oivey

Pretty good odds we’ll all be dead in 100 years, and whatever guess we make about what the long game entails will be wrong.

That’s not at all how lawyers or businesses work. The job of the lawyer is to represent the client. Lawyers didn’t ultimately decide to use the ToS in this way, Disney did. Disney estimated the reputational risk and calling attention to their morally (and legally) questionable ToS was worth the risk.

Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.

1. There doesn’t have to be a blank screen. Major League Baseball’s streaming service, for example, plays highlights or a placeholder video saying a commercial break is in progress.

2. What? They own ESPN which is producing the content, right?

Baseball literally has an ad-free tier for its live streaming service. I’m sure it’s not the only live service that does.

None of your points seem well considered. Why run interference for these companies?

Incredibly irrelevant. By asserting their ToS this way, they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.

Possibly making matters worse, this is from Stanford where they had the university president caught engaging in fraud on Alzheimer’s research.

Not sure what way you’re trying to land with this rhetorical question, but the Republicans, right? Biden took office in January 2021, and vaccines began to roll out around April.

I guess people doing night school maybe? That’s pretty clearly not what this is.

Will the intelligent agents be plugging the infected USB sticks in?

Bonkers to call college graduates deadbeats. These aren’t addicts or slackers. They had to have some level of achievement their whole lives and managed to finish a degree.

Getting on disability is insanely difficult and pays jack shit. That is not a US equivalent by any measure.

> Excess solar power generated by ordinary consumers is probably being priced correctly

Do you have any evidence for this position? Is this just regulations giving you bad vibes? I’m pretty sure everyone was quite aware the sun doesn’t shine at night whenever the previous rules and regulations were written. Your analysis isn’t breaking new ground.

No? Christianity, for example, has changed massively over time. You can pick any denomination, and it’s true.

You can also look at new religions, denominations, or sects popping up. The purpose of religion is at its core supposed to be spirituality.

At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either.

The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.

It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.

Even that is arguably not lucky, it just followed a non-obvious trajectory. Graphics uses a fair amount of linear algebra, so people with large scale physical modeling needs (among many) became interested. To an extent the deep learning craze kicked off because of developments in computation on GPUs enabled economical training.

Again, the old car comparison is demonstrably untrue. To put the same example forward, computer modeling has wildly changed and accelerated car design in ways that were impossible for any sum of money in the 70s.

I think part of why this is hard to believe is that people strongly believe in the concept that time is money. On the margins for decisions like hiring someone to mow your lawn, it is true. For large scale things, you often cannot accelerate processes no matter how much money you dump into it. A good example of this is how long it has taken China to industrialize.

To be clear also, you have to prove your point that #2 is outpacing #1. The fact that the price keeps going up is not proof as there are other explanations. The poor quality of domestic manufacturers and their bad business practices, for example.

> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.

You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”

When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.

I don’t think this is true. Advancements in technology often make things possible that previously were not at any price. Engines, for example, are better than ever in part due to computer modeling that would have been impossible in the 70s. Same deal with aerodynamics, safety features, and a million other things. In the 70s, you couldn’t have those things for any price. They required decades of development in other sectors to open possibilities for automobiles.

That is a low n, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. Surely random anecdotes (n=1) are even less powerful?

That’s a strange comparison to make. Those are entirely different sectors and sorts of engineering projects. In this example, also, SpaceX built all of that on Earth.

Why not do the obvious comparison with terrestrial data centers?

Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and all the others are private companies, too. NASA and others generally go through contractors to build things. SpaceX is on the dole just like them.

The satellite is built on Earth, so I’m not sure how it dodges any of those regulations practically. Why not just build a fully autonomous, solar powered datacenter on Earth? I guess in space Elon might think that no one can ban Grok for distributing CSAM?

There’s some truly magical thinking behind the idea that government regulations have somehow made it cheaper to launch a rocket than build a building. Rockets are fantastically expensive even with the major leaps SpaceX made and will be even with Starship. Everything about a space launch is expensive, dangerous, and highly regulated. Your datacenter on Earth can’t go boom.

A truck is sluggish because of its weight and inertia. It’s a law of nature. What law of nature is making Gitlab slow?

Besides what all these other commenters are saying, probably many of the people running these small lunch shops in Japan are the owners, not waged employees. On top of that, that business probably isn’t viable for 8 hours per day.

> If you were open every day of the year and assume no seasonality, that means your first 49 orders every day go just to regulatory fees.

This looks crazy because it is incorrect. In your premise, that 9% profit margin includes the regulatory costs for a brick and mortar restaurant already. The only way your logic works out is if truck regulations are on average $30k more expensive than a regular building, which they almost certainly are not.

You can’t even begin to do the calculation without knowing the breakdown underlying the profit margin you cite.

$250k per house is an absolutely insane level of mismanagement.

I'm not sure it's common knowledge, but it is general knowledge. Not all HNers are writing web apps. Many may be writing truly compute bound applications.

In my experience writing computer vision software, people really struggle with the common sense of how fast computers really are. Some knowledge like how many nanoseconds an add takes can be very illuminating to understand whether their algorithm's runtime makes any sense. That may push loose the bit of common sense that their algorithm is somehow wrong. Often I see people fail to put bounds on their expectations. Numbers like these help set those bounds.

No one is suggesting “wasting time on non problems.” You’re tilting at windmills.

These are the metrics underneath it all. Profiles tell you what parts are slow relative to others and time your specific implementation. How long should it take to sum together a million integers?

It isn’t what you said. If you want, you can write your own matmul in Numba and it will be roughly as fast as similar C code. You shouldn’t, of course, for the same reason handrolling your own matmuls in C is stupid.

Many problems can performantly solved in pure Python, especially via the growing set of tools like the JIT libraries I cited. Even more will be solvable when things like free threaded Python land. It will be a minority of problems that can’t be, if it isn’t already.