stg22

It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.

There is a great deal of death in a language.

Gawker flouted the law.

They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial

Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.

Historically, the UK was run for the benefit of an elite and the regions they lived in, but they discovered that that ran counter to their own interests. They reversed the economic parts of that in Ireland in the 1890s ("Killing Home Rule with Kindness"), and they did so in Northern England after the Wall Street Crash. For example, for part of the 20th century, companies were banned from expanding anywhere outside of deprived regions which caused industrial havoc in the South without providing much long-term benefit to the North. The root problem isn't that government didn't try extreme measure, it's that those measures failed at massive cost, so proposed ones are now subject to much more rigorous scrutiny.

Power in the UK is highly centralised in London, but that's not necessarily bad for regional economic development, e.g. the office ban mentioned above would not have been agreed to by southern devolved regions and the redevelopment of the former East Germany was driven by Bonn (former West Germany's capital city). Competition in government also isn't necessarily good for regional development and the corn laws and free trade that the author credits to Northern England's influence caused another famine in Ireland in 1879. It's also worth noting the North East England referendum of 2004, when London's project of devolving power to the English regions was blocked because Northern English voters overwhelmingly didn't want it.

British manufacturing suffered an unusually steep collapse relative to other western countries in the late 20th century that hit Northern England particularly hard, while the benefits of the slightly later financial services boom were inevitably focused on the country's financial centre in the South. The manufacturing collapse was partially driven by government policies, but not in the way generally thought - for decades, pre-Thatcher governments had been taking fairly regular extreme measures in response to various crises (balance of payments deficits, unbalanced regional development, oil shortages, strikes, etc.), that made life much harder for businesses. But the collapse was mainly driven by the fact that Britain in the second half of the 20th century was mind-bogglingly bad at manufacturing. I suspect that the failure of that entire section of the British economy would be a better starting point for an analysis of what went wrong in Northern England.

Viewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is.

Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.

He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.

He was a Communist until his death in the 1970s, but Communism is a pretty broad spectrum and his beliefs moved about it during his life. His public and financial support for Stalinism in France until the mid-1950s was a bad error of judgement.

Enshittification - they switched to artificial sweetener.

The two companies are not the same; their dominant positions are in different markets which means the anti-trust implications of them extending into a specific market have to be judged separately.

As an extreme example, Oracle had a dominant position in the enterprise database market in the late '90s, but it wouldn't have been an abuse of that position if they'd integrated a web browser into Oracle 8.

In general, the more direct the impact of your role on short-term revenue, the safer you are when your company starts sacrificing people to the gods of quarterly accounts.

Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.

The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s.

1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.

2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.

3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.

Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.

Social media sites have so many users/viewings that fixed costs for serving all their content don't really matter to them, but since ads don't pay much per viewing, they have to cut the marginal costs of hosting and serving content to the bone to stay profitable.

For every million pieces of user-generated content hosted, they get a certain number of copyright complaints, so handling those complaints is a marginal cost. Since the kind of uploaded content YouTube target is particularly prone to being a significant violation of copyright (e.g. entire films), handling the complaints cheaply is a particularly big concern for them. Handling them effectively and with common sense would require human processing of each complaint, but the effect of that on marginal costs wouldn't fit with the business model, so they go with a low-marginal cost, error-prone system instead.

Since the consequences for the business of wrongly failing to take down copyrighted content can be very bad, but the consequences for the business of wrongly taking down uncopyrighted content are negligible, if the system must be error prone, they want their users to be on the wrong side of any errors, not the complainants.

Any American rival to YouTube would have the same problem and would resolve it a similar way.

The CCP really don't want another Tienanmen Square and bend to public opinion when necessary, e.g. the ending of lockdown. Given that a lot of Chinese women feel strongly about this, their government can still prod them a bit, but too much pressure would damage the broader legitimacy of the system.

Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough) to make it as efficient as possible.

By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a lower priority.