Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
In capitalism, incentive usually is aligned with price. The industry doesn’t have incentive - the incentive arrives with higher prices, which is what we’re discussing in the first place.
Comment · 3 months ago
Their thing is improving the models; it would be extremely counter-company-culture to bet on models plateau-ing. Maybe wise in terms of hedging, but still difficult to pull of as a company decision.
Comment · 3 months ago
This is not strictly true.

I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it

This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.

Comment · 4 months ago
This sounds like "government issue Revolut". Which would be... low-key nice? Not a nefarious scheme, not a revolutionary future of money, just something to replace a certain part of your financial life without tying it to a commercial entity. Which might be appealing to the anti-capitalism segment of Europeans.
Comment · 10 months ago
Of course they care about oil spills - this is why all the oil tankers in the last weeks were attacked when empty.
Comment · 10 months ago
Peacetime technology from people who ignore the shooting war next door. Do you really want to build your energy system on huge soft targets? This looks much more vulnerable than solar arrays or battery installations to small-to-medium warheads (i.e anything from $500 FPV drones with an RPG round to $100k middle strike drones with 100 kg of payload).
Comment · 11 months ago
Freely available and openly editable maps might be one of the things that we take for granted, but are simply an abberation of a brief period of peace and civility; now we'll return to the default hobbesian state of affairs.

See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.

Comment · 1 year ago
An Apple Watch with a cellular connection, paired with Airpods, fulfills some of the role of a small iPhone - you can make calls, listen to music, and even do some light texting if Siri likes your accent.
Comment · 1 year ago
The ICE has tanks - can you provide a link? Words have meaning. Maybe some armored cars, but tanks?
Comment · 1 year ago
Congrats on the release. I was wondering what the zstd team is up to lately.

You mentioned something about grid structured data being in the plans - can you give more details?

Have you done experiments with compressing BCn GPU texture formats? They have a peculiar branched structure, with multiple sub formats packed tightly in bitfields of 64- or 128-bit blocks; due to the requirement of fixed ratio and random access by the GPU they still leave some potential compression on the table.

Comment · 1 year ago
how do you "take cash" over the Internet?
Comment · 1 year ago
Dead business?

The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.

The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.

Comment · 1 year ago
they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.
Comment · 1 year ago
I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).

There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles. There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.) There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs. There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc

Comment · 1 year ago
I prolonged the life of my terminally ill dog using EPO. It wasn't exotic or expensive. Probably that means it's already in wide use for humans, too.

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