domain:amphobian.info
lagrangian
4hr ago
Meta: please consider making multiple top level comments instead of one (excellent!) multi-topic comment. The responses get disorganized as-is.
sliders1234
4hr ago
Software makes it harder and easier to make money. Profits scale a lot more. But it’s a lot harder to get to initial profitability because the competition to be the one who scales is more fierce.
In the physical world every real estate developer can make a building with positive unlevered free cash flow (harder to create a yield above capital costs but fundamentally the project will have profits).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
Also read Jasper Fforde's Red Side Story last night, and regret the wasted time. Dreadful sequel 15 years too late to use the original ideas of the first book.
I'm enjoying it, personally. But I wouldn't call myself a literary connoisseur.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4hr ago
"But battles are ugly when women fight."
What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
sliders1234
5hr ago
He didn’t make them popular. He got them to the point of being economically competitive and profitable to sell which is a huge step forward.
We did nuclear fusion decades ago. We still can’t do it economically.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
5hr ago
Ever been to 4chan?
(And yes, I know a few people in that demographic that do this constantly for that reason.)
dr_analog
razorboy
5hr ago
I don't have an opinion on AI yet, but then again I don't understand why people are acting like OpenAI == Elon Musk
I think his early investment in OpenAI shows vision even if he did leave them for dead for not bending their knee to him.
Also, because FSD is amazing? It's pretty reliable! I mean it needs to be, like, 4-5 orders of magnitude more reliable and it's unclear if they can achieve that with their current tech stack but it's still one of the most remarkable AI achievements ever to have a car that can drive itself for an entire day, using only cameras, in any arbitrary environment and maybe only kill one pedestrian. I would absolutely say they're well positioned to capture a portion of an AI market.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
Big Ben is very underrated. Really great in comebacks. Basically when Tomlin had to let Ben ball, Ben played at an extremely high level reaches by only a few. Tomlin though believes in attrition.
Also the TD throw to Holmes to win the SB and the game winning pass to Mike Wallace against GB from about thirty yards out with no time on the clock are two of the greatest throws ever made
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5hr ago
The advantage of the software industry over hardware is that hardware is bounded by the laws of physics and the costs of making things and moving them around. This brings on a lot more recurring costs— replacing worn out equipment, transportation costs, and the costs to continue to produce more product. Starlink cannot be a money maker without finding ways around entropy and the costs of putting satellites in orbit. Microsoft was and still is doing software. Sure software has development costs, and needs a few plugs and patches, but it doesn’t really cost anything to ship software (and it’s mostly downloaded from a server these days anyway). Software doesn’t wear out except totally on purpose via the company no longer supporting it. This makes growing and making money as a software company a bit easier. If you can keep market share as the default option for most office software, you basically print money by not doing anything to fuck that up. If you’re selling a product, you have to keep the costs down while not losing either quality or market share. It’s not impossible, but harder.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
I would add in he helped PayPal though obviously was pushed out.
But still a guy involved in that many massive companies isn’t luck alone.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5hr ago
Reading that came with a strange sense of deja vu. The author is fighting for Reagan with the same attitude some people use for ivermectin. It’s strange to see this applied to a subject I didn’t know was controversial.
I suppose positioning oneself as a bold iconoclast has a certain appeal. Perhaps it’s the best way to get attention in the competitive marketplace of, uh, CIA history periodicals.
dr_analog
razorboy
5hr ago
I agree, many billion and trillion dollar empires are built on companies finding the cost of migration unbearable.
Microsoft probably should've sold Office for $1 for the entire 1990s.
2rafa
5hr ago
Musk is a very impressive booster and is therefore an important figure in modern capitalism.
He isn’t an “inventor” or “engineer” the way, say, Brunel was. No Musk stan can point to a key mechanical component of the spaceship, or model S, that he personally designed, drew the CAD model of, came up with the physics behind, actually invented in the way even a 5 year old would understand the term.
Yeah, you can point to his employees saying he’s really smart and “gets it”. So do plenty of regular people with STEM degrees. Musk isn’t a great inventor in the Victorian tradition. He’s a businessman.
dr_analog
razorboy
5hr ago
I know how trolling works. I just have a hard time imagining teenagers using n-word today is all.
2rafa
5hr ago
Electric cars existed for 120 years before Tesla. Why should I care that Musk made them popular? They’re not particularly better than ICE cars; there is no great improvement to the consumer.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
5hr ago
their homebrew processors are supposed to be pretty good although I haven't tried them.
They're 4-5 years ahead of their closest competitor, Qualcomm (even with the Nuvia acquisition). They're not actually any faster than normal PCs, but they're excellent when it comes to idle power consumption (which is what the computer is doing most of the time).
zeke5123a
5hr ago
Greatness? Doing hard things? Some people are attracted to that challenge. Add in the potential for economic return…
2rafa
5hr ago
There is no reason to mine in space while everything we need is much cheaper to obtain on earth. It’s unnecessary science fiction to build “industrial tech” settings that include asteroid mines and lunar helium farming or whatever.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
And they did by reusing rockets which was a game changer
What does BFR mean?
I hate Google with a fiery passion, but they've had a couple big (even Earth-shattering) breakthroughs in the last decade.
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Invention of the transformer, which led directly to the wave of modern LLMs that have everyone so fired up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture)
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AlphaFold. I'm not qualified to comment on this, but it is supposedly an amazing breakthrough with large implications in the field of biotech.
Twitter is noticeably worse for me. About 40% of the time the app is in a state in which no images or videos will load. It's full of bots, which I never noticed before. I get follow requests from bots several times a week, even though I have a private account and have never posted anything.
There are more ads and oftentimes I am shown the same ad three or four times in a row. The recommendation algorithm sometimes does weird things. Recently, about a third of the recommended Tweets were in Turkish. I don't speak a word of Turkish.
I do like that there is less censorship, but I don't believe for a second that firing so many people hasn't caused serious problems.
Other companies that have done mass layoffs are having similar problems, though not as severe. Most software I use has gotten worse lately. Facebook Messenger is especially bad.
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