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Comment Re: TFA is shit. (Score 3, Interesting) 51

TFA from Techcrunch is basically "creative editorializing" the original reporting of other sources (axios mainly) to justify the clickbait headline. But it you click through to the original sources the story is more nuanced and more interesting.

The surface dynamic is anthropic is in a delicate position and struggling to manage a "temperamental" regulatory power *and* strategic customer shortly before their IPO.

The background dynamic is multiple sources close enough to the matter in the exec branch felt so strongly this was an unnecessary escalation and that anthropic was the party who could and had to fix it, that they're talking to axios reporters the next day.

  In an administration that is proudly punitive of leaks, don't assume multiple people are spilling the tea to reporters this quickly out of civic interest or a strong belief in the role of free press.

Comment Re: All based on fake values (Score 4, Informative) 58

Its not just who remains after the bubble pops - its we dont know yet *which product* will pay the bills, and *then* who remains selling that product.

OpenAI has more users overall, but they have mainly "sold" a free / loss leader product. Anthropic has become more popular on the enterprise "maybe eliza doesnt pay the bills" business model. OpenAI pivots but if this were "search" its too early to figure out if either of these is google or they're yahoo and altavista.

Nvidia seems to be betting this is the PC + MPC redux and all these folks are trying to be IBM selling mainframes; which is less of a "worst timeline" but they're biased since their valuation already priced in the "mainframe" market. Democratizing AI is a larger addressable market for a chips seller whether its a real market or not.

Or the real business model could be elsewhere altogether - I still remember the early aughts when the future of growth for the interwebs was telecoms and iTV and Netflix was shipping CDs and the video streaming business was licensing codecs.

Comment Re:Buy my plastic rice machine (Score 2) 76

I knew several people in ruraltania who bought into the 3rd generation of raising Vietnamese potbellied pigs. First and second generations made a fair amount of money selling into a rising novelty market; the second generation also made money selling to third generation hopefuls. Third generation breeders lost their shirts of course. Before that it was small farmers in central Ontario who discovered that ginseng grows very well in that climate and soil and that was large, nay HUGE, demand for that root in the PRC. This is perhaps even more germane to the tech example because it takes the first crop of ginseng 7 years to mature, so many many Lake Erie-area farmers saw their early-in neighbors harvesting the crop and the cash - only to see the market flooded and prices crash the year before they were due to harvest.

Comment Juxtaposition (Score 1) 48

Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?

Comment Re:Never got the hate (Score 1) 79

"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."

Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.

Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.

Comment Never got the hate (Score 4, Insightful) 79

I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.

Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.

Comment Re:Figures (Score 5, Insightful) 149

"There is no safety or cost reason to prefer this over normal analog protein vaccines. Only advantage MRNA has is reduced up front capex."

Nice attempt at shaping the discussion to flow down the limited paths you prefer. In reality world the gigantic advantages of having straightforward yearly influenza vaccines be mRNA-based is that (1) after enough experience it would become possible to reformulate the vaccine midseason if the dominant flu strain changes (2) if a 1918 Kansas Flu boils up out of a giant pig farm somewhere it will be possible to create an mRNA vaccine for it and get it into distribution rapidly.

Comment Multiple rug pulls (Score 5, Informative) 90

The streaming services have already done multiple rug pulls, rights-stripping acquisitions, and bankruptcies to take away "purchased" streaming rights and force people to pay a second time (and a third, and a fourth...). But yeah, the people who have CD players with analog outputs and who buy CDs are the dumb ones.

Comment Wilhoit's Law (Score 5, Informative) 97

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

To conservatism I would add billionaireism.

[note that this is not Wilhoit the academic political philospher, but a different Wilhoit]

Comment 40% growth forever (Score 1) 39

The smartest guys in the room somehow failed to realize that 40% compounded growth forever at 80%-3000% gross margins wasn't possible. It can happen for 5-10 years of an economic turnover (whether driven by new technology, new forms of organization, immigration, or other fundamental changes) but just because it happens to some organizations for 5, 10, even 20 years does not mean it can/will happen to every organization - and trees don't grow to the sky.

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