achatham

It was built in-house at Google, not aquired. Orkut (the person) had been working at Google for several years before he built orkut.com. He'd done a similar site at Stanford pre-Google (and pre-Friendster!)

Lately I've been using RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) speed reading, where you see a single word at a time, reading at 400-600wpm. You have to pay attention or you miss the words, so the distraction questions are mostly moot. On the downside, it's a lot harder to think about what you're reading, so I'm questioning whether it even counts as having read the book. I haven't loved any books I've read this way, which could be bad luck with the content but may be more about how I'm consuming it.

DragonBox Algebra has a similar concept but gamified. It has a cool progression: you get a new "power" each chapter, like factoring or negating. And it starts out with monster cards then gradually transitions to "x" and numerals. My kids have loved it, but it's hard to tell how much they learn when you can only make legal moves. When my older one learned the basic rules of algebraic manipulation and went back to it, it worked great at giving him a visual model to follow.

That said, the game doesn't let you do arbitrary equations, so you cap out when you beat the game. Excited to try this app out!

Yes, Gemini is very token efficient at video. It also has "lower resolution" options which can make it even cheaper if. With Gemini 3.1 flash lite an hour of video works out to $0.24 at the API rates.

What conclusion do you think I was drawing? I was just sharing an interesting quote relevant to the thread.

Oil was solely a lighting product at this point. The Teamsters were clearly not thinking 70 years into the future to stop automobiles. But I think the "monopoly" part of the quote is somewhat germain, even if it's just opinion of the author.

No idea about them trying to ban automobiles, but oil pipelines were invented to get around their friction. From _The Prize_, referencing the mid-1800s:

"From the first discoveries, teamsters, lashing their horses, had clogged the roads of the Oil Regions with their loads of barrels. They were more than just a physical bottleneck. Holding a monopoly position, they charged exorbitant rates; it cost more to move a barrel over a few miles of muddy road to a railway stop than to transport it by rail from western Pennsylvania all the way to New York. The teamsters’ stranglehold on transportation led to an ingenious effort to develop an alternative—transportation by pipeline."

The donation was also made through a donor advised fund (DAF), which means Musk didn't legally make the donation. I'm surprised he didn't lose on not having standing.

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

My personal project is illustrating arbitrary stories with consistent characters and settings. I've rewritten it at least 5 times, and Nano Banana has been a game-changer. My kids are willing to listen to much more sophisticated stories as long as it has pictures, so I've used it to illustrate text like Ender's Game. Unfortunately, it's getting harder to legally acquire books in a format you can feed to an LLM.

I first extract all the entities from the text, generate characters from an art style, and then start stitching them together into individual illustrations. It works much better with NB than anything else I tried before.

This was in place of reorganizing the codebase, which would have been the alternative. I've done such work in the past, and I've found it's a pretty rare skillet to optimize compilation speed. There's just a lot less input for the compiler to look at, as the useless transitive text is dropped.

And to be clear, it also speeds up the original compilation, but that's not as noticeable because when you're compiling zillions of separate compilation units with massive parallelism, you don't notice how long any given file takes to compile.

Clang modules. Sorry, didn't realize the distinction!

We use c++ modules at Waymo, inside the google monorepo. The Google toolchain team did all the hard work, but we applied it more aggressively than any team I know of. The results have been fantastic, with our largest compilation units getting a 30-40% speedup. It doesn't make a huge difference in a clean build, as that's massively distributed. But it makes an enormous difference for iterative compilation. It also has the benefit of avoiding recompilation entirely in some cases.

Every once in a while something breaks, usually around exotic use of templates. But on the whole we love it, and we'd have to do so much ongoing refactoring to keep things workable without them.

Update: I now recall those numbers are from a partial experiment, and the full deployment was even faster, but I can't recall the exact number. Maybe a 2/3 speedup?

At Waymo we use c++ modules via clang and got the demanded 5x speedup.

As the article mentions, you need a close relationship between the compiler and build system, which Google already has. The google build tooling team got modules to mostly work but only turned them on in limited situations. But we but the bullet and turned them on everywhere, which has sped up compilation of individual files by more than 5x (I forget the exact number).

The remaining problem is that sometimes we get weird compilation errors and have to disable modules for that compilation unit. It's always around templates, and Eigen has been gnarly to get working.

> “While TBD Labs is still relatively new, we believe it has the greatest compute-per-researcher in the industry, and that will only increase,” Meta said.

Well, two ways to make that true!