Long ago CUNY had a low admission bar and a high graduation bar. This meant, of course, that many students dropped out. In your case, students choose to pay tuition and not do the work. What is the external pressure on you or the dean or university to make things easier for these people? I think there should be a reverse feeder school idea: enroll in a university where standards are high, if you do poorly then transfer to a community college. That way a degree from that university is a signal for quality.
There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.
The writer is a journalist, runs a media firm and podcasts. His job is to get attention. You get attention by being outrageous. The “AI will kill us all” take is covered by too many people, so he’s taking the “AI is doomed” path. No one is going to engage with a reasonable middle-of-the-road article. He’s got no credibility on this subject, but he knows how to turn attention into dollars. Everyone here keeps falling for it.
The trade imbalance, like GDP, is a very crude economic measure. Do a search for “iPhone China trade imbalance” for more details. TL;DR is every iPhone is added to the trade deficit with China. However, China (Foxconn) just puts them together. The actual components come from all over the world. Then Apple sells them for 3x plus all the iCloud services. Samsung (Korea) makes more than Foxconn per iPhone.
O3-mini solved this prompt. DeepSeek R1 had a mental breakdown. The prompt: “Bob is facing forward. To his left is Ann, to his right is Cathy. Ann and Cathy are facing backwards. Who is on Ann’s left?”
The new Prius looks good, but I love my old Prius’s spacious hatchback. With the backseat down we can stick 3 giant dogs back there. I don’t know if there’s a hybrid with similar internal space.
> small differences were important enough to change the world unpredictable ways
I completely agree with this. I’m also in my 50s but I lean techno-optimist. Whenever there’s a new hype cycle, I’m looking for those small differences that might overcome the hurdles we’ve seen in the past. For example, the PicturePhone was demoed in 1964. Now we’re all on Zoom constantly. I’ve lived through many AI hype cycles. The current LLM craze is significantly different from past exuberance. LLMs aren’t perfect but they are remarkable when they work.
I don’t know where you live but I get the battery swapped while I’m standing there. It’s insane that you’d rather spend $800 than be without your phone for a few hours.
Professional managers (aka not the founder, climbed up the corporate ladder the old fashioned way): Tim Cook (apple), Satya Nadella (msft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Arvind Krishna (ibm), Shantanu Narayen (adobe), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Lisa Su (amd) and on and on. Just scan the Fortune 500 for tech companies and it’s nearly all professional managers. The YC audience could have debunked this Founder Mode nonsense in just 10 minutes on Wikipedia, as I did.
Most professional managers are BS artists. Perhaps Chesky hired of bunch of those. The conclusion is not to run everything yourself, but maybe hire better managers.
The immersive videos are amazing. Stick a VR camera on the best seat at a concert, sports event, wedding, etc. People will pay for Taylor Swift or the Super Bowl. The tech is very close, the Quest is a good price, VR cameras are ~$5k. The only thing left is the content creators.
I worked on online learning for a bit. Turns out people are willing to pay for the inconvenience of in-person learning, even flying to another location. It's the only way most people can focus on a topic. Otherwise, work, kids, life interrupts and they can't stay on track. Replit's 100 Days of Python says only 0.4% of those who complete day 1 finish day 100.
Good info! I use an HPC with SLURM. 40k GPUs shared by hundreds of users. It works well enough. I don’t know how the market for cloud-based clusters works. Why didn’t OP use AWS or Google for on-demand training? Is it just down to cost?
Many CS PhDs work on a small piece of a larger funded project. You work normal hours, read papers in the evening, take Sunday off. It’s not a big deal. So many naive students think they are going to solve AGI. No, you’ll publish an insignificant twist on a loss function and get a job.
I had a similar opinion until I worked at a bank. Think of banks as an extension of the government, deputized to monitor all transactions for illegal activity. If banks fail they get in big trouble with the gov’t. Most bank transfers in the US are faster than any blockchain, but this is usually between known corporate entities that do a lot of business. For individuals there’s far more automated scrutiny. In addition, many smaller banks have ancient systems they refuse to upgrade, so overall speed of the banking system is held back by these weak links. Also, US banking oligopoly benefits from slower transactions and higher fees. Europe shows that regulators can force banks to operate faster and cheaper. That’s why this is not a tech issue, it’s a regulatory problem.
The heated metal can act as a battery. Another post on HN says they can recover 40% of energy from a heat source over 1000C. Seems like everyone wins here.
I think there’s a role for AI in news media. First, you still need reporters to gather information. AI can be used to speed up the final phase of writing and editing. Second, AI can provide background and context to current events. For example, a story about Israel entering Rafah is a snapshot in time. But a reader might ask historical questions: “Who controlled Gaza before Israel became a country?”. Third, combine both features above. AI can generate stories from short updates to magazine features depending on my interest. I don’t care about Trump’s trials, so give me a quick update. I am interested in China’s real estate collapse, so generate a deeper story. All this comes from reporters’ research, most of which isn’t used because editors have allotted them a fixed space.
Of course, this requires better AIs that don’t hallucinate. It needs to be able to update info, and even handle non-monotonic reasoning (an earlier report was mistaken, the latest report updates info).
The news has 2 parts: facts and analysis. In most cases I don’t care what the reporter thinks. Semafor.com has an interesting style of clearly saying these are the facts and here’s what the reporter thinks. An AI can deliver the facts, while leaving reporters to write a separate analysis (which I can easily skip).
The iPad Air has 8G RAM and it’s enough for my spouse to run a $B business. Office, Safari, etc. It all runs fine. Doctors in my family are fine with 8G. My mom is fine with it. In fact I could use just 8G because I ssh into giant HPCs. Frankly a minority needs more than 8 and, behold, they have that option. Isn’t choice wonderful?
The weight of the 13" Air vs 15" Air vs 14" Pro is 2.7 > 3.3 > 3.4 lbs. For developers who do development on remote machines, weight and form factor are more important. I would pay top dollar for a 12" Macbook with M processor because I do my focused editing on a big screen. Other people use their laptop for everything so a 15" screen is preferred. Also, different strokes for different folks.