Recent submissions

Comment · 6 months ago
At this point, when you are doing big AI you basically have to buy it from NVidia or rent it from Google. And Google can design their chips and engine and systems in a whole-datacenter context, centralizing some aspects that are impossible for chip vendors to centralize, so I suspect that when things get really big, Google's systems will always be more cost-efficient.

(disclosure: I am long GOOG, for this and a few other reasons)

Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Any computable function f on one variable x has a program. That function is a program of size p. The input x also has a data size d. BB(p+d) >= f(x), by definition, for all f and x. If you think you might have a (function, input) pair (and corresponding (program, data) pair) for which this is not true, see the previous sentence.
Comment · 1 year ago
It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research. AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly.

Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.

The funding model is an integral part of the story.

Comment · 1 year ago
They are a zero-trust networking solution that also traverses IPv4 NATs. Zero-trust networking is a layer above the IP layer. In an IPv6 Internet their capital costs go down, and their product remains valuable for their paying customers. (Free accounts mostly use it for NAT traversal, businesses for the zero-trust encryption.)

Their CEO has been working with (and supporting) v6 for decades both at the executive level (now) and also as an extremely capable software engineer that I personally met with a few times while we were both engineers at Google doing network measurement.

Comment · 1 year ago
plonk
Comment · 1 year ago
Countries can tell companies what the maps of their countries should look like and what things should be called.

For example, Google shows different info about the Kashmir region depending on whether you are in Pakistan or India or external to both, because of how the Indian and Pakistani governments define the borders and names of the region. If the US government changes a thing's name, then Google will change that thing's name within the US. Google mostly doesn't choose names, it uses externally-supplied mostly-governmental name databases. Governments have the power to name their own regions.

I don't want Google to choose what things are called, so I think they are doing the right thing here, and the USG is doing the dumb thing.

Comment · 1 year ago
NB: The Treynor Curve is named after Ben Treynor and his ideas. Ben Treynor's name changed to Ben Sloss a few years back, and Ben Sloss is one of the authors of this article.
Comment · 1 year ago
The Qmodem program, brought home on some random 3.5 inch floppy, allowed me to connect to local BBSes and started my journey into networking computers. Now I have a PhD in CS and I spent more than a decade deeply caring about the Internet, networks, and network research. Without the start given by those BBSes, my path could have been very different! I am very sorry for your loss, and I hope the fact that he made a random teen's life better is some comfort.
Comment · 1 year ago
They said it was currently worse than it used to be before the EU. That is not true.

Netflix engaging in complicated IP rights negotiations does not mean the existence of the European Union is pointless.

Comment · 1 year ago
> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.

[citation needed] because I think this is extremely false.

It is easy to underestimate the pain caused by having all the pre-euro currencies and pre-EU tax laws (yes there was the Schengen zone and EEC, but the EU uniformity helps a lot) and pre-EU borders.

Source: me, who is a middle-aged American founding a tech startup in the EU and visited Europe many times before the EU existed.

Comment · 2 years ago
No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point. Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.
Comment · 2 years ago
The state motto of Texas is "Friendship".

(this is true)

Comment · 2 years ago
People who have never had it have no concept of how much they are missing. It's so frustrating.

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