6 Feb 2021
At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book.
We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way--one page at a time.
Wonder the additional cost to add automated page turning. More than Bezos can afford, impoverished chap he is.
They couldn't compete because the company was horrible run. They basically relied on chips designs from the early 1980s until 1992. They did almost nothing to improve the product line while their CEO earn a huge amount. They fired the only decent CEO they had.
Had the taken some money in hand and all-in-one Amiga 500 SoC that had some sales potential left, and combined that with a next generation chip set that could run the modern games of the early 90s I think you would have had a great product.
And Windows wasn't really actually good at all the games media stuff for a long time. I think the home market for that stuff was possible if somebody grabbed it along with continuing some higher level unix, video, audio workstations.
And many people who had one liked it and grew up with it. There was a market there. Many switched to PC simply because the product was no longer competitive. Many had grown up with the Amiga 500 and were ready for an upgrade.
If you look at what Acorn achieved with even fewer resources and a much worse market position. Imagine and ARM chip with modern chipset but Amiga 500 compatible. Maybe along with non-backwards compatible console version like the CD32.
Would it have been a hyper-growth company, I don't really think so, but survive for the rest of the 90s was possible.
SoThe anti-hype is also way overblown. Nobody is saying that today's AI is omniscient and never makes mistakes. Future models will make fewer mistakes. They will still not hook into the universe with a cheat code and do everything at 100 percent reliability. It's a straw man.
> with their respective speculative decoding methods
You're benchmarking drafter acceptance rate, then. Which is real life values, yes, but attributing worse drafter performance to the other 95% of the model being inherently slower.
In the end its not who can train the better model its who owns the better stack of training data. Acquiring old texts then destroying them makes their information proprietary.
I agree that it implies simplicity, but in my experience, that is exactly the intended context. People say "Can we just..." when other people are proposing complex solutions that may not be needed.
And if the answer is that a complex solution is needed and you cannot "just X", then saying why the simple answer won't work is a fair answer to such a question.
My understanding is that they split the accounts to keep up with the limit. Otherwise though yeah, FDIC will only step in for the extreme minority scenario of failure by the underlying bank. You absolutely should not be allowed to advertise FDIC insurance unless it goes all the way to the consumer.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't a distinction between common and rare books.
It was a distinction between library books and others. They partnered with libraries, and obviously, libraries didn't want their books destroyed, so they devised a non-destructive book scanner. Some of the books they scanned were indeed rare, but rare or not, you don't destroy books you borrowed from a library!
It's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing all that, and the churn is causing outages sometimes. I see such a quick increase in scale and think ok, stuff will tend to go wrong when that happens, it's not like they have a simple stable product that they keep screwing up.
A similar metaphor (I think I came up with but can't remember) is the slop sandwich. You can deliver slop to me but only when wrapped in a thick layer of human intervention (which usually also means removing 50% of the slop)
But surely you can see that that's a stupid state of affairs?
The built-in Photos app is just a basic built-in photo viewer. So the user is not allowed to view their own damn photos without clicking through a bunch of permission prompts like they're running Windows Vista.
The app even comes from the same developer as the operating system. If you don't trust that developer to make an app that views your photos, why did you buy a phone that runs that operating system in the first place?!?
I agree you cannot tie the success or failure to any single decision. I was just sharing a personal anecdote about the company.
I do know that Spirit Airlines was a lot scrappier and lean minded when they were based in Detroit. Course that is kind of a Midwest thing. Spirit grew a lot faster after moving to Florida but ultimately getting there involved taking financial risks that ultimately doomed them.
What is the lesswrong-crowd answer to the non-existential risk to working people?
I'm way more worried about these guys breaking the economy in such a way that enriches them and makes me poorer, than I'm about any existential risk these guys cook up in their thought experiments.
Like if you are making more money than god in silicon valley I guess you don't really fear losing your job or house, but for most people that would be quite bad.
I never hear these guys articulate what their concrete vision for the economy if they make ASI / AGI happen (one of those is the correct shibboleth and I don't remember which).
That’s not the story I’m hearing. Large numbers of developers were moved away from ADO when they bought GitHub. ADO has more or less been on feature freeze for years.
