wearhere

I too was surprised to read that they were syncing what reads, at a glance, to be their entire database into the data lake. IIUC the reason that Snowflake prioritizes inserts over updates is because you're supposed to stream events derived from your data, not the data itself.

I was hoping to open this and see screenshots of what the OS looked like—I have never had a sense of what the OS for Meta's headsets is, only what individual games look like.

Instead, we get five (5) "Not an actual product render" illustrations.

This article barely describes why the mushrooms did _not_ eat Luke Perry, despite acknowledging that up top. All it suggests is that autolysis enzymes kill the mushrooms?

Also Swift!

This reflects astonishingly poorly on Brex. What customer wants to hear that Brex is using "a non-deterministic model" for "production use cases" like "staying on top of your expenses"? I don't see them acknowledge the downsides of that non-determinism anywhere, let alone hallucination, even though they mention the latter. Hallucinating an extra expense, or missing one, could have serious consequences.

This is also potentially terrible from a privacy standpoint. That "staying on top of your expenses" example suggests that you upload "a list of the entire [receipts] inbox" to the model. It _seems_ like they're using OpenAI's API, which doesn’t use customer data for training (unlike ChatGPT), but they should be crystal clear about this. Even if OpenAI doesn't retain/reuse the data, would Brex's customers be happy with this 3rd-party sharing?

The expenses example seems like sloppy engineering too—there's no reason to share expense amounts with the model if you just want it to count the number of expenses. Merchant names could be redacted too, replaced with identifiers that Brex would map back to the real data. These suggestions would save on tokens too.

Despite Brex saying they're using this in production, I suspect it's mostly a recruiting exercise. It's still a very bad look for their engineering.

The best thing to do would be to plow this money back into vaccine production and distribution, since that's the reason that the wealthy shouldn't be able to shortcut the process in the first place—it needing to work well for everyone.

What’s the timeline for Phase III trials? The article doesn’t seem to say. I don’t feel reassured that those won’t be rushed.

Yeah I do not understand why the author waited so long to disclose and also feels that Google deserves a "stellar job" here. Sure, Google patched the bug very quickly after disclosure. But given that Google waited so long, it sure looks like they only prioritized the fix once disclosure was a risk. If anything, I think that the author should have scheduled disclosure sooner.

What’s MCN?

Calling a hosted database "serverless" is the most brazen branding I have seen in a long time. For extra hilarity, their pricing page says "pricing is inclusive of cloud hardware".