jacobn

or, not of

Not if there are hills in between. But the delta between A and B is the best you can do, yes.

Neat! Scala support would be great, thanks!

> This group came together after OpenAI approached some of its members about establishing an external advisory board. In agreement with OpenAI, they decided to create an independent group and invite others to join.

The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.

It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.

This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.

This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.

Google ads work exactly the same way.

As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.

If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.

("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)

Make a billion / deserve a billion. Ok.

Given how tech has gone from nerdy underdog to Orwellian, Machiavellian, dopamine-peddling overlord, I’m actually a bit surprised people aren’t more angry / upset.

Over the last 40 years there has been two career paths with “disproportionate leverage”: tech and finance.

I believe in capitalism, contracts and the rule of law. A founder starting a company and attracting capital, employees and customers and generating tremendous wealth I see as an opportunity, not a bug.

But if I were in a normal career the wealth generated by tech & finance would certainly look & feel like some form of cheat code.

The last forty years have been a huge transient. Massive. AI will probably push it even further.

I hope we as a society and democracy can survive the strain.

So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?

(That can of course change very quickly, yes)

Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...

I just ask it for what I’m looking for (doing very simple “spare part” level at home 3d printing, nothing fancy or elaborate) and it gives me a starting point. Then I sometimes just edit the scad code by hand, and some times I ask the AI to revise, sometimes a mix (many iterations).

For very simple geometries it works great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a disconnect between “LLM views image” and “LLM emits scad that looks like that image” when it comes to anything non-trivial.

Still gives me a starting point I can mess with, which is great since I have zero CAD training or experience.

(I’m not the commenter you replied to)

I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

> MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.

Are there any nuclear alternatives that don't include strapping low grade bombs to the reactor core (PRW/BWR: water separation -> hydrogen + oxygen -> boom, like happened @ Fukushima) or using coolants that instantly start violently combusting when exposed to air or moisture (sodium)?

I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem so bad? Are there really no better options?

Cool! How do you actually implement “Reverse-mode automatic differentiation with a tape-based computational graph” in rust?