The Veritasium video on how jet engine turbine blades are "grown" in an aligned crystalline structure for enhanced material properties (e.g. thermal performance) is absolutely fascinating & well worth a watch:
> A lot of it is effectively bribing and menacing trading partners
That's just a byproduct of propping up the military industrial complex; have to have conflicts to justify giving the primes sole-source cost+ contracts so they can meet their quarterly EPS targets.
Yet rents won't drop -- the commercial mortgage covenants prevent landlords from dropping rental rates, so they'll just sit there fallow until the market recovers.
Test-taking may only roughly correlate to intelligence, and is just one dimension of a human... but they likely care less about false negatives (like you) than they do about false positives in alternative assessments.
Google removed "Don't be evil" from its Code of Conduct in May 2018. Shocking that it took 8 years for the author to make their ethical stand -- during which time Google stock went up 600%...
Google is one of the few verticalized options in AI: Data, models, cloud services, low-level silicon (TPUs), internal use cases, retail use cases, B2B uses, distribution (browser & mobile), etc.
They rise with the tide of AI adoption. But they gain ground if people opt into Google solutions. And any token sent to a Google model (free or paid) actively punishes their competitors that are then required to spend vast sums to remain bleeding edge.
Google & Meta are illustrative of late-stage capitalism -- it's all about distribution, not innovation. Their job is (mostly) to just acquire the products that have passed the gauntlet, then scale up their monetization through their distribution-focused machine. The same dynamic plays out in virtually every industry (not just tech).
You'll find that most internal "innovation" teams are just lip service. In most cases, the "mothership" will be incapable of reproducing true innovation -- from a statistical perspective, culture perspective (mega corps are anti-scrappy; internal politics), and motivation perspective (startups aren't 9-to-5). It's much easier to have big M&A budgets, a VC arm, and some handwavvy internal innovation group.
Every now and again, you'll get real innovations (Waymo, transistors, GUIs), but even those have a spotty track record of commercialization when created internally.
Andreessen-Horowitz, who most people (and they themselves) refer to as a16z and have the eponymous domain name (a16z.com). They're one of the top VC firms on the planet -- exceedingly relevant to HN audiences and commonly discussed here.
Sayre's Law: Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small
Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."
That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...
To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
They seem to have found some high-margin value-add niches in doing large signs, tradeshow displays, topographical maps, etc. Seems like there can be some nice SMB opportunities in the space if you can carve out some specialty services & attract repeat customers.
Deyle.com
Travis@