This is an interesting question to ask of any company. Every company over a long period is a Ship of Theseus. Google started out as a rowboat and now it is an ocean liner.
Investment in product quality, "Don't be evil", everything that set a company apart and allowed it to rise, it lasts only as long as it is preserved in a way that resists decay.
Is there anything left of the rowboat? I'm at the point where I am actively trying to shut Google out of my life to the degree that it is possible. And yet it is still not Microsoft. I catch a glimmer of the old google in a product release now and then.
And as a reminder to folks he's the writer of (the newer era) Westworld which if you haven't seen the full first season really turns into an incredible mind bender
S2 was reasonably OK, IMO. But that was it. And all their talk of having a fantastic entire story laid out right from the start? I don't believe a word of it. There's no way they had thought up Rehobaum or whatever it was called back when they started work on S1.
Also creator of and writer on Person of Interest, which had an okay first season but gradually got amazing in later seasons, following a roughly inverted arc from Westworld.
Person of Interest was probably the first example of superintelligent AI that actually left me thinking that it could really happen (and with the conclusion that this was not a priori a good or bad thing).
Trying to defeat a badly designed tax that even the Democrats aren’t aligned is evidence of him being a bad person? I think you can probably do better.
Yes, actively working against "wealth tax" while you're wealthy, does indeed make you a bad person. A good person realize they're ahead of others, and try to help them rise as well, even if it means less wealth for them. It's called "greed" if you're looking for a specific name of this concept.
It took me a while to learn that giving money to the government isn't the highest form of good, despite also being a necessity to some degree. In fact I'm not even sure if it could make the top 10 of best ways to give money. But trust me when I was younger I definitely acted in that belief.
Like greedy Brin here has donated around $4B to charity that has gone to all manner of public good. Philanthropic organizations like his tend to be pretty efficient with getting good bang for their buck.
Had he given it to the government, which I'm sure you would call reason for celebration, well some of it would have gone to helping people directly, but most would have gone into protracted bureaucracy where just the rind ends up at the final objective. I'm actually pretty sure you yourself could write a decent list of government expenses that you would not want that money to go to.
In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.
So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
> In fact if you wrote a list of things that you would like it to go to, I'm pretty confident it would have very high overlap with what Brin does give to.
Alright, lets give it a try:
- Wealth Tax
- Taxes of all sorts and kinds
What percentage of overlap do we have? I have a feeling it's zero.
> So what again are we trying to call out here? He's greedy?
We're trying to call out that working against a wealth tax because it'd impact you personally (since you're wealthy), is greedy behavior and greed is generally something most humans want to reduce, just like most of us wants less violence. We call people who favor greed and violence "bad people".
Nah the actual bad people are the people calling for the tax, who are primarily motivated by populist resentment of the visibly successful, and who don't have a good sense of what the actual problems in society are or how to actually fix them.
The worse part is that it wasn't driven by populist resentment, it was cynical utilization of populist resentment as a cudgel to extort the governor: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seiu-delenda-est
Ok, so it might need iterations. Lets implement it, then fix it once live? Nothing is ever set completely in stone.
Out of ~40 million people in California, the impact of this tax seems to be about ~250 individuals. If they were considering users of their products and services, wouldn't that amount of users compared to the entire user base, be considered almost a rounding error?
It was dismaying to see this flagged so fast. When I reached out to the moderators about it they felt that it should remain flagged for reasons that seemed dubious and inconsistent imho.
Semites are also e.g. Arabs. It comes from linguistic science and denotes people speaking Hebraic, Arabic or new-Aramaic languages. Look up the philologist August Ludwig von Schlözer who coined the term if that is new to you.
Also, criticizing a country is something very normal.
When one criticizes the Japan of 1930 to 1945 ... was this anti-zen? Or anti-nipponic? Or was it about their government?
When one criticizes the Syria of 1971-1924 ... what this anti-islamistic? Or anti-arabic? Or was it about their government, specifically their dictator?
When one criticizes the Israel of recent times ... is this anti-jewish? Or anti-semitic? Or is it about their government and various movements in said country?
It's only when we criticize the Israel government that suddenly people intermix politics with religion. And also with belonging to long extinct tribe groups. Or that they blame e.g. a synagogue congregation in Denmark with human-right violations of Israel settlers. Suddenly people stop being able to differentiate.
I see that there are countries that are anti-jewish (like Iran). And Persians aren't Semites, so maybe they are also anti-semitic, I can't judge this. But neither Iran nor Yemen or other puppet-organizations like the Hezbollah rule the UN. I'm quite sure that they can't even nudge the UN.
So claiming that the UN is anti-semitic is un-factional. I have seen zero evidence, and the people claiming this haven't brought up any evidence. The most they can bring up is that some UN sub-organization doesn't do the exact bidding of the current Israel government. Or that some UN sub-organization has the occasional mole or spy amongst them ... but hey, I don't want to know how many organizations have the odd moles or spy from the Mossad in them. That doesn't make them wholly israel-controlled.
Not just out of touch, but downright psychopathic in my opinion. I used to greatly admire Larry Page. He seemed like a really smart, driven, level-headed guy. When the news came out that he was basically fine with AI wiping out humanity, as it would just be the natural evolution of intelligence, and to fight against that would be "speciesist", all I good think was "what a psycho".
And I really don't think I'm exaggerating Page's opinion on this, though I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
Incredible back story here if I can trust Gemini on this as that dates back to over 10 years ago when Musk accused Larry Page of being too obsessed with bringing about AI and hence co-founds OpenAI... the irony of course being that OpenAI raced ahead while Google has been conservative
Counter point - accumulating extreme wealth seems to require a cooked brain. I genuinely believe that level headed people are unable to reach more than a few million in accumulated wealth as they'll clearly see how much more that money would benefit others compared to themselves.
There is a theory that the industrial and information revolutions rewarded certain types of neurodiversity more than what you was natural, I think that is entirely plausible.
While some of those traits may be prone to antisocial behavior, given the right social cooking conditions, they are also natural so I don't think people with those traits shouldn't be considered "cooked" from from brith either.
There are also seemingly neurotypical people who win the lottery and get cooked, I think it mostly comes from alienation because wealth changes how others around you act.
I think I'm with the other commenter on this one. It's a fundamental truth that only a rare, and very off-kilter, personality will earn their first $100m dollars and think "Gosh, I need more money!" Then continue working long hours to become billionaires despite already having enough to retire to a private island with a full time maid and butler or spend their life on philanthropy.
To these people it starts to feel obvious that Ayn Rand was right, because Ayn Rand would have agreed with them. They come to feel that they were rewarded because they are more righteous than others, and they are more righteous than others because they were rewarded. Capitalism becomes a religion, rather than a means to an end and money becomes it's own goal instead of a symbolic token that represents real wealth. The piece of paper is now worth more than the things it can buy.
Eventually, due to the broken feedback loop that social order was meant to provide but no longer does, they lose the common moral boundaries that tie them to other men completely and become a special kind of sociopath.
"Open Source Muti-Machine": The heavy, ultra-stiff mass of the cast iron dampens vibrations and forces the cutting tool to move in a perfectly straight, micron-accurate line dictated by the factory-bored cylinders.
Ask an AI about it, but conceptually it's an amazing concept. There are probably billions of "nearly micron-accurate" machines, and if you're 1000% repeatable 90° then the world is (eventually) your oyster.
Best guess is that it's disabled for anything but track/trick stuff. There will be some cool videos eventually showing up with tricks people pull with this. I don't know what else it's for.
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
Solo track use at that. I can't imagine that other drivers are going to be all that happy if they get hit by the exhaust from one of the thrusters in a corner.
Gases dissipate very rapidly, even moreso if doing pulsing or whatever. Probably very unsafe for a human standing literally right behind it, but it'd likely have 0 effect on another car at typical driving distance.
Air is mostly nitrogen, about 80%. Pure oxygen as you might be thinking, would be quite dangerous - not only for long-term consumption but also in terms of its effects. Oxygen is fuel for fire so a 100% oxygen environment would quite create the pyrotechnic show! The 'white' you see from the exhaust isn't the exhaust itself - nitrogen is obviously colorless, but the moisture in the surrounding air freezing. It's going to be coming out quite chilly to keep the nitrogen liquified ( boiling temp of something like -196F).
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Whoa, was just watching the video (great link btw). People have been debating the specs, but they're shown unambiguously right here. [1] It has 95 kn peak thrust, 6g peak acceleration, pressure of 5500 PSI, and a min operating temp of -200F.
Of course air is mostly nitrogen. But if you replace 10% of the air with pure nitrogen you go into OSHA-angering levels of oxygen depletion, and if you replace 25-30% you get into serious danger.
Not easily achieved in a tunnel, but much more easily achieved in a garage.
10% of the air replaced with pure nitrogen would be 0.8 * 0.9 + 1.0 * 0.1 = 82% nitrogen, 18% oxygen. That's perfectly safe for brief exposure, which is all it would be before you return to ambient levels.
To create a dangerous scenario you've gotta do something like somehow gas out your entire tank in a garage and then just stand around for a while breathing it in. Kind of an improbable scenario unless somebody is trying a really weird suicide attempt.
The bigger tank apparently holds 250kg of air. That's about 200 cubic meters. A two car garage is likely less than 100 cubic meters.
You wouldn't need to dump nearly an entire tank of nitrogen to reach levels that are immediately dangerous. And oxygen deprivation makes you stupid well before it makes you pass out, with no "lack of air" panic since that is based on CO2 levels, so even when it would be survivable for a couple minutes you might not even think to escape.
I suppose I can see this also. It sounds horrifying. A head on collision is a pretty terrible thing but having one of the cars suddenly fly 30 feet in the air and crashing into on coming traffic does not sound like a great option. Reminds me of the cybertruck "this would make the perfect post apocalyptic vehicle."
you might have a better chance of surviving that 30 foot launch than a head on collision with a pole or a semi truck. don't get me wrong it seems wildly impractical but there may be rare situations where it's useful. ejection seats on fighters frequently injured their pilot but that is better than being dead.
This whole thing is incredibly stupid and yet, people are bending over backwards to defend it. There is not a single traffic situation where the ability of a car to suddenly launch itself into the air doesn't have more downsides than it staying put. This includes overhead wiring, other people nearby, tunnels, bridges, overpasses, lampposts, traffic lights and other street furniture. With a little luck you will survive the impact of your toy when it lands but the party that you land on does not. People have a hard enough time predicting trajectories with everything constrained to 2D, if cars start jumping around like fleas that is not an improvement. From a standstill with other parties around you this is already a serious problem, if it were moving forward at highway speeds in traffic it would be utterly irresponsible to trigger this kind of launch.
What, you don’t think the solution to a situation with too much out-of-control kinetic energy is to inject a whole bunch more semi-randomly-directed kinetic energy?
That depends on the landing zone being available in a way that's hard for the onboard safety system to predict. But if the car is, say, spinning out you could use these to restore stability or try to recover from the other sorts of disasters that overpowered cars can end up in even on clear roads.
The thrusters are primarily pointed rearward and to the ground. It's not capable of doing much at all for a flat spin, the typical scenario of a car spinning out
Incorrect - the Rocket trim (if it ever exists) has four thrusters pointed downward at the wheels for lift and they can rotate 180 degrees and two thrusters at the front pointing outward for use control.
>Youtube without ads is still worse than pretty much all the major streaming services with ads.
Depends on what you watch, as always. my YT feed is a mix of news, random gaming content, documentaries on a variety of topics, and odd little tech trivia. It covers all the bases at once.
Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch". Then I just pluck it onto my NAS and move about on my day. Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
Nebula is the only other service I ever considered paying for. It's not a "Youtube killer" and misses out on a lot of the odd trivia sides of YT, but it overally feels more fleshed out on content than Netflix".
> Any other streaming service is simply "okay, maybe there's 1-2 shows on here I want to watch".
If there's even 1 show I want to watch, it's great to watch it. The problem with Youtube is even when they have stuff I want to watch, it's a pain to watch it. Their UI is atrocious!
> Why would I pay for a streaming service that struggles to even keep the few shows I like on there running past 1-2 seasons?
You just unsubscribe at that point.
Know how much stuff I had bookmarked on Youtube that is no longer available? A whole damn lot.
Maybe I'm missing something, but every video service Ui feels the same these days. Grid of videos with some loose sorting, click to play/pause, seek controls. I wouldn't call any of them good/bad on UI alone.
Imagine if all the energy spent whining on the purity of a system being insufficiently private or decentralized or somehow loyal to a fight against the man, was spent instead on actually improving those systems. They're open source.
IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.
This is essentially guaranteed. There are lots of useful smaller models that we should be able to run locally. Over time they'll be more and more capable and require less API usage.
You're getting downvoted because your argument is cosmetic, egotistical, and useless. Can you give an objective separation between design flaws and engineering details? One that has zero ambiguity: if I give 100 engineers your criteria and then ask them to categorize 100 different points against it, would give exactly the same results? And would that distinction actually correlate to a historical analysis of programming languages' effects on software project success metrics?
No, because the entire distinction falls apart pretty quickly into "shit I like to discuss and care about" and "shit I don't care about and don't want to talk about."
Systems programming lives and dies by the details you want to ignore. The economics of large software production are mildly affected by language design. But weaknesses there are easily overcome with engineering practices and additional tooling. Almost every complaint about C++ safety I've ever heard hasn't been a problem for me for decades, because I know what libraries, practices, and tools solve those problems. But I've yet to work with another language - and I've programmed in a shit-ton of languages - that gets out of the way as well as C++ when I want to systems-program. Even C. C is strictly lower level, but its lack of abstraction facilities gets in the way more than some of the modern numerical-type-safety stuff of C++ does.
> You're getting downvoted because your argument is cosmetic, egotistical, and useless.
Ouch. (sincerely) I hate to think my ego might be so large and detailed that it could be so irritating to someone through such scarce writing. Are you certain you're identifying me correctly?
> if I give 100 engineers your criteria and then ask them to categorize 100 different points against it, would give exactly the same results?
Fair point, I understand that things I find to be "unnecessary friction" were once very necessary, and are (not infrequently) still necessary today.
> Systems programming lives and dies by the details you want to ignore.
I haven't really given you much to respond to, which is my fault, but I don't think you're yet identifying what I want to ignore, because how could you if I'm not specifying myself entirely? Frankly, I was being too casual with my discourse for many of the people responding to me, I see that now and graciously accept my downvotes. I'd rather have a good conversation than internet karma points, so here goes.
So let me box this in more. A lot of my students just want to get some practice with programming the computer. They want to learn some basic graphics, whether they're using the GPU or not. They want to be direct about programming the computer, and often want to use systems-languages but find C and C++ too difficult to use. It is now common for university students to complete a bachelor's degree while strictly writing Python. *This is the current against which I swim.* I do not think this is a healthy situation. I want there to be: more incentive for students to do "fine grained" (systems) programming. Ultimately, it needs to be more economically relevant _and_ to seem accessible to them. So, in my eyes, if enterprises attempt to use some of the "rounder" (less sharp) tooling *where possible*, students might think they've got a shot and can feel assured there's a point to putting in the effort to learn how to use things like pointers, allocators, profilers, debuggers etc.
I do not want C or C++ to die tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, but in my time writing these languages and their "successors" I do think there are enough meaningful improvements that we owe the next generation a chance to take ownership of something that seems a little less hairy-- even if it is so they can make it hairy and start anew. I simply want them to feel the responsibility and freedom of control.
So what are the improvements? Let's start with C. Let me preface by saying I am aware there are a few tools that are a "must" with C, otherwise you're going to get bit by things like integer conversions or memory corruption. Know your compiler-flags and tools like valgrind and you'll be okay. But what if you didn't have to learn that the hard way? Some of the new languages can put friction in the way of these mistakes, whether by way of incompatible numerical operations on mixed types, or various restrictions on what you can do with a pointer. These are small things, and I hesitate to list many more, but there are so many! I realize I won't be exhaustive enough for you, but we can take it further, sometimes bugs can be introduced via aggressive backend optimizations which operate on undefined/platform defined behavior. Again, in this case, there are languages which simply forego these optimizations by defining the behavior.
Again, I realize there are genuine losses due to these design decisions which I'm advocating for, and I appreciate the pressure you're placing against me to distinguish these from flaws. I don't mean to point at the inventors of the past and to say they just did it poorly, I simply believe the trade-offs are out of calibration now. e.g. C's pre-processor and linkage strategy is to write a bunch of little atomic things so that it all fits in memory. That is still crucial for a lot of the largest systems out there today, but for anything else PLEASE let me write something like `go run .` and be done (this is not an endorsement for Golang specifically.)
The point which inspired me to write any of this is this: the software we run could be faster and lighter if we know how to make it that way. I think C and C++ are good tools to make the absolute fastest and lightest software in a great many cases. Probably the best tools. But what about the people who just want to make a GUI application without learning the framework of the month, or the programming language of the decade? What if you want to know something you can use for the foreseeable future without investing the kind of energy it takes to be a discerning user of C or C++? We're missing out on better software because students are giving up on "finer" tools.
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