whoisjuan

I'm not stating that any of those strategies are the wrong approach to interpreting the world.

I'm saying that when those strategies are applied axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we know about the world because there's a general feeling that doing so will undo all scientific progress.

Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory of everything may emerge from a completely different interpretation of the world. One that is rationally contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell us.

And this brings me back to my original argument, which is that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.

First, assuming that the universe is an absolute system doesn't mean we can't build models to interpret its nature through binary interpretations. In the same way that a map is not the territory, a mental model for the universe isn't the universe.

So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong question, and we should reframe what we understand as absolute or relative.

You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the universe and the debates about its origins are often based on ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific truisms.

The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.

Our minds can only interpret the universe through a binary model, but that doesn't mean that the universe conforms to our binary interpretation of it.

"Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no dualistic nature.

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish, but I think a combination of Puppeteer and JSDOM or Cheerio should take you far. Where it gets complex is when you need to do things such as rotating IPs, but in my experience, that's only needed if you're engaging in a heavy scraping workload.

Puppeteer + JSDOM is what I used to build https://www.getscrape.com, which is a high-level web scraping API. Basically, you tell the API if you want links, images, texts, headings, numbers, etc; and the API gets all that stuff for you without the need to pass selectors or parsing instructions.

In case anyone here wants something straightforward. It works well to build generic scraping operations.

There are some Zuckerberg emails exposed as part of some subpoena process where he describes why Unity was a valuable asset to build Meta's AR/VR business. He goes on a lengthy argument about why owning Unity will create a value flywheel that could accelerate Meta's business by doubling down on Unity's engine as a core technology for building games and other AR/VR experiences: https://sriramk.com/memos/zuck-unity.pdf

We don't know what would have been the outcome since this never happened, but he saw Unity as a valuable core technology, so is reasonable to assume (whether you like Zuck or not) that Meta would have probably invested some serious money in making Unity (the engine) better.

Now that we are past that, we are looking at a company that can't grow its game engine business anymore, so they have started to invest in app/game monetization. But likely at the expense of being less focused on improving the game engine.

So the logic here is that Unity under Zuck (who is ironically the king of ad revenue models) would likely have thrived as a game engine. Instead, Unity as an independent company is now seen as nothing else than adware leverage.

For people wondering what happens with the ironSource deal, this bid is meant to derail it.

This is AppLovin playing offense to avoid the emergence of a stronger competitor and instead become that stronger competitor.

Unity is not as strong in monetization technologies but it’s a desired asset since it has already a foot in with game developers.

Unfortunately building a game engine is not as profitable as building adware.

I guess Zuckerberg’s idea to buy Unity at certain point doesn’t sound that bad now. Clearly he wanted it for the game engine technology and not to build another ad revenue source. Kind of ironic how things play out in the long term.

Yeah maybe not. But the Dall-E images have similar characteristics. But I think you're right. This seems to have more post-processing than an AI-generated image.

Unrelated, but for some reason, the first image (of a keyboard) seems to be a DALL-E image. Many images generated by DALL-E have some common sub-perceptual characteristics in the edges or something.

Sugar is not even in a comparable realm. By every measure, sugar is worst than any non-sugar sweetener.

Modern medical consensus is that added sugar should be avoided as much as possible.

That's because it really isn't an academic paper. He clearly stated that he was publishing it as a manifesto of what he would be researching going forward.

Would it be different if he just published it on a Medium or Substack blog?

I'm not an academic so I don't understand these weird feuds but seems pretty ridiculous to call someone out for lack of citations when they clearly disclosed the nature of that writing as somewhat unofficial and opinion-based. Maybe there's something I don't understand about those academic circles.

It’s incredible that the US allowed TikTok (which is by all measures a chinese spy tool) to become such a dominant social network.

India got it right from the beggining by banning TikTok. They saw the immense threat and didn’t hesitate.

China, by principle, has always banned all foreign information technology companies. What seemed hostile for us, it’s a reasonable play if you understand the unmeasurable power of massive information products such as Google or Facebook.

Meanwhile the US is just focused on attacking its own homegrown tech companies and diminishing their ability to compete in global contexts.

We are on a declining trajectory and we willingly paved that road. It’s sad.

Meta/Facebook has given the world React, PyTorch, GraphQL, Jest, and other fantastic technologies, and you are just boiling down their open source efforts to "Facebook wanting free labor."

Not everything in tech is a sinister capitalistic plot. Open Source and Open Research are truly one of the best ways to accelerate technology advancements, in particular software technology advancements.

I think this is a little bit more complicated than that.

Split brain patients are fully aware of events where their executive function clashes. For instance, they can see how one limb operates out of sync with the other one. So how do they establish this awareness? Who is watching? Who is the one that verbalizes that fully conscious experience?

Certainly one could argue that this could be the result of an observer in the right or left brain verbalizing their subjective experience, but that creates several problems.

The biggest one is that for this to be the case there needs to be a commanding observer at any point in time and this would mean that one brain needs to communicate to the other when would it becomes the observer. That would require some unifying substrate that allows this cooperation to happen beyond the physical connection of both brains. This assumes a full separation of the left and right brain. There are also some theories (Gazzaniga experiment) that suggest that the left brain might be in this case the conscious operator simply because the left interpreter is capable of overwriting the right brain by default. But this experiment fails to explain the meta-observer experience that allows the subjects to effectively participate in the experiment and explain their experience with both right and left stimuli. The experiment correctly shows the existence of separate logic centers but can't explain why the subject is still experiencing his cognitive interpretation of reality as a single observer.

This is the fallacy of consciousness theorization. We don't have any good definition of consciousness because it can only be defined subjectively and uni-personally.

Empirically and logically we know that is implausible to have two simultaneously operating and fully aware consciousness. We know this because this duality doesn’t work at all with any rational interpretation of ourselves. We are one and only one. We are never two simultaneous people and there’s no thought or physical experiment that would allow us to test or imagine that.

Some people might have mental diseases that completely alter their consciousness and sense of identity but their experience is still a single observer experience.

Split brain patients are in fact the best example we have of consciousness being discrete and somewhat separable from brain function. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the brain isn’t the one producing the conscious experience but it certainly shows that the brain mechanisms that could produce consciousness are very different from the ones that enable other neurological functions.

The idea that a patient with two physically separated brains can have a relatively normal life (even when executive function clashes happen, one brain is still capable to overwrite the other) shows that there’s some unknown hypervisor function that enables their conscious experience.

The author suggests that split brain surgery causes “two consciousness” but this is simply not true.

Split brain patients seem to have two separate executive functions but they still describe their subjective experience as a single observer.

I think he is referring to “computation” in a strictly binary sense.

I hope this doesn’t sound pedantic but it’s “affected”, not “effected”. It’s an error I see a lot and it’s easy to fix if you just remember that “affect” means “to impact”.

So if what you’re trying to say someone or something was impacted by something else, you say “affected”.

Also as a general rule of thumb “effected” while grammatically correct is rarely ever used in colloquial talk in the context of what it means which is executed or produced. So people almost always mean “affected” when they make this mistake.

I'm sure that Tesla will have to eventually bring back radar into the stack. The problem with a vision system only is that it relies on visual clues that can be easily blinded by the conditions of the road. For instance a sun glare, high beams from traffic, water on the windshield, or simply a small depression on the road terrain.

These are the same things that can cause a traffic accident for a human with human eyes, so there's really no logical reason to assume that you can create a more performing and safer computer driver by emulating human vision only.

Radar solves all these problems by enhancing the perception of the car and creating redundancy so the car can cross-check its assumptions about the road, the terrain, and the obstacles with two different and independent perception systems.

I can't understand why they removed radar. You don't need to be an expert to understand why vision alone won't work.

Parag is likely the first one getting the boot after the takeover is finished.

This is one of those cases where I believe consolidation helps the users instead of harming them.

Fragmentation in VOD is taking us back to the cable era where you had to pay extra for different content packages.

High quality content is spread across multiple platforms so users have to pay more for other services or simply miss out on that content.

That graph isn’t showing that. Sure, Netflix produces way more content than competitors but they also have more shows in the far right (outstanding and exceptional) than their competitors.

I don’t what are you talking about. Machine Learning is one the fundamental technical pilars of modern Facebook. It’s used in almost every process imaginable in some way or another.

I can't believe the number of entitled posts here. Do people here think that Gitlab SaaS doesn't have an operation cost (in servers, development, support, etc)?

Perhaps people need to start re-evaluating what "free" means in the context of a cloud offering. "Free" is a marketing strategy, not a charitable act.

In the case of Gitlab there's nothing preventing you from using the self-managed free tier which will effectively remove this limit, but guess what? Running it on your own will also have a cost for you. The same way it does for Gitlab when they give it for free through Gitlab.com

Popup windows don't show the bookmark bar, though.

A safeguard against this type of attack is to right-click on buttons and links, and open them in a new tab.

That means that you can end up with a lot of tabs open, but it really helps to unmask these types of attacks.

Ultimately, I think browser vendors should implement better patterns to discern actual windows from mimicked windows. For example, showing a personal secret signature in the UI above the "line of death".

The attacker won't be able to figure out the secret signature so only a legit browser window will be able to display it. Here is a quick wireframe of how it could work: https://cln.sh/0GbV3A

As an adverb `when` is used mostly to refer to a time or moment. So semantically speaking `when` should be reserved for time conditionals only.

Why is Belgium so polluted, though? This is the first time I'm learning about it.

In many ways the big disruption is that EVs require orders of magnitude less service than ICE vehicles.

In the case of Tesla, their gains in reliability are directly transformed into a lesser demand for servicing. Once they get into a inflection point with their fit and finish quality they will likely become less dependent on having a traditional service infrastructure. Instead they can double down on more unorthodox models like mobile service.

Traditional manufacturers, in particular Japanese manufacturers, already achieved peak reliability in ICE vehicles. But even with that, they still need to have a service and maintenance footprint because their cars still break.

The average-reliability EV breaks way less than the top-reliability ICE, so you really need way less service infrastructure if you only sell EVs.

I think this is a bug of the system, not a feature. Manufacturers and Dealerships have a co-dependent relationship where manufacturers provide a franchised business and the supply of a very unique product and dealerships provide distribution/footprint, last mile logistics and support.

This is where Tesla has an incredible position. They can invest in becoming a logistics company in every possible part of the chain and maximize value at every point.

The other manufacturers have to undo their dealership footprint which is predicated on a +60 year relationship. That divorce will eat alive most classic manufacturers and will permanently block them from making good progress in direct to consumer.

This is what being disrupted looks like.

Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side, it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken groups (investors, founders, politicians, journalists, activists, etc) and a terrible product-market fit with everyone else.

I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics.

News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y".

I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.

Very poor reasoning in this article.

He totally ignored the business fundamentals of the entertainment industry. Content is king and content is an extremely capital-intensive business. No existing entertainment business is willing to cooperate on content distribution because that would severely reduce their margins.

Netflix's strategy is indeed the right strategy because they can create long-lasting IP and horizontally expand their business into other entertainment verticals.

Aggregation is by far the worst strategy in content distribution because you don't have bargaining power. As you start adding users to your platform, you will proportionally lose power to renegotiate licenses because IP owners will attribute your growth to their content. It's a zero-sum game.