geophile

Why?

- Ergonomically, a touchscreen laptop seems undesirable.

- Apple prides itself on its great displays, and now invites users to smudge them with fingerprints.

Touchscreens, beta quality apps and hardware on the Duo, Lake America on Apple Maps -- I think we're entering a new Gil Amelio era.

Why?

- Ergonomically, a touchscreen laptop seems undesirable.

- Apple prides itself on its great displays, and now invites users to smudge them with fingerprints.

Touchscreens, beta quality apps and hardware on the Duo, Lake America on Apple Maps -- I think we're entering a new Gil Amelio era.

I have been an adjunct CS prof on and off for decades. I stopped in 2020 because teaching over Zoom sucked.

If were to teach a course today: I’d assign homework as usual, and have it be worth zero toward a student’s grade. The point is to learn, do it or not, that’s your choice. I would base the grade on in-person exams and maybe an interview. That’s it. No room for AI to boost grades.

The story is so much more than a startup scam. It's about large numbers of supposedly savvy men being duped by a kid. What kind of kid could and would do such a thing?

It seems that everyone interviewed about this story has their own red flag moment -- the point where they knew that something was way off, and that they should stay far away. Silicon Valley VCs being the prime example. It is incorrect to say that Theranos was a VC company, it was more funded by angels who were incapable of objectively judging what was being proposed.

At Stanford a prof (important to say: a woman) who knew that the idea was technically infeasible. (And interesting to contrast with another very senior prof -- a man -- who left his tenured position to join Theranos). I remember reading a New Yorker profile of EH years before Theranos blew up, and the story described how she had all of these extremely powerful old men on her board: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger. That was my red flag moment. Yes, they are brilliant and powerful, but they are also clueless about biotech and medical tech. So why get them involved? Something seemed very off to me. Lots of people knew that something was very off, and yet ...

!!! SPOILERS !!!

I agree. The EH portrayed in this movie is much more sympathetic than the one portrayed in the Carreyrou book, and in Dropout. Fielder obviously knows all of this, and he is consistently interested in the "meta" levels of storytelling. So I don't think the point of the movie is as simple as "but wait, maybe she is actually innocent!".

One point seems to be mindfuckery -- EH making Nathan unsure of who she is, and when she is being honest; him doing the same to his audience; even Amanda seems to get in on it. For example: when Amanda and Nathan are in front of the fireplace talking about Nathan's visit to EH in prison: was that scripted? Or was it a genuine conversation? Or an improvised conversation (with an agreed set of points to be made)?

A tangent, but todays’s NYT Daily podcast, about one journalist’s experience with Muse, was pretty irresponsible in not covering these problems.

What about training data? Aren't AIs trained on vast collections of descriptions of how humans handle a large variety of situations? These descriptions surely include tales of humans achieving goals by cheating. In fact, isn't it likely that the AIs hoovered up many recountings of Kobayashi Maru?

A silly hobby of mine has been to track Apple's use of the word "computer". They don't use it. The only use of the word that I can find, on apple.com, is in legal boilerplate.

I want a computer dammit, not an appliance.

Slightly off-topic: I decided to go with a Mac Mini to start playing with AI. My daily driver is a Linux laptop (with a negligible GPU). I also have a few Raspberry Pi machines for backup, and a low-end AWS server.

I was always cobbling together ad hoc network access, to get from one machine to another. Access to my Mac Mini while traveling was a pain. Bringing it with me is ridiculous, and network access was a PITA.

Tailscale is wonderful magic. Free (for my usage), so easy to set up, and now no matter where my various computers are, they are all accessible trivially via a single ssh connection.

So get a beefed up desktop Mac, set up Tailscale, and then use any random laptop, anywhere, to use it headless.

I remember so many details of his brief appearances in that movie, but what really stands out are his eyes -- intense, fearful, paranoid, menacing. (Suitable, given that scene where Deckard and Leon extract J. F. Sebastian's name.)

I had modest expectations going in (I mean, how could it possibly compare?). But it was still disappointing. I expected so much better from Denis Villeneuve. Unfortunately, he seems to have veered into big-budget pretentious scifi schlock.

I had to leave the IMAX showing of 2049, it was deafening (and I'm already hard of hearing!) Saw the whole thing in an ordinary non-IMAX theater, which was much more tolerable.

I saw Blade Runner in its first theater run, and I was bored. But it stayed with me, and decided that I had to watch it again. And again and again, and I've now seen in dozens of times over the years. It is one of my favorites, for the completeness of the world, for the visuals, for the music, for the ideas, for the acting, for the little details I keep discovering.

Ridley Scott's idea of the scifi future being as gritty, ugly and dysfunctional as current times led to his creation of his two scifi masterpieces -- Blade Runner and Alien. The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.

WTF are you talking about?! Brion James was fantastic in Blade Runner!

It's self-propagating nonsense. In the immediate post-dotcom crash, I worked for a company that was run by a bunch of young HBS grads, who all had management consulting backgrounds, (and a few minor dotcom successes). They regarded themselves as geniuses. They couldn't make a decision on anything.

Their preferred working style was to not make decisions, and to hire consulting firms to make the decisions for them. So they hired these even younger consultants, who would work for a few weeks, and make their recommendations, and then those recommendations would not be put into action. No. Instead, more consultants were hired to review and then discard the work of the previous consultants. Rinse and repeat for a few cycles.

I cannot resist one story. The initial HBS/management consulting CEO was replaced by a new CEO, someone who had run one of the early search engine companies, and had a similar background. He turned out to be no better. What I found very entertaining about CEO2 was his business past. He was known for two decisions. 1) Declined to buy the very early Google for high six figures, when he had the chance. 2) Decided to buy Blue Mountain -- think Hallmark cards but online -- for $780M. Greeting cards. 3/4 of a billion dollars. 1000x the cost of Google at the time.

Yes, hindsight and all, but still. If I had made both decisions by flipping a coin, my expected value would far exceed what this business genius accomplished.

I agree with you on all points. SPs are incredibly useful. DB portability is such a strange goal. Very common for some reason, but rarely actually needed.

I think there are probably two reasons for the hate that SPs get. 1) Come on, I learned SQL, isn't that enough? I have to learn SPs too? 2) Architecture astronauts love them their tiers, and logic belongs in the tier above the database, not the database tier itself. (I expressed this opinion in a job interview -- without disparaging any group of techies -- and I believe this is the reason I was not invited back.)