities?