Bad employees also tend to think they're irreplaceable and they're as common as bad managers. The difference is that bad employees are the manager's problem, a bad manager is your problem. Unless you become the manager, then you see the other side of that equation. I don't mind taking on a tech lead position but if I went into middle management I'd probably end up strangling someone. I have the feeling I'd be one of those technically bright but horribly micromanaging bosses who'd rather be doing my underlings job than doing mine. Which would be mostly herding cats, running interference and communicating upwards, downwards and sideways in the hierarchy.

Intel drank that kool-aid and decided to make a CPU architecture where practically everything was exposed to the compiler, it's called IA-64 aka Itanium. They soon found out that a design grounded in reality beats ivory tower theory. ARM is also CISC with micro-ops these days, some instruction complexity is best left hidden. Forcing the compiler to deliver micro-instructions only hurts performance.

The reason I use whitelist and blacklist is that they're not the same as what's allowed/denied. If you implement say a spam filter and somebody wonders why something does or doesn't get through then "it's whitelisted" or "it's blacklisted" are complete explanations that someone has overridden the regular spam filter that'll also allow and deny emails. If the rules are exhaustive there's no reason not to be more direct. I have no strong opinion about master and slave, I tend to use manager/worker anyway since that's been the most relevant structure for me. But as long as people don't go crazy on the euphemisms we'll be fine. Rudolph/reindeer anyone?

Ads are quite effective for the things you know relatively little about and in general we don't have the time or interest to research most things in our life. For these types of things I often don't even consider alternatives, it's like I have a problem and product X will solve that problem so I buy X and the problem is solved. Now maybe product Y or Z was better or cheaper, but I just reached for the first possible solution. That way I can get on with the rest of my life so I consider this rational even if it's sub-optimal.

What's the first thing that pops into your mind? It's a brand that you've seen a lot, with a memorable catchphrase or jingle. We like to tell ourselves that we don't care about the ads, but the practical reality is that we'd never bother seeking out their store on our own. If they didn't advertise they wouldn't be on the radar. At the grocery store a big poster with an introductory offer can be the difference between "meh, I'll buy the usual" and "okay, I'll give it go... doesn't cost me much to try". Notice the lack of enthusiasm, if I had that I'd buy it anyway. Ads is limping it in.

There's nothing wrong with PGP as such, but one feature/flaw depending on how you look at it is that if the key is compromised your entire communications history with everybody can be decrypted if they have the encrypted messages. Which is not unlikely if it's sent from or received by any of the big free email providers, even if you "delete" them they could probably be recovered if you get them to dig through backups for you. The ratchet algorithm that Signal (and others) use is using something almost, but not entirely like session keys for the communication. Basically you update the send/receive keys continuously so only the keys to decrypt the next message is available and then they're discarded. That way nobody can do back and decrypt old dialog, what's gone is gone.

That's not how it works at all. If you got four people in a line-up there's a 1/4 = 25% chance you'll find the right person by coin toss. If I can make a tool that's right half the time I've doubled that. Along the way we're redefined the question from how hard the underlying problem is to how successful we are at it.

If I could make a machine that'd give me the lottery jackpot numbers half the time I'd be ecstatic. Sure, I'd only win every other week but given that it's one set of winning numbers and hundreds of millions non-winning numbers each week I'd gladly take the 50% failure rate.

If you take a database of ~10000 celebrities, your coin toss would have 0.01% accuracy by luck. Modern facial recognition algorithms get about 99.8% so like ten thousand times better. The problem is they want to find your face in a database of 640 million photos. One needle and 639.999.999 straws.

Why bother? There's billions of us, you can buy the rights off a nobody with zero acting experience for next to nothing or just create a generative model that's a blend of people but not anyone in particular. Once you got virtual actors you make your own stars.

There's plenty of people that work on virtual lighting in animations, both on the tech and story side. When you look at modern 3D production it's pretty much a whole virtual set.

There's already PULSE for that, but the problem that you can see in figure 3 is that even with near perfect photo realism there's an ambiguity in facial expression, lip motion etc. which would probably go straight into the uncanny valley as being overly neutral in expression, lacking smooth transitions and lip sync. So you would probably need a more advanced model to fill in the missing motion detail. Also this model is only for photo realism not identity preservation, so it's the natural image manifold of people and not the natural image manifold of a particular actor. However adding an identity loss to the existing model shouldn't be that hard, assuming high resolution reference photos are available.

It's a failure if you took a 70% chance it'll flop and it gave a 200% ROI. Because if you invested in 10 companies you'd pay in 10*100 = 1000 and get back 3*300 = 900. Maybe you gambled on one company and tripled your money but then that's luck. That's essentially what venture capitalists do, they buy your business plan and sales pitch, scratch their lottery ticket and end up with a winner or a loser. Either way they're done, off to find new promising tickets to scratch. Which is why they care so much about the upside, they already know it's a gamble but they want to know the prizes. No point in a high risk gamble without a high reward to match.

Actually open source is in general massively underfunded because it has to be worth it to the people stuck with the bill - in either time or money - which is usually far fewer than those who benefit from it. Like I enjoy the fact that there's roads to drive my car on, but I've never funded a specific stretch of road. Granted, I've paid my share of taxes and toll roads but if you gave me all of that money back and told me to invest it directly into road projects I'd probably pocket the money instead. There's no place in particular I'd like to go that badly and even if I did I wouldn't get very far. And for the people with money it's more like fuck it let's rent a helicopter because it's cheaper to airlift it in than to build a road all by ourselves.

Many people have tried various forms of crowdfunding, bug bounties, subscriptions etc. but the general tendency to play chicken and see if someone else will fund it and the uncertainty involved means they pretty much all suck. As consumers we want to see the product and decide whether it's worth our money or not. But then code is already written and we got plenty other things to spend them on where you don't get to play if you don't pay so we don't actually make donations. I'm not saying capitalism is optimal either because it's definitively not but it does a pretty good job of moving money from people who want shit done to the people who can get them done.

Nobody puts people on ventilators just because they have low oxygen levels. First they put you on bed rest. Then they put you on extra oxygen. A quick search show you have people with severe COPD that have down towards 10% lung capacity but still breathe on their own. Ventilators are for people that can't even do that, there'll always be a few borderline cases but for most it's that or death by suffocation. It's a silly attempt at diversion trying to blame the ventilators rather than the "harmless" virus, when we wouldn't use a ventilator unless it's wiped out 90%+ of your ability to breathe.

How long ago do you think Apple made the strategic decision to move desktop-class computers to ARM? They'd need the chip designs, production capacity, software support, all sorts of plans for the transition. This is not a decision made in the past year, my guess is 3-4 years ago. Once they committed the resources it's unlikely Intel could do anything to change their mind.

People have been bashing Olympus and Panasonic for their "small" sensors cameras for years saying the pros only want full frame, medium format or in a pinch ASP-C. But even a MFT sensor is way bigger than the <1" sensors you find in a cell phone, there's been a market for that. Particularly with hybrid shooters who are interested in video, but Panasonic cornered that market. What I read is that Olympus tried too hard with high end bodies and glass bringing them to a price/size/weight where they'd compete with bigger sensors rather than focus on being the small/light/cheap alternative. But of course on that end you have cell phones so... maybe the path just got narrower and narrower until it dead ended.

I don't think anyone's selling as much as they'd like these days, even before corona... Canon's RF line is creating some amazing but niche gear, Nikon's Z line is okay for those already invested, Sony's innovation seems to have slowed down since 2018, Panasonic is making okay gear for the L-mount... but the most exciting stuff has actually been coming out of Fuji lately. They're not even on the podium in terms of market share but the X-T4 is impressive.

I don't think you're wrong, hell we know just a false accusation can ruin lives. That doesn't mean the police should refuse to investigate/search/detain/arrest suspects or the DA should not press charges unless it's a slam dunk conviction. While I'm sorry when innocents are caught up in that, we can't make the system such that anything we couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt becomes a demand for restitution. You should be able to get compensation for things that are obvious mistakes and incompetence like having a warrant but knocking down the wrong door, but not simply for being the target of a criminal investigation. I accept that a lot of guilty people have to get away to avoid putting the innocent in jail, but giving them a payday on top would be a bit much. One shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there's a whole lot of actual criminals too...