Questions:

1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed?

2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy?

3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?

There needs to be prestige for tearing down heavily flawed work.

reviewers are unpaid. its also quite common to farm out the actual review work to grad students, postdocs and the like. if you're suggesting adding liability, then you're just undermining the small amount of review that already takes place.

Article resonates with me. This time around, we asked cursor to estimate giving PRD & codebase. It gave very detailed estimate. Currently in the process of getting it down to what leadership wants (as in the article). AI estimates much better & faster than us. We are bringing it down much faster than AI. Sometimes changing the PRD or prioritizing the flows & cutting down scope of MVP. Honestly AI is a great tool for estimation.

Another reason I could think of is Security. There is a bunch of cheating goes on there. As a seller I lost my laptop to a scammer. Seller paid be until I shipped & cancelled the transaction. Buyer asked me ship it to their son’s address. Since I didn’t use buyer’s address registered in their eBay account eBay/Paypal didn’t pay me either. AI accelerates these scams.

If google is serving 90% traffic & others are unable to enter - Doesn't that mean google is doing something right for the customer and others are unable to outcompete it? Isn't this how life works?

Google is allowed to be big, be better and win users. But happy customers is not the full test of monopolization. The real question is, "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?” If the answer is no, then competition is broken

> "Could a meaningfully better search engine realistically displace Google today?”

ChatGPT clearly demonstrated that displacing Google is possible. All previous monopoly arguments seemed even more flimsy after that.

I think you’re proving the monopoly argument yourself: if they only way to compete with Google is an innovation that generations of scientists have been working towards, it does paint a grim picture of competition in this space. Besides, are we ignoring Gemini?

Google already used AI and language models before ChatGPT came out. If you wanted a state of the art search / recommendation engine you needed that innovations from scientists already.

That's what I am saying: if you had a better search/rec engine than Google, good luck making it useful without Google's search index, acquired to a large extent thanks to their dominant market position. This doesn't sound like healthy competition. ChatGPT had to change the whole game to be able to compete.

ChatGPT did not build a search engine though. They built something else (equally impressive) and then were able to use their weight to enter the web search business where most sites now have to allow them in.

While it's good that building other products is possible, it doesn't detract from the point that search engines are a de-facto monopoly.

(Not quite the same as a search engine, but to create a base model in an LLM, they pretty much did "download the whole internet" for it)

This is a woefully naive view on the nature of monopolies. You could have made the same argument for Standard Oil.

Is the user's choice to use google a meaningful one when they're effectively the only game in town?

Competition only works when we have an even field.

Like shooting your opponents in the leg before a Marathon will surely improve your chances, but it doesn't mean you are the best out of them. This is like the very tenet of markets, reaching as far back as Adam Smith.

"Funnily" enough this requires some external system that upholds the rules of the competition, e.g. governments. That's why busting monopolies make sense.

Google must be right for the customer because Google pays billions of dollars to be the default search engine for all the major browsers. And end users are notorious for changing application defaults.

...No. Not at all. Not in the case of Google and generally that's not "how life works". If it was true, why would Google spend so much money to be the default search engine in so many devices/browsers?

What is the difference between RCS & Whatsapp messages? Aren't they similar?

When you use Whatsapp, you're trusting a single entity to handle your messages (plus your ISP I guess). When you use RCS, your messages go through your mobile operator, google, and perhaps someone else in an overly complicated way that is also built upon SMS (a non-internet thing) for more confusion.

Message payloads go directly to Google servers, there's no difference in practice.

Carriers handle IMS registration, that's it. And not even in all cases.

This is an incredible project! Thanks for sharing. Love to see some photos taken in this camera!

There is also new Adaptive Radix Tree implementation - https://www.db.in.tum.de/~leis/papers/ART.pdf which is supposed to be faster than B-Tree

Great job. This is amazingly done. Is the phone connected to wifi or using a data plan?

Thx, Wifi! Was down for a bit yesterday but back up. No downtime due to volume of traffic

I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.

Two points here.

First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.

Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping. Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that accounting could use more automation. Everything could use more automation. But for something it's more straightforward than others.

> This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It isn’t impossible (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your automation tools.

You the correct that it means you can’t have purely general purpose automation that will do all accounting work for every entity, but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.

> but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.

The fact that accountants still exist should tell you that you're mistaken.

I think many accountants would laugh at saying accuracy is a requirement. They have full time jobs because the books for any major company are a disaster that are kept together by prayer and duct tape. Accuracy is the ideal, but when you have hundreds of revenue streams, discounts, rebates, deprecation, tax structures, salesmen actively trying to sell out the company, etc keeping the books in order is a tall order.

I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any responsibility whatsoever.

This! It blows my mind every bank doesn't have a sort of scripting language of some sort that let's me automate whatever I want to happen. I've seen a few services that supposedly enable this but their prone to breakage, don't support one bank or another, or are simply way too expensive.