"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
739 karma · joined October 6, 2011
I don't have the answer, but I can understand the viewpoint that China's temporary kneecapping may actually lead to long term supremacy, as their in-country solutions become capable of competing with the state of the art. That will leave America more vulnerable in relation to China, because we will still be relying on access to technology from a wide range of countries (Netherlands, Taiwan, South Korea) in order to compete. That gives China additional leverage over the United States, as we will remain reliant on international cooperation.
And this analysis doesn't even address the ramifications of China exporting this technology, increasing their export dominance and potentially overtaking America's tech dominance at the software and design level of the stack.
I don't know what the right answer is to the problem, but it doesn't take much effort to imagine our current efforts as being the wrong answer, which is a little troubling.
None of these basic realities are accounted for in current technology. Instead we have these dumb robot voices reading us results from a preprocessed script that it thinks answers our question. No wonder the monkey part of our brain immediately picks up on the fact that this whole facade isn't just a lie, but an excruciating lie. It's excruciating because it's immediately obvious that there's nothing else 'there' to interact with. Even when speaking to another person over the phone, there's a huge amount of nuance you can pick up on. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they frazzled? Are they in a rush? Are they relaxed? And you automatically calibrate your responses and what you say in the conversation based on all of these perfectly obvious things. Normal humans automatically calibrate what they say, how they sound, what they suggest based on these cues. It works really well!
There's no reason voice stuff has to suck. It has worked pretty great for humans for thousands of years. We're evolutionarily tuned to it. It's just that all the technology we've created around it totally sucks and people are delusional if they think it's anywhere near prime time.
The core problem is that these systems are just so incorrect in fundamental ways that they're effectively useless.
Imagine a buddy of yours tells you about an event he's pretty sure you'll be interested in. Why does he tell you about this event? Well, he knows your interests, what kind of things you enjoy, when you're free, who you might want to go to the event with, how much money you're willing to spend, how far you're willing to travel, when you like to go out... So when you're on the receiving end of such a suggestion it often feels great! It's like you've struck gold.
Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events. It doesn't feel magical. It doesn't even feel like it knows what the hell you enjoy doing half the time. Forget about knowing about your free time, budgetary restrictions, family restrictions, who you'd be able to go with; None of that stuff is even sort of in the picture. And it's all delivered to you in a voice that sounds like it would be as happy to kill you as give you advice. There's no lively back and forth on the logistics of the event. No feeling of discovery as you two talk it out, honing the plan that brings it from an abstract concept to reality.
It's just dead and lifeless and shitty.
Or they'll do something hilarious like sell VCs on a world wide cryptocurrency that is uniquely joined to an individual by their biometrics and somehow involves AI. I'm sure they could wrangle a few hundred million out of the VC class with a braindead scheme like that.
Any decision that doesn't make the 'line go up' is considered a dumb decision. So to most people on this site, kicking Sam out of the company was a bad idea because it meant the company's future earning potential had cratered.
I grew up and got into software by messing around with self-hosting web servers and game communities as a kid. As time has gone on I felt like we had lost some of the magic of easily sharing your machines and your creations with other people. We have a ton of services where you can now deploy and share your creations, but we've moved further and further away from direct sharing. There were plenty of good reasons why this has happened, with security being the most obvious factor, but it still makes me a little sad. I want my things to be able to talk to each other no matter where I am. I want to be able to invite my friends in and have access to my stuff.
Tailscale makes all of that quick, easy and awesome. I think it's really neat, makes me feel like a little nerdy kid again.
So even if you were to white-list the context to train the engine against, it would still make up information because that's just what LLMs do. They make stuff up to fit certain patterns.
The old Netflix was an absolute gold mine. There was sooooo much good content and almost none of it was their own. The place was overflowing with great movies from every genre. It had all these great movies because they were the only game in town and the studios hadn't yet identified them as a competitor. It was a novelty. "Hey sure, movies on the internet. Why not! Here's our entire back catalog. Go nuts."
Once everyone realized this wasn't a novelty the IP holders began to pull back. First it was increased rates, which meant Netflix could have fewer of the top items available for streaming at any given time. Fine, kind of annoying that I can't find everything I want anymore but there's still a lot of good stuff! Then the megacorps that own all of the studios began to develop their own platforms to cash in on the money train and stopped licensing their content to Netflix altogether. Instead they began to pile the IP up to be released exclusively on their own platforms. Netflix knew this was going to happen so they went absolutely nuts on the spending, trying to produce enough of their own content to fill the gap left by 60 years of the top IP that was (mostly) banished from their platform.
The spending didn't work because it turns out making high quality IP is really, really hard. Think of all the film and television IP created over the last 60 years. Not the hits, I'm talking about everything. Now think of the hits. Those are like, what, 1% of the total? Netflix can't fill their catalog to compete with who they used to be. It's not physically/creatively possible. That means they will never live up to the initial experience of using the site.
As a consumer, I'd prefer they shift to become something closer to HBO/Apple TV+. A company that focuses on high quality, carefully curated productions. At least then I would have a good reason to continue subscribing. As it is, I don't find much value in the endless stream of schlock they've been producing to try to fill in for the lost IP. Quantity doesn't have a quality all its own when it comes to entertainment.
I don't disagree that models are pointless if they're not doing anything other than aping the DB. Why waste your time creating another layer of required translation if it doesn't buy you anything?
With that said, I do think there are some benefits to using statically typed models in languages line C# with larger codebases. It seems like it makes it easier to refactor the application code.
My mom was a nurse, my aunt was a nurse, my sister is a nurse and my best friend’s mom is a nurse. I really can’t believe anyone continues to be a nurse given the insane working conditions these folks have to put up with. Twelve hour shifts, overflowing with patients, watching newcomers earn more than seasoned veterans… When I compare it to my laid back software engineering job it’s like I’m living in an entirely different universe. The hospital industry is a hugely demoralizing place.
Does anyone know if there’s any sort of reflective documentation or anything in powershell? Like, is there a way to ask it what arguments exist for a command?
I just thought the framework of his argument was rather odd. Better water heaters are framed as being a way to avoid constructing power storage systems that convert variable renewable energy into steady baseline power, which feels like an argument that doesn't hold up. We'll still need some way to supply steady power to run AC units, heaters, and other big power draws all night, no matter what type of water heaters we use!
It starts off talking about wanting to move energy production to renewable sources. Great, I'm with you so far. A major issue with renewable energy (solar and wind) is that they're variable, not constant. This results in uneven power. The wind doesn't blow, it's cloudy or it's night time. So we need a way to convert this variable renewable energy into constant energy that's accessible around the clock. An obvious solution to the problem is to convert the renewable energy into stored potential energy. This is what pumped hydroelectric dams are all about. Use the variable energy to pump a bunch of water up behind a dam, then release it when you need a more constant supply of energy.
Great, so we've got that much figured out. The world needs a way to convert renewable energy into constant energy.
And the solution to this problem is... the distribution of more efficient water heaters.
Wat
How do more efficient water heaters in any way, shape or form help solve the renewable variable rate energy to constant energy problem? I feel like I must be missing something obvious. Are we able to somehow store energy in heat-pump based water heaters and then extract that energy to run other items in our homes? When you store energy in a heat-pump based water heater does it not need to run at night when renewable energy sources are lowest?
Can anyone explain to me what the heck this article is talking about?
I feel like I'm missing the larger picture, but I don't see how these two concepts (energy storage and appliance efficiency) are related.
That's probably a rounding error on their quarterly report. Heck, it might have cost them more money to hire more people to provide adequate security to prevent such attacks than to just suck it up and get attacked.
It may actually be economically favorable to stay insecure!
If that were the case, the market would actually encourage CEO's to spend less money on security, not more.
Cyber warfare, whether ransomware or espionage, is largely asymmetric. Why would these other countries want to play ball when they have everything to gain?
The answer tends to be that you make them cooperate by attaching additional costs to the actions, in order to make them less attractive. These costs come in two major forms, which we might want to categorize as passive and aggressive.
Passive costs might include: - Sanctions - Investigation/Arrests
Aggressive costs might include: - Offensive hacks - Military response
The issue here seems to be that the passive responses aren't likely to be strong enough to dissuade the other actors, while the aggressive responses are too costly. Aggressive counter hacks might just normalize cyber hacking and espionage, and the US is on the wrong side of that asymmetric gamble. Normalizing the behavior would be likely to make it worse than it already is!
Military responses go too far. You can't reaaalllly militarily respond to another nuclear power. Not directly. The potential outcomes there are almost uniformly bad. If you want to play the longer game maybe you do some poking and prodding by supporting third party combatants (IE: Soviet support of Vietnam against the Americans) or political opponents. But there aren't really that many great options on that front today for Russia or China.
So that leaves trying to increase the cost of the passive responses. This is kind of troublesome with China, since they'll just throw identical costs right back at you. It's a bit more possible with Russia, but Europe's entanglement with their power sector screws everything up. And it's not like we're lacking on Russian sanctions as it is.
You can try to play a strong defense, but that's kind of like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound at this point.
Yadda yadda yaddad, I don't know what to do but I think it's an interesting problem!
Edit: Maybe I shouldn't say European entanglement with Russian power sector. I suppose it's more appropriate to say gas sector?
Some interesting data can be drilled into here in the Power BI report: https://new.azwater.gov/ama/ama-data
ASML's Q1 Net Revenue: $2.79 billion TSMC Q1 Net Revenue: $12.9 billion
Don't you think ASML would just pocket the world's semiconductor income if this were the case?
The machines are only a part of the equation. How you use the machines and the processes you develop to create cutting edge semiconductors are arguably the more important part of the equation. As someone else mentioned in the comments, think of it as the difference between being a chisel manufacturer and a master sculptor. The tools are only a part of the equation. The methods and processes developed by TSMC are valuable pieces of technology. This value has an additional moat surrounding it due to the astronomical capital investment required to use it.
Even if you knew of all of TSMC's process information, you wouldn't be able to use it without tens of billions of dollars in investments, many years of construction, an adequately skilled workforce and right customer contacts.