pocketsand

A strange retort. "Yeah well, your CHILD'S COMPUTER is better, but that's for CHILDREN. We're talking adult computers here!"

This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.

It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.

It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).

I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.

You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.

Work for me or I will publicly shame you, try to damage your reputation, and make your employees potentially question your loyalty.

Threatening people if they don’t take a job with you is in the most literal way a challenge to your autonomy as a human being.

For me, the fact he tried to compel the WPE CEO to work for him or else he would expose that she was in negotiations with him is the most unhinged thing I’ve ever heard in a hiring process. Quite literally an affront to freedom.

My most charitable guess at what is going on is severe mental illness.

Having an ad partner that is doing bad things on its own direction is different from explicitly paying a company to do a specific bad thing.

Far be it from me to defend Meta on privacy —- I won’t —- but we should at least characterize their numerous evils honestly.

For what it’s worth, in most cases, an organization that overly focuses on process is superior to one with a naive individualism that throws employees under the bus by default.

If you took the "no it won't" side of every argument about "how in X number of years, AI is sure to Y", you'd be way ahead.

In any event, raw parameter/weight count to me seems like a very primitive way to judge "complexity" in comparison to the human brain. Looked at most ways, our brains are for more efficient at doing the incredible things they do than LLMs. Consider how little language young children are exposed to in comparison to LLMs given their abilities to figure out how to produce language.

If the brain doesn't work like an LLM, you can expand the size and "complexity" of these models to the moon and they won't outperform the brain. Current models can write impressively well, but they can barely do math. It's clear they don't reason as we do.

Yeah, sure. But the marginal cost is zero, whereas a Slack subscription for every person in our org will cost about 1 million dollars a year. And it doesn’t integrate as well with every other piece of functional but mediocre software.

The person approving the $1 million dollar budget item doesn’t really care that Teams isn’t “free” in the sense that there is no free lunch, and while they perhaps have moral qualms of antitrust, that’s outside their purview. We’re locked into Office suite and right now there is no extra charge for Teams.

I would disagree. I work in healthcare and we’ve always used SQL Server. While I wouldn’t pick it, it’s been reliable and integrates with auth.

No one “loves” Teams, but honestly it serves its purpose for us at no cost.

No one loves OneDrive but it works.

I think people underestimate how much work it would take to integrate services, train people, and meet compliance requirements when using a handful of the best in class products instead of MS Suite.

My experience with DataSpell has not been great. Granted, my workflow leans toward R, and it DataSpell has a Python-first approach, but the app was basically completely broken to even load R, and StackOverflow was full of relatively old posts of people with the same problem. If they really cared about that app that would never happen.

I just do a lot of my R editing in PyCharm now and flip between terminals and RStudio. I was hoping DataSpell could unify that, but it's not ready.

The new RStudio IDE is promising, however.

As I'm sure you know, there are a lot of variations on how quantiles are calculated in various software. The 25th percentile, e.g., doesn't always line up with a value in the dataset, so sometimes nearest rank methods are used, otherwise a linearly interpolated data point, where interpolation is done in various ways.

In any event, none of these methods assume normality, or rely on CDFs of a normal curve.

If they did, every box plot would be symmetric.

The fact some people think that boxplots are constructed in such a way is a pretty good reason to take the author's article seriously as for how boxplots are confusing.

I do stats and data viz for a living and the article seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

He isn’t dogmatic.

He makes reasonable arguments.

I’m confused by these hopelessly uncharitable readings of the article.

Why? They’re non-parametric and make zero assumptions of normality.