whakim

The history of the cloud computing market belies your argument, in that the entire market has grown significantly since 2020, with all 3 big cloud providers >3xing their operating income (and 3-5x'ing their revenue) over that period. That isn't what you'd expect from undifferentiated, interchangeable commodities.

The scenario you've described sure sounds like the enterprise ideal, but it probably isn't the reality: in fact, some combination of high switching costs, feature differentiation, and/or price insensitivity means you have 3 highly profitable businesses.

I don't think it's correct to view AI capex as simply booking profit for Google Cloud - theoretically almost every aspect of Google's business should indirectly benefit from those investments. Bigger picture though, the bet behind that staggering capex is future profits, not current profits (see: OpenAI, Anthropic). Even if you think that's a stupid bet, the evidence won't be in 2026 income, it'll be in future income.

> GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.

This is an outdated or straight-up incorrect take. In the past quarter, Google Cloud's revenue was ~$30B, just shy of Azure (~$33B) and well shy of AWS (~$45B). That's about 28% of the cloud computing market excluding other players. Additionally, Google Cloud has grown a lot over the past few years and has been steadily eating away at AWS and Azure's market share; by next year it seems likely that it'll be bigger than Azure.

> As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.

Sure, it's a website that serves videos (and ads); just because the fundamental proposition hasn't changed doesn't mean that Google hasn't done a hell of a lot of work into turning YouTube in a business that earns tens of billions of dollars a year.

I mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.

I don't really agree: it's pretty simplistic to boil Google's history down to two products developed 20 years ago.

I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.

Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.

Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.

Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.

I think there's a huge spectrum between "pokes around in source code occasionally" and "maintains critical infrastructure." Learning to read and understand the open source software that powers a lot of the toolchain is a big part of the development of a lot of engineers, and said toolchain mostly not being written in a language you're familiar with is a barrier to that (not an insurmountable barrier, but still a barrier, to be clear).

I agree with you that the juice is worth the squeeze here, but I don't think it's right to pretend that there's absolutely zero cost in terms of the learning pathway for the next generation of open source contributors and maintainers.

Sure; total blinding is an issue with many drugs (however active placebos which can make you feel dizzy/sedated/whatever can help); opiods/fentanyl/etc sometimes have to make do with imperfect blinding. The fact remains that the psychedelic state is so distinct from normal consciousness that the challenge is qualitatively different.

> The "war on drugs" certainly didn't help, but research never really stopped.

This is false. The scheduling of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD was catastrophic for medical research in the United States (as well as in many other countries) from the early 1970s until the mid-2000's. Even today, research on psychedelics is challenging.

> but we are struggling to turn these drugs into treatments that up to modern standards

The elephant in the room is that psychedelics don't really fit into our existing framework around development of psychiatric drugs. For example, you can't really run a RCT, because it's completely obvious to the patient whether they've received the drug or a placebo. The concepts of set and settings, and the importance of "guides" in trials, prove challenging as they introduce highly subjective elements. I would frame this as more of a mismatch than a case of "modern standards being better" - the jury is still out on whether psychedelics will prove effective, and we're still trying to figure out how to "prove" that.

There are a number of problems with these statements, but a major one is that psychedelics are associated with reduced activity within the DMN (but increased activity between the DMN and other networks). It is not clear the direction in which this causality runs.

Comment · 3 months ago

I agree that there's plenty of footguns with async python, but I think the hype is a bit overblown. A few sensible defaults in the standard library would go a long way, e.g. requiring a maxsize argument to Queue (or None if you really need it to be unbounded). The "accidental blocking" thing seems like less of design issue - it has much more to do with python's super long history as a sync-first language. Taking a step back, though, async is popular because it is genuinely extremely useful! If you need to do a bunch of work and that work is mostly IO-bound, then it makes sense to live in an async world.

> But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.

But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience? That sounds simply like a mathematical function (perhaps using our own past experiences as inputs). Reinforcement Learning is a great counterexample here: AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.

If thermoregulation is too "reflexive" for you, consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.

> This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.

This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".

> For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why).

But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain. So qualia and consciousness seem like they have nothing to do with ensuring coherent behavior. To put this another way, your experiences and interactions with the world could be sufficient to associate the stove with danger, but how does that explain why the experience of touching the stove has qualia, as opposed to simply the pain-reaction of a patient without inner brain function or a baby?

Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation; most of the time, there is no conscious experience associated with it, but yet it is happening constantly and coherently.

Let's simplify it further: to use a famous example, do you believe that a thermostat is conscious? After all, a theremostat is able to coherently regulate its temperature over time in response to changes in its environment.

Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.

> The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.

Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical functions "in the dark" (and do so coherently) which do not rise to the level of consciousness.