Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
You complain that the bar keeps getting raised. Is there some good write up by someone who believes AGI is possible and how it might look like? I.e. what is your definition of the bar where you will say 'now, this is AGI'?
Comment · 5 years ago
I can confirm that I keep seeing Economist's predictions re China debt not pan out, though I started paying attention only ~10 years ago.

Do you have any books to recommend on China's financial system to help give perspective alternative to western default take?

Comment · 5 years ago
$3.6B is at peak valuation. The actual contributions maybe much lower?
Comment · 6 years ago
"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.

So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.

Comment · 6 years ago
How do you invest in gold?
Comment · 6 years ago
I agree that the number of games compared to established platforms is small.

But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.

Comment · 6 years ago
The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the article.

Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do.

Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business.

Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary?

Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.

Comment · 6 years ago
Looking at the overflowing hospitals in Wuhan, I'm preparing for the possibility of being mildly sick at home and not being able to get a bed in the hospital. The best hope is then that somehow we reduce chance of cross-infection inside the family. For that I got:

- Oxygen/HR meter ($15 @ Amazon) to monitor when oxygenation drops real low so that we know we have to get to ER and staying at home is suicidal.

- Some medical gloves, some masks (not hoarding - I think we have ~50 cheap masks from the time Bay Area was full of smoke).

- A ton of tissues and toilet paper.

- UV lamps to disinfect rooms.

- Basic staple foods to last for quite a while.

It's quite likely I won't be able to prevent cross-infection, but at least I've tried.

Comment · 8 years ago
Transparency is good and all, but there is anther way. In most advanced economies professional bureaucracy figures out the costs. Ordinary folks focus on getting healthy, not on costs.
Comment · 8 years ago
Perhaps you are right --- Amazon would not be punished in this way.

But likely you are right for different reasons than you think?

US government can put US executives in jail. I'm sure it would put them in jail. You have to remember what happened here: ZTE was caught, paid penalty and promised to be nice, then they reneged on their promise, lied about it, and got caught again.

Feds in fact just recently put VW executive in jail for even lesser offense. US government has no such jail-time leverage with Chinese companies, there is no extradition agreement, so the only leverage US has, it used.

Comment · 9 years ago
"it would be as slow as conventional rail" - citation?

Even Reason Foundation (which is as biased as it gets - it's funded by Koch brothers and ideological critic of almost any government investment) claim SF to LA times will be 3:30 to 4:40, which is faster than any train today.

Comment · 9 years ago
Is it really more environmentally 'sustainable' to live in a van than in an apartment in a dense city? Don't we get economies of scale in cities?
Comment · 9 years ago
It's quite possible the security firm was asked to audit their systems, but not asked (or paid) to fix them.
Comment · 9 years ago
What do mean by 'loosing control of their business ... to their employees'?
Comment · 9 years ago
Disclaimer: I worked on this technology.

I agree, article could be improved.

In a nutshell, Espresso system allows (logically) centralized, fine-grained control of how bits leave Google's network. Specifically, each server has a tailored (for that server) routing table that allows the server to select a specific port on a specific peering router for a given packet to exit to. The routing tables are updated very often and fast (e.g. to remove references to links that went down).

This makes it very easy to move bits around. You want to shift 42.2% of link X traffic to link Y? Just update some routing tables in end hosts. It also allows for different applications to the same destination to use different exit links (e.g. low latency - exit somewhere close, high bandwidth - exit where we have bandwidth). Bonus benefit: router can be simpler, it doesn't need to do any routing anymore, it just needs to follow instructions on each packet on which port to forward the packet to.

Does it make it more clear? Ask me anything.

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