raz32dust

It's easy to understand. US optimizes for whatever helps with more overall spending. They can print money and export inflation to others. All this new money then goes to the companies that hold power through lobbying.

I think two things are being conflated: whether math will continue to offer exciting opportunities, and whether it will remain fulfilling for those who love doing it today.

Grant is right about the former. But that doesn't address the latter. A field can have a bright future while losing what drew people to it.

Yes but you're getting a lot more for the same price. It's a lot more powerful, comfortable, safe and efficient while the effective cost has remained the same.

This view is too cynical. The frontier advancements are certainly going to trickle down. Take cars for example. AI driven cars are already here. AI-designed battery systems, fuel systems, materials and 3d printing capabilities will come to cars. It will likely lead to cheaper, more efficient and more effective vehicles. If will just take time for the impact to percolate.

A lot of use cases for agents require long running sessions. And you're likely to have many agent sessions running in parallel. These aren't going to be running on your personal devices

Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care

Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.

I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.

Interesting that factual error rates have not improved a lot since the last year. Models are getting smarter but not more trustworthy. At this point I would love to have a model that's maybe not as smart but has lower factual inaccuracies and works harder. I.e don't try to find shortcuts as much and does more rigorous self checks.

The question isn't about entitlement at all. It's about decency. I agree, better to not allow people to stay too long on temporary status. But it was and is allowed today. So there are people who have been on temporary status for 15, even 20 years. Fully legally. If your policies require them to just leave one fine day without any recourse, it is not decent.

An example might be someone who is renting your house. If you allowed them to live in your house for 10 years, would you ask them to leave without notice or with just the minimum 1 month notice? Yes they are not entitled to anything more than what was in the contract but would you do that? I wouldn't. Most people I know would work with the tenant and give them more time to figure things out. And if all of this was done with that decency, I am fine with it.

So you're claim of 4 countries isn't applicable to most people buying homes while on visa. Nobody on visa is buying a house in 1.5 years. People buy homes when they've been here for several years and have a permanent residency application in progress. So that's more like the last country where you've been.

Whole point of this thread is that it isn't unreasonable to have kids and family and a house and social life when you've lived somewhere for 10+ years. So any action on part of the government should at least give the space to get things in order or find alternatives. This is a fair and humane expectation.

Curious how long have you lived in 4 countries beyond college? No kids, marriage, social life?

I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant" whereas for all practical purposes it is really an immigrant visa. Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency? People buy homes because it is a reasonable belief that they are going to be living here permanently and it has historically been true.

In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.

It almost certainly is. Just too early right now.

Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?

As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.

I know but the point is that it worked too. You could argue one problem is harder than the other, I am not and expert so I wouldn't know. But at least it's clear the second result is also impressive, and didn't require much expertise. So it's wrong to say that you need expertise to get hard and impressive things done with AI.

The top comment has a counter example though https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709

I think it's not even about the ability to steer the AI. Just the ability to ask the right questions

If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)

I agree with the author that engineers need to recalibrate and say yes more often but the zirp connection is a stretch and unnecessary.

Good engineers will say yes and no thoughtfully and will adjust to the new reality anyway. So it feels kind of pointless since no one is really a just say yes or just say no person, though it is well written.

Does anyone have insight into how waymo is actually doing as a business? It seems to be unaffordable in the bay area. 2-3x the cost of Uber/lyft whenever I've checked. It is very cool, but I can't imagine they're doing well at that price point

It's marketing plus perception of how expensive it is. Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.

Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.

What can we do to keep these companies accountable? This is so frustrating.

This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.

In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.

I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).

No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.

With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.

[1] https://backlinko.com/twitch-users

My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.

I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.

How is "firing people" more clear in intent than "Reduction in force"? Reduction in force/cutting costs is usually the intent. People getting fired is a side effect. "Firing people" is a more vivid picture, which is exactly why it is not the right term - it's too personal a term for something that usually is not personal. Performance-based layoffs = Firing. Cost/business-outlook-based layoffs = RIFs.

illai in Dravidian languages