"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America."
I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
I have a little rust script that uses the built in vision toolkit to do ocr of pdfs, it spins up the ANE to a full 1W compared to 0 as measured by the power profiler. So it is used!
IMO, It’s a very apple strategy, stuff just works and is slowly more accelerated/lower power.
Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them.
But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.
It's astounding how useful and intuitive they are, but my biggest gripe is how easy is for anyone to mess calculations, say, SUM(<RANGE>), by simply adding one row/column/cell.
I use Google Worksheets frequently to track new things that fit into lists/tables, and giving someone else editor access without them knowing a few worksheet nuances means I have to recheck and correct them every month or two.
This happened not so many years ago, in a certain small European nation, where official government housing valuation numbers were incorrect for some years due to a flaw in a spreadsheet.
I remember my apartment got a ~10% bump in value one year due to this flaw being fixed (fix didn't apply to all housing, just those who were on floors 5 or above).
I don't think though that a SaaS would have solved anything here.
Right, and the dust is from shattered meteorites rather than erosion. So it has very sharp edges instead of being smoothed out by tumbling in water like terrestrial rock dust. Really not very good for them to breathe in.
If I was a Meta shareholder I might well agree with you. But as someone with very little interest in their products so far, I’m very happy for them to sink huge amounts of money into AI research and publishing it all.
I’m just calling balls and strikes. For all I care, the whole lot of them can get sucked down a storm drain. Frankly I think there’s way too much effort and resources being put into this stuff regardless of who’s doing it. We’ve got a bunch of agentic job stealers, a bunch of magic spam/slop generators, and a bunch of asinine toys with the big name LLM stuff: I don’t think that’s a net gain for humanity. Then there’s a bunch of genuinely useful things made by people who are more interested in solving real problems. I’ll care about the first category when it consistently brings more value than garbage “content” and job anxiety to average people’s lives.
If you listed the best movies or books or plays or albums or video games you could think of, they would tend to be older too. 99% of stuff is kinda crap, always.
> it’s only about 2-3 times a year that anything comes out worth seeing.
This was probably always true, with some randomly amazing years every now and again, like 1972 (The Godfather, Cabaret, Deliverance, What's Up Doc?,...).
IMDB listing shows 470 films released US in 1972. Google says there are ~3,900 IMDB entries for 1972 (why the 4X discrepancy?). The hit ratio was veeeery small even in killer years.
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