tshaddox

I'm hoping they bring the new Outback design (both exterior and interior) to the Ascent. The 2027 Ascent is already out and unfortunately it's the same old styling and infotainment.

I've heard that the redesigned 2026 Outback has a much nicer interior. Lots of physical buttons and supposedly more stable infotainment software.

We've been pretty happy with our 2020 Outback so far (bought it just before the chip shortage). My only complaint is the stability of the infotainment software. The big portrait screen is actually quite nice, and with CarPlay I don't really care about the rest of UI and software. Except that the stupid thing just crashes all the time.

Every person has differences from every other people. Including monozygotic twins. Clearly what’s being referred to here is using “different” dismissively.

> But the reality is I'd wager that for probably 99% of the population, this is actually not true and the economics doesn't work out favorably after accounting for all the fees.

> So then, all that is really left is convenience.

But nearly all technology and services you pay for arguably boil down to “convenience,” in the sense that people in the past either did the thing themselves or survived without it.

> if there's a government agency whose job it is to deport people in a country illegally

This antecedent is false, so we don’t even need to read the consequent.

> Deporting everyone who isn't in the country legally is their mission

This is not in fact the stated mission of the agency.

> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.

Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”

Which is true, of course!

It obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).

The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.

lampshade Verb

(narratology, fandom slang) To intentionally call attention to the improbable, incongruent, or clichéd nature of an element or situation featured in a work of fiction within the work itself.

I predict it’ll be less than 6 million a year at these ludicrous prices.

To be fair, the “younger replacements” have typically grown up surrounded with many more user interfaces than their predecessors, and the same is true for much of the audience they’re designing interfaces for.

Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.

> Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.

I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."

It is not hypocritical or contradictory to believe that deplatforming is appropriate in some cases and not in others.

Well, yes, the alternative would be the necessary number of people to do the first thing and the necessary number of people to do the second thing.

If the two needs are distributed such that it works well to have one group of full-time workers able to do both, then I reckon that’s fine.

Commercial bribery is a thing. Many places have laws against bribing an employee of a private organization to violate their duties.

Surely the only problem isn’t the knowledge of how to train and the confidence it would work. Wouldn’t it also have required a 1 or 2 order of magnitude increase in computing power over 2005-era supercomputers to be able to train a modern LLM in a reasonable time (“reasonable” meaning “finish training before GPT-3 comes out in 15 years”)?

> Things survive for no good reason.

And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.

I don’t think it’s reasonable. The age of an idea does not imply that it’s true, valuable, or good.

A student of history might note that power tools do indeed allow a worker to replace multiple workers not equipped with power tools.

I use the ChatGPT general purpose interface rather than Claude, and this is not at all my experience. ChatGPT will almost always do one or more web searches for any query about recent or historical events.

That’s kinda like asking why does any company make and sell any tool rather than just using the tool to make money? Why does Milwaukee sell power tools to contractors rather than keeping those tools to themselves to profit from contracting work?

It’s probably cheaper per unit when they buy at massive scale, but that was also true before the hardware inflation of the past couple of years. So I’m sure they are still paying much higher prices than in previous years. Many cloud services have increased prices and I suspect that will continue for at least a few more years.

> Econ 101 would be understanding that you can’t snap your fingers and have a new DRAM factory online overnight, and that this isn’t an indicator that the market is not functioning.

You can quibble over my usage of “functioning,” but all I’m referring to are the textbook characteristics of perfect competition. I’m not claiming that someone is to blame if any of these conditions don’t hold. Of course they never hold perfectly in practice!

I’m not trying to blame anyone for the fact that it takes a lot of money and time to get a new DRAM factory online. I’m just saying that this fact is bad for essentially everyone except for the small number of current DRAM producers.

> You’re defining a market “functioning well” as meaning the price is low for you and all demand is satisfied immediately without raising prices.

Well, yes, that’s pretty much the only reason to advocate for competitive markets, isn’t it? If you don’t want allocative efficiency and productive efficiency, then what do you want?

The important question isn’t so much “are people trying to get the best deal possible for themselves?” but rather “how well is this market functioning?” Or phrased another way, “how competitive is this market?”

This particular market is pretty clearly not functioning well, and there are textbook Econ 101 reasons why a market may not function well. Of those textbook reasons, I suspect the most obviously applicable one here is large barriers to entry.

Not quite. That guy was appointed chancellor by the President after his political party won the most seats (still a minority) in two parliamentary elections that year. He had in fact lost the presidential election earlier that same year against the incumbent who ended up appointing him chancellor.

Several notable dictators came to power through elections or through the existing legal appointment process. Of course it's more common for a dictator to come to power through a revolution, military coup, or civil war, but the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator.

I used to be a big metal fan.

This is most YouTubers who get very popular due to having original and opinionated content on niche topics. They tend to identify (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) their idiosyncratic personalities and opinions as the primary cause of their initial popularity and repeatedly double down on it as they grow in popularity. This is also the explicit advice that the vast majority of big YouTubers give to aspiring or up-and-coming YouTubers.

And I’m not advising that they should do anything different! Who am I?! I’m just pointing out that the culture of YouTubers is fundamentally about deliberately subjecting yourself to the most extreme audience capture.

I don’t know, this seems like a pretty basic feature that I would expect all the mainstream smart home ecosystems to support. Do they not? Is it possible with Alexa/Google Home/ etc. for anyone to say “turn off all the lights in the house” into any smart speaker? I’d honestly expect the defaults to only allow commands to apply to the devices in the same room/group as the smart speaker.

That makes sense. But is the price difference between doing it on home hardware versus cloud hardware less significant than it is for LLM inference? And if so, is it mostly because LLMs need much more VRAM (or more exotic memory architectures)?