fchu

If a company built a tool like Copilot to help students write essays, is that considered plagiarism? Probably yes, and the reason is that regurgitating blobs of text without actually thinking like a human and writing them anew doesn't feel like actual work, just direct re-use.

Same thinking probably applies to GitHub Copilot and copyright

There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized).

It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.

Google changing the country in their terms of services without user explicit approval/opt-in is much worse than it seems.

As a user, I might have Germany as my country in Google while living in Malaysia: maybe I like its privacy law better, or I'm a German ambassador on a diplomatic mission, or a German citizen on an exchange program, or a Malaysian citizen who signed up for Google while on vacation in Germany and is now confused about some parts of their account.

The point is, only the last scenario needs some fixing, while in all other cases, the user will understandably prefer to keep the country unchanged. Yet Google forcibly and preemptively switches country in all these scenarios, with no real benefits to the user.

But if there is no real benefit to the end user, and not everyone wants this, why force this change in the first place? Something technical that has to do with local laws.

And that's where it's really bad: - It's bad as a principle, because if a person signs a contract with an entity under a specific jurisdiction, that person doesn't expect the jurisdiction to change unilaterally. - It's bad in practice, because instead of knowing with certainty that my data is under a specific jurisdiction, I'm now subject to some automated process that could unilaterally move my data to a random country, resulting in unintended exposure to its laws

Free market includes when competition can reasonably enter a market that's not structured through legislation to be overly favorable towards incumbents.

Note that there are natural monopolies/oligopolies, which are the result of the nature of the market (eg need for scale) rather than legal lobbying.

Meanwhile Google Meet is still horrendous compared to Zoom, despite me and my coworker both having gigabit internet...

Don't get me wrong, this is cool, but a research project becomes really cool when it gets well executed

It's not very stealth tech if it's vue

Am I the only one who thinks the concept of relative error is not meaningful in this context?

It gives a disproportionate meaning to 0 without real physical consideration, eg:

- 0.1⁰C ± 0.1 (wow 100% relative error) - 273.25K ± 0.1 (meh 0.04% relative error)

Totally agree. One redeeming truth is that software is similar to finance in that it gives an outsized advantage to a business vs one that doesn't get it. Unlike finance though, "softwarizing" a company is a much more drastic transformation than having a finance team and most business can't level up. It so happens that we're still at the early ages of that process and thus the "tech company" distinction still exists. In the future all big companies will be "tech companies" in that sense. (Marc was right)

I'm pretty sure they pivoted after starting YC, so in this instance the specific criticism about YC doesn't hold

The key difference here is that it's a venture backed effort, which signals something very different from large state-financed research efforts like Iter.

Namely, that there is a path to financial viability

Learning isn't possible without unlearning whatever temporary construct we used as a crutch, but it doesn't mean using that temporary construct is wrong even if it's not technically correct.

More specifically in mathematics, the interplay between formalism and intuition, like a mental danse or gymnastics, is a powerful process in furthering our understanding of mathematical truths:

From a formal perspective, mathematical objects can be created in so many ways, some constructions being more intuitive and beautiful than others (axioms, groups, rings, fields). The formalism itself let us see what intuition can't.

From an intuitive perspective, it's useful to latch on whatever concept one have to learn the next level of abstraction, while acknowledging that the intuition might not be 100% correct. Like using addition to intuitively understand multiplication, or addition and multiplication to intuitively understand fields. The intuition let us familiarize with otherwise novel ideas.

Ironically, this article wants to be very normative about which mathematical intuition is better (which there isn't, I'm sure many don't think of "multiplicand" as something special), while disregarding any cues from any formalism.

Not quite. Having a blanket "Google doesn't track you" statement doesn't capture the complexity of reality: what if the website you're browsing is using Firebase for their authentication, or Google Pay for payment. I'm certain most users would want the website to function correctly, otherwise it defeats the point of using incognito. In all of these cases, Google will have a record of you, even if those records are not actively joined. Where do you draw the line?

This is amazing. I was not happy when my doctor told me I had to do 3 shots, twice a week, for my allergies, with 30min wait time at the doctors, while I could have just had sublingual pills from the comfort of my home if I were in Europe. Those shots lasted for 5+ years... Really hope the best of success to your start-up !

Having great returns and improving humanity are very different things. I'm pretty sure a lot of scams are benefiting their creators very well, and yet...