retrocryptid

Is it me or does that emoji look a little more like a Ruger SR9 than a Colt M1911?

I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.

maybe you could just delete the messaging app that receives text messages? though if you're not pon an unlimited plan, maybe you'll still get charged for them?

doesn't work for me: mobile firefox on android. just gives me an error.

There's a joke I first heard in the early 90s: "True AI is 10 years in the future and has been for the last 30."

I suspect we'll be in exactly the same place: incremental improvements in LLMs, but the corner case failures will be perceived as significant enough to preclude widespread adoption.

Maybe we'll go back to the "neural network winter" of the 80s and 90s where "anti-hype" seemed to make research into CNNs unfashionable.

Or maybe industry will deploy LMMs widely and just cope with their flaws.

Okay. You want me to delete the prev comment?

I think I have a real comment in there somewhere, but yeah, it came out pretty snarky.

I think the point I might have been getting at was this might be the result of unfulfilled FSD/robotaxi hype. Tesla started as a cool car company, but definitely a "car" company, competing with Ford, GM, Stellantis, etc.

Over time, more of the story about the company and its products was the robotaxi narrarive. By the end of 2020, the stock price had rocketed up partially for macro reasons, but largely for expectations of sales of FSD/robotaxi capabilities. Or at least that's my perception. Tesla fans I talked to all repeated the robotaxi story... "any day now, FSD is going to let me rent out my car as a taxi while I work. I'll actually make money from owning my Tesla!" It's 2024 and the last I heard was the robotaxi demo is again delayed and while FSD is running over fewer people than in the past, it still may be a ways away. From that perspective, robotaxi in 2020 was hype.

In other words, TLSA's stock price was inflated by hype in 2020, not completely unlike tech securities in the late 90s.

A 45% hit in per-share profit is not surprising given the vaporware nature of the cybertruck in the early 2020s and robotaxi/FSD capabilities.

But my main point is it is disappointing to see a once-innovative firm resorting to what feels like DotCom era hype.

can anyone tell the difference between fake elon and real elon anymore? i sure can't.

because a vt100 can't emit graphics.

because it has positive economic externalities and avoids the moral hazard of enabling hucksters.

i have no problem with investment, but investing in an obviously stupid startup just cause they were launched by a friend's kids doesn't seem like a way to allocate capital that Adam Smith would appreciate.

Avalara didn't seem to be overtly ageist. Plenty of kids in their 30s. Smattering of tech workers in their 50s. They seem to be off-shoring most of their tech work though.

we may have to start our own.

One thing I noticed from the Sili Valley startups I've been involved with in the last 20 years: exec management's parents went to school w/ the funds managers.

I have this theory that there's institutional money burning a hole in various institution's collective pockets. Those funds' managers are under pressure to invest a percentage in risky, high reward opportunities. So they have money that has to be invested. You would look pretty stupid if you missed out on investing in the next Facebook or Google.

So you get some valley VC firms managed by guys who went to MIT, UCB or Stanford in the 80s and made their cash founding 90s era startups.

Now these guys' college room-mates have kids in MIT, UCB and Stanford who are about to graduate. So they (the VC's old room mates) channel some dosh into the VC's funds. In return, the VC's fund startups started by their room-mate's kids.

For the parent, it's great. They avoid estate taxes and if there's a profit, they only pay capital gains rates.

The kids receive their pay in perfectly laundered equity which at the next liquidity event can be reified outside the IRS' jurisdiction, so they wind up paying 12% corporate tax in Panama instead of the on-shored 26% cap gains rate.

All that's really required is a greater fool to take the series A shares off your hands when you do a series B.

My take on SiliValley is it's turned into a tax avoidant generational wealth transfer system for the financier class.

Nice work if you can get it.

Academia supports the system with hype-filled pronouncements about how future tech (AI, RISC-V, Battery Tech, WISC, etc.) will completely revolutionize the world.

Analysts who should have been taught skepticism when corporate leaders imply their startup will have a market value in excess of western Europe's GDP, jump on board to avoid looking like idiots on the off chance the firms they cover do take off.

Tech investing isn't a scam, there are definitely corners that are producing solid tech. But they're few and far between and very often not involved in the VC economy.

My Commodore 64 never gave me a blue screen of death and my Atari ST never lapsed into a hardcore boot loop.

just sayin'

hunh. if you're a scam, you're a scam that knows how to hook me. the code deck says "hates facebook / loves 90s" -- that's the type of crazy i love to see. i'm more of a scheme / ryol person, but lemme look at the code and find you online.

it's really nice to see genz looking at lisp. if nothing else, nice to see people not taking guff for liking what they like.

The full title was supposed to be "we asked an AI to do something AIs aren't intended to do and feigned shock when it didn't do a good job."

As I've always said... AI isn't going to suddenly gain sapience and decide to kill us. What's going to kill us is our misplaced trust in LLMs.

And there's something cynical in Littlefoot's business model. If their businss was based on making recommendations for interesting places to see in various cities, they would have collected lists of locations and their features and then done sophomore level constraint programming to match location, features (like dog friendly or open for lunch) and added a schedule based on typical travel times. But they had to throw an AI in the mix because 18 months ago that was how you guranteed round B financing.

i'm a fan of E2EE, but the AT&T hack did not involve intercepting RCS messages. It's sort of like saying "Chewbacca is a Wookie, therefore you shouldn't use RCS."

I would love it if authors would put the date the paper was written in the paper itself. I think that's standard for the iacr eprint archive, but sadly missing for many other disciplines.

I'm old enough to remember when companies tried to make more revenue than expenses and we called that "profitability." But these days there's so much money out there, you just jeep going back to the VC.

How closely related are your co-founders parents to the guy running the VC fund that gave you a series A?

Having written algorithms for CV and satellite image processing, I can tell you that advancement in the field more or less halted in 2018 when everyone decided to dump money and time into CNNs.

I wrote a cloud detection algorithm that would run well on a 20MHz microcontroller powered by 4 AA batteries. But my bosses were worried they couldn't find devs to replace me if I retired, and figured a CS intern and a trained dog [*] could train a CNN to do the same thing. $600k and 2 years later they got something that worked until the dog got a better job and the intern returned to school. None of the surviving engineers could make heads or tails of the solution so they hired a PhD to replicate the work. After publishing his research paper he left and found a job at an east coast university.

So... Sure... CNNs are doing all sorts of things, mostly things we did with DFTs in the past and not quite as well.

* the joke here is the dog does the technical tasks while the intern's only responsibilities are to feed and walk the dog and give it a treat when it completes it's user stories before the end of the sprint.*

According to SiFive, the P870 is roughly equivalent to an ARM X2 or AMD Xen 4, so it's about two or three generations back from the Cortex X925.

I've yet to see a catalog part w/ that core, but the guys I know at SiFive say they're pretty sure it should hit 3GHz, which is cortex X2 territory. Not exactly ARM's current best, but they're definitely closing the gap.

One difficulty in evaluating SiFive's cores is their business model is to license their designs to companies who are fabbing their own custom or semi-custom SoCs, so they don't appear in generally available parts until much later.

Except cars and second gen vr headsets.

Yes. They are popular among people who buy arm-based macs.

I don't know why apple passed on kuato (the next version of Siri from SRI.) I think it was around the time Jobs was getting seriously ill.

"I am the best candidate who meets the requirement that I be related to the boss. Our company is absolutely a meritocracy."

It's as if apple had a pair of visionary co-founders who are no longer with the company and the people left are excellent at getting things done but don't have an intuitive understanding of what people want.

Or maybe it's because LLMs don't live up to the hype.

I know Apple is relevant because they have a lot of money. But when was the last time their products were relevant? 2008 w/ the iPhone? 2010 with the iPad? 2002 w/ the iPod? MacBooks in 1998?

Most of my family uses iPhones and it's painful to watch them struggle with basic tasks. My mom tries to find out how to access gmail instead of me.com. My brother downloads yet another app to add metadata to pictures. No one at work seems to know how to upload pictures as JPEGs (I think they default to AVIFs now. Not a problem, but it was a super-secret change to the defaults, and easy to support on the server, but we didn't hear about it until our users started complaining.

I know there are people who positively love their iPhone and the status it apparently confers in their friends group. But I've never understood why a device from a secretive developer-hostile company is supposed to be some amazing tool.

It's a miniature computer with built-in wireless network and a poorly integrated phone app. It's innovation seemed to me to be how well they were able to convince Verizon to finance the phone so users wouldn't have sticker-shock.

So "apple intelligence" is just repackaging other people's stuff in a way that their users can digest? That's not a surprise. I'm just waiting for my family to start yammering on about how Steve Jobs just added AI to their phones and no one else has such features even though Steve Jobs is dead and LLMs have been a thing for YEARS.

and another link to the same story... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719938

"We should absolutely overhaul American education, but if we want to make lives better for millions of indebted students as quickly as possible, the fastest pain relief would come from better educating people..."

Definitely agree with this statement.

All the devs have already put "event driven" on their resumes. They need something new to be seen to be at the forefront of technology. I think we're in the AI hype phase where everyone is competing for those tasty $500k per year AI jobs at google, so the ACS systems don't know what to do with resumes that have "event driven."

The last thing you want on your LinkedIn profile is a link to a video you made in 2015 about your cool Kafka solution. The ACS would spit you out so fast...

Or... Maybe people who buy these things know why they're buying them and raw horsepower isn't their primary concern.