medius

A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, etc.

Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI.

I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet!

Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"

To add to this, I have a 6 year old iPad. There are no issues with it except the operating system itself. Hulu won't install since it needs iOS 11 for some reason. iOS won't update to 11 because it's too old. Netflix works and updates just fine.

The iPad is in perfect condition with no hardware issues. It's the software that will make it an ewaste soon.

My Android phone updates all the apps (even many OS services) without any problem.

Analog can actually be much more precise than 8-bit since there's no quantization noise (yes, this is not A2D, but any intermediate results can take middle values that will only make the final value more precise than digital signal).

Just a few thoughts I've been mulling for a while about this topic:

Machine learning is something that I believe can take advantage of analog computing. A machine learning algorithm does not need highly precise or accurate representations. Most current implementations of such processing units use fewer bits (usually 8).

However, even if we use fewer bits, the engineering effort (design, layout, lithography, etc.) that goes into making the processing unit still assumes that those few bits are error free. The manufacturing process treats it like any other digital circuit. It assumes data processing part should be fault free (e.g. treat MSB and LSB the same). Digital circuits also demand higher power compared to analog versions.

If an analog circuit can be designed for such algorithms, not only could it be much faster, it will probably consume far less power. With a super high bandwidth consuming little power, an analog processing chip may give us a much better playground to try advanced algorithms. The materials can then be optimized and we might end up with something like a brain.

Brains (all animals) process far more information for the power they consume.

Digital circuits give us low level reliability and so they are really good for simple control. Analog/biology don't give us that. But they can give us a high level reliability while delegating the low level reliability to digital counterparts.

Sherlock Holmes would be envious of such abilities.

This is one of the most amazing things about humans to me. I marvel at how it's possible to get so much information about our universe by observing so little. Astronomy is another field that I'm really impressed with. It's possible to infer things about galaxies, stars, planets, etc. just buy observing some light coming from them to our little blue planet. Absolutely crazy.

How many such techniques we haven't even discovered or technology is not there to observe such things?

I really enjoyed reading Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark that explores such things.

Yes. I generally like to make a reverse calculation when evaluating such offers. To get $1 million out of this risk, the company has to exit for $1 billion if I have 0.1% stake. How likely is it? And that's before considering dilution, preference stocks, option exercise problems, etc.

Joining a BigCo can give $1 million (above startup salary) in 5 years with a very high probability.

Here's my take on it:

He has lost all credibility as a trustworthy individual. Anything he builds will be seen as tainted by IP stolen from Google (whether true or not). Most companies will avoid doing business with him for the fear of being pulled in some lawsuit and/or bad PR. This will put a major drag on his company in attracting engineers, investment, etc. He is definitely an extremely talented engineer, but his problems may be beyond any technical ingenuity that he can come up with.

I feel that the time to file for IPO for Lyft and Uber is running out. If Waymo One starts getting popular and gets more and more into news cycle, valuations of both of these companies will be considered based on the progress of self driving cars.

My wife said, after we finished watching her show, that Samin seems to be the kind of person she would love to be close friends with.