I had no idea they still had which I understand to be a “metaverse” division, especially with thousands of people. People there must have realized they were on borrowed time.
Depends. Leadership will constantly tell people how important their work is and how they are changing the world. I expect a leader to motivate the people under them in all cases otherwise folks become confused and leave.
I canceled prime ~8 years ago because where I am, half the stuff I wanted was considered an “add on item” that could only be shipped free if you had > $35 of other stuff, which is a complete scam because you get that without prime.
Maybe that was just for me (in a large Canadian city at the time) or maybe they don’t do that anymore?
I haven’t considered getting prime since, it would be a lot more interesting if it actually provided the shipping terms they advertise.
It was like that in NYC at the time as well. I'm not sure when it stopped but have not seen add-on items in a long time and most things seem to ship immediately regardless of price (with Prime).
Yeah, haven't seen in a long time either. I can't help but wonder if it's related to Amazon building its own delivery infrastructure instead of relying on UPS/USPS like it once did? (At least where I am.)
Big tech has changed over the last bit to trying to tell us exactly what and how we should think - or maybe more precisely to see thought as “friction” and want to remove it all together. This is a very minor example in the scheme of things, but I see it everywhere now.
Not really, reliably detecting a user's preferred languages has been a persistent Hard Problem in tech since the start of the internet. Every proposed alternative solution ends up having vastly more false positives due to browsers/people incorrectly setting of default preferences so companies begrudgingly default to geographic heuristics knowing it is a terrible experience for an outlier group of people.
Why wouldn’t you just ask them, and particularly for media like this that has a native language, default to that? I don’t want software to think for me about what I want to see, if I want something different I’ll change it.
It's probably Microservices(TM)... The black box responsible for rendering the HTML is some other black box to the UI or whatever. The UI offers you locale options, but the renderer that fetches video titles hasn't been configured to respect this, probably uses locale from geolocation and some overpaid genius said "always use machine translation if locale doesn't match video title language"...
The homepage of google.com is also localized. I remember noticing that even when requesting and getting the English locale, the tooltip for the doodle was still in my region's language... wahey!
Government is probably the worst actor to run healthcare facilities. It’s not that different from PE, except with more administrative bloat. I’d be curious to compare US PE run facilities with government run facilities in Canada.
There is not an easy answer here, it basically a cost centre that whoever runs it, the welfare state is incentivized to spend as little as possible on it. PE is almost certainly a bad solution. If they can destroy a restaurant or other low impact business, I hate to think what they’d do to businesses that care for people. You’d get the healthcare equivalent of Burger King. But with government you get the equivalent of the DMV.
Canada's healthcare is generally cheaper per capita, pays healthcare workers less and has far lower administrative costs than the US. The US spends 5x the average of other wealthy countries on administrative costs [1]. This line that the government is automatically inefficient and terrible at anything at all is not true, is not set in stone and does not preclude private industry being even more greedy, stupid, amoral and inefficient than the government.
> The US spends 5x the average of other wealthy countries on administrative costs [1]. This line that the government is automatically inefficient and terrible at anything at all is not true
It's a line that tends to be mainly parroted by... the US. Quelle fucking surprise.
Free market ideologues are too dumb to understand local minima.
An ideal free market is a global minima (in theory). It's the best.
A non-ideal free market (heavily subsidised and regulated) might be close (in parameter space) to a global minima, but might be highly suboptimal compared to a local minima.
It's not even that. Free markets by themselves (as implemented thus far) DO NOT ACCOUNT FOR EXTERNALITIES.
I have yet to see reasonable fix to the tragedy of the commons in a free market situation, and that's one of the most basic things one is fucking introduced to when studying economics and game theory.
Anybody who thinks health care is best served solely privately should have to pay to be diagnosed for something; either that or they've been failed in their privately funded education.
In the past I have read some libertarian literature that suggested the answer to the tragedy of the commons was that there should be no commons. Everything should be privately owned. How that would actually work in practice is way beyond my tiny brain.
It doesn't matter if it works in practice - it's religion, so it doesn't have to be true. We sent rockets up into space and there wasn't a giant man there watching us, but people still believe God exists. We tried living in a free market and everything turned to shit, but people still believe in libertarianism.
I think the theory is that if people owned the forest, the rivers, etc, they would have an incentive to take care of them for the long term. As we've seen with how companies have had all the value sucked out of them by private equity, leaving nothing but husks, I think this is a pipe dream.
Former libertarian here. The issue with libertarianism is that it does not explain the state of the world. The world is inherently unregulated. If libertarianism was superior it would have outcompeted other systems and it would have been the dominant system right now.
Historic explanations are even more problematic. How does libertarianism explain nomadic cultures or rice growing cultures (that tend to be highly collectivist)?
Huh the government is the ideal party to do that. Because it can set its goals to best serve its constituents instead of making money.
Don't forget there are so many countries with government healthcare and their care is a lot more accessible than the US's. I've lived in many countries and a nationalised healthcare system is one of the things I select for.
Even a poor country like Cuba has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita. Unfortunately a bit hamstrung by the US's illegal and needless sanctions so they can't get proper equipment but I've been told healthcare is still pretty excellent there.
it’s that first paragraph which is really the bugaboo. In an ideal world that first paragraph is 100% true. In reality, what you get is the government getting its own people on the inside, raking in tons of contract money and doing very little for that, then squeeze the services on the inside to win political points from their constituents by drumming up hatred for the system in which they work. While they take in "campaign contributions" from private entities who benefit from people falling out of the system or being fed up with it.
so I agree with you in theory, but in practice, there was a whole host of other issues that would need to be dealt with somehow. I don’t know that more bureaucracy is the solution, but I would like to think it can be handled.
Actual competition and monopoly breaking/preventing.
"Free" markets tend to have transparent pricing : US healthcare does not.
"Free" markets tend to have large numbers of independent players that compete with each other : This is disappearing in the US market.
We have the worst of both systems currently. It's not ran by the government to control costs to the end user. And it's ran by a few monopolistic insurance/medical companies to reap as much profit as possible.
Canadian healthcare is horrible, pretty sure public healthcare in the UK is also very bad. It’s not a given that somehow switching to public healthcare will make the US like Finland, Canada is much more likely.
Yes, when the government politicians hate public healthcare they can successfully sabotage it. That just means we need to structure it in a way that they can't. The examples given were all successful in their missions in the past before they were actively targeted.
It's all about the execution - UK NHS public healthcare was once easily the envy of the world (I'm from Australia, not the UK) and then it suffered decades of being white anted by Conservatives.
Government is probably the worst actor to run healthcare facilities
Are those your gut feelings, or do you have an argument to back it up?
In reality, the outcomes from Government operated hospitals in Scandinavian Countries do not need to hide behind those of other countries, especially not with the US
These should be useful signals to regulators. Regulation is imperfect but somehow we blame companies that take advantage, either of immature or nonexistent regulation (which might be the case here) or of poorly written regulation (e.g. circa 2000 California energy regulation that let Enron and company run wild).
These companies, in finding essentially arbitrage opportunities, are, perversely, helping strengthen regulation, but only if regulators pay attention to what is going on and do something about it, instead of just watching it happen.
No it doesn't. Nothing about what you're responding to indicates they're ignoring these things exist. Unless your argument is "lobbyists exist, so we should ban all regulations and go back to the wild west," then the sentence where the person referred to regulation as "imperfect" encompasses lobbying.
I don’t buy it. Obviously LLMs have a role and are powerful, but they (and more importantly the people that think they know something because they can prompt an LLM) are more like the kid in 2008 that thinks he knows something because he has Wikipedia. Fact lookup isn’t intelligence, it’s not even idiot savant intelligence which I think is the point of the article.
Just bought a Strix Halo (framework desktop), waffled a long time between that and a Mac Studo but I got tired of waiting for the M5 and don’t really like Apple.
I work with ML professionally, almost all in cloud, I just wanted something “off grid” and unmetered, and needed a computer anyway so decided to pay a bit more and get the one I want. It’s “personal” in that it’s exclusively for me, but I have a business and bought it for that.
Still figuring out the best software, so far it looks like llama.cpp with Vulcan though I have a lot of experimenting to do and don’t currently find it optimal for what I want.
Re DGX, I’m mostly interested in local inference, it might have been nice to try but it was more expensive for similar performance (or so I think).
I do lots of different experiments, synthetic data generation along the lines of Magpie is one of the things I wanted a local machine for, as well as just general access to a decent sized LLM to try different things, without having to spin up a cloud machine each time.
I would prefer PyTorch / HF transformers to llama.cpp as I fine the latter less flexible if I want to change anything.
Well, Mac chips are badass for training / inference - super underrated. I mean, I've literally run epochs on cloud Nvidia GPU Servers...compared to running them locally (M chip) - and look, not trying to burn any houses down but...eh...Apple does really really well.
The good news for you, you can chain like a bunch / couple of them together and run the largest open source models around. But extremely expensive route - but probably the easiest and smoothest way.
If you're planning on running this on Apple - you can do some stuff with Metal directly...in PyTorch it's 'mcu' if I remember?
I think your llama.cpp route is good - I wouldn't go the Ollama route - I mean great to start, but IMHO: get the models directly, learn the layers and how the heads work as best as you can, make an effort to understand what's going on - well you don't have to, but, I think the models appreciate the effort - respect goes far.
People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
It’s actually insulting to people who work hard that some people assume they have it easy somehow, like the “must be nice” comment upstream. Not everyone takes the view that you can’t control what happens to you, it’s pretty easy to see who does.
Your parents determine a lot of your trajectory. If they don't make the same investement in their kids as the average for the socioeconomic, you start with a heavy penalty. You can work hard, but you'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else.
If you friends gets permit, cars, fully financed studies but you get thrown out to work straight out of high school what is the probability you would give to be able to accomplish the same things as your friends in a similar timeline.
Sure you can work hard and you will get somewhere, but is that somewhere anywhere near what could be possible ? I would argue not.
The left often argues about unfair advantage from famillies having money. In my experience it's not the having money part that is important, its the parent willing to invest it in their children.
I know some people who accomplished a lot with poor parents, but they got full support from both gov aids and parents, it generally explains a lot.
Without talking about the genetic lottery, life is unfair and hard work isn't really all that's needed. It can never hurt but at the same time you can work much harder than most and never get as much. Add politics in the mix and anything goes.
Your prior comment makes it sound like you assume it’s generally just about willpower and that external factors aren’t generally an issue. Is that accurate?
No, is generally about discipline and building good habits. Willpower or lack thereof is largely irrelevant. I'm not convinced that willpower is even a real thing.
What do you think discipline is if not willpower? This might explain why we're talking past each other.
I can do the exact same thing a hundred days in a row as long as the circumstances happen to be the same. And I can try to make them as similar as I possibly can. My lights come on at the same time. I eat the same food. My clothes are in the same place.
But the second something happens that I can't control, the night the wind howls all night, or a cough wakes me up, or for some damn reason, I wake up hungrier than normal, it doesn't matter how many times I've done it. None of it is automatic. It's all new now. All of it requires decisions. It's like it was never there. And that's why, frankly, I don't ever get to 100 identical days.
Your brain does something different with whatever you mean by "discipline and good habits" than my brain does. And that's really cool. It sounds awesome to have a brain that does that.
It also sounds way easier and like it's not something you actually deserve any credit for, in the same way that my learning how to speak before I was a year old or read before I was 3 is just "a cool thing about my brain" and not something I deserve credit for.
The difference is that because your cool thing about your brain is common, people who don't have it are considered "less than" by people who do, whereas my cool thing about my brain is uncommon, so people looked at me as "more than" other people. Both are baseless. You and I have no more control over having these advantages in our brains than we do over our height or the color of our eyes.
This doesn't answer the question on any level. There is ALWAYS a choice. Where does the choice go when you remove it? What exists in its stead? How is there ever not a choice?
Dicipline and the ability to build good habits is out of the window for a lot of people due to different illnesses. You come across as trying to sell snake oil to people with a heart attack.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse for failure. Discipline and good habits are the most effective way to prevent heart attacks in the first place. While there are a tiny fraction of people with serious mental health conditions or developmental disabilities which prevent them from making progress, that hardly applies to anyone on HN.
I have to leave the house for work at 7am. I get back sometime between 6 and 8pm. When I get back I'm mentally and physically shot. I mean, yes I could get an easier job that pays less I suppose, lose the house etc.
Even better in my opinion and experience, exercise during lunch break, if possible. Being drained after work can feel like too high barrier to get started exercising.
> People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
In my opinion the first step to taking responsibility is acknowledging reality. That reality can includes brains and bodies being different, sometimes extremely so. If someones brain or body is different but they deny it, stick their head in the sand, ignore it, then they are at a disadvantage when they try to take responsibility for something and may fail due to failing to acknowledging reality.
You can actually just choose to lock in.
And you don't need a perfect streak. Waking up early, working out and eating a nutritious breakfast is a perfect morning for probably 90% of people but our society is so broken that being healthy is associated with being either a grifter or a fascist.
My (Canadian) bank extorted me into installing their app, literally blocking me from doing transfers of my own money without it - I had to install it and take a picture of myself and my ID. After this I was able to switch to sms authentication and delete it, but they’re obviously trying to force people onto the app, and eventually they will do so more aggressively.
Of course in Canada we have a banking oligopoly that is effectively there just to rob people, but ironically any of the “challenger” startup banks are 100% app based afaik
May I ask what bank? I use CIBC and RBC. They do not require any apps on the phone to reach whatever services they offer. I use all my work on desktop.
I did install app from CIBC for one single and the only purpose - deposit cheques sent to me by clients to my business account without having to go to ATM or the bank teller.
> Of course in Canada we have a banking oligopoly that is effectively there just to rob people
Are there any OECD nations that don't have a banking oligopoly? I can think of at least one: Germany, because they have Sparkasse (community banks). Does Canada have community banks like Germany and the United States? If yes, then you should vote with your wallet and switch.
UK has building societies, they function like a bank mostly but are mutual (owned by it's members).
In my experience they are more pleasant to deal with, tend to be smaller/more conservative with tech and you can speak to a human when shit goes sideways.
Mine has never laundered money for the cartels (unlike my other bank) which is a plus as well.
I don’t know the backstory but Cloudflare arguing for an open internet is super ironic, presumably he means they want the be the one to close it off and are upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it.
1.1.1.1 DNS is just querying root DNS servers. And @elon.jet twitter account was just querying ADS data and posting it. Its exactly same, yet this guy praises Elon.
DNS lookups via 1.1.1.1 are also directly fed into the US surveillance state so peter thiel can use his palantir dashboard to see if you are the antichrist or not.
A government agency in Italy which is known nation-wide to complain and fine other institutions for the stupidest and pettiest reasons, fined another institution for a stupid and petty reason. But of course, ignorant people just see this single occurrence and make up conspiracy theories about it. (Really, if you looked at some examples of previous fines and complaints by AGCOM you would laugh your ass off independently of your political stance)
So you think it's fine that if some Italian agency orders Cloudflare to block some domain on it's 1.1.1.1 public DNS (or Google on it's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) it should be blocked for everyone on Earth who is using this DNS server, including yourself? And if you think otherwise, you are merely "upset that someone else is ruining their monopoly on it"?
> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site
Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.
They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).
I honestly don't see the irony. I believe Cloudflare tries to argue for an open internet. I use some of their features on the free plan and it's of tremendous help, especially considering the price I pay (ie 0$). I'm actually super glad that Cloudflare exists.
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