Oracle is going to use debt to finance the buildout of AI cloud infrastructure to meet their obligations to customers. They’re the first hyperscaler to do so. Made the news two weeks ago.
An alternate hypothesis which seems equally interesting, albeit for different reasons, is at the end of the article:
> Another explanation for why the JWST may have seen an overrepresentation of galaxies rotating in one direction is that the Milky Way's own rotation could have caused it.
> Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy's rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.
> “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir concluded. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself."
The hospital system near my hometown just announced they are filing for bankruptcy. The parent company that bought it, which itself is owned by private equity, extracted nearly a billion dollars in profit from hospitals before going bankrupt, according to local reporting. I don’t know what the solution is, but PE is a parasitic blight on society.
It looks like the recall will be addressed with a software update, which will probably limit autopilot to highway use only. That seems like a reasonable step, in line with Autopilot’s intended use.
The General Services Administration is the U.S. government agency that maintains login.gov, the public’s single sign-on for government. GSA is conducting an equity study on remote identity proofing to find whether methods like facial recognition work equitably for a diverse set of users. If you’d like to help make technology access more equitable, consider participating or sharing the study. Thanks HN!
I found a pair of AirPods a while back and wanted to return them to their owner. They must be associated with an Apple ID, so I reached out to Apple and asked if they’d help me get in touch. They said no, and advised me to file a police report.
I wonder why they have this policy? They have all the necessary information to facilitate a conversation. Heck, with services like Hide My Email, they could even keep the identities of each party private.
A shame they didn’t opt for Public Sans, which was designed by the US Web Design System team. Though I see it only supports Latin characters at the moment, which might make it unsuitable for use at State.
I wonder what the author thinks of Sublime Text. Fast everything (search, opening files, switching projects…) is a big part of Sublime’s value proposition, one that has so far survived the era of VSCode. And AFAIK it is written in C++, and can certainly be used to write C++.
I enrolled in Statistics during undergrad several times, dropping out each time when I got frustrated and bored with the endless memorization of distributions and equations. The stats class was a requirement to graduate, so eventually I was forced to take it over summer.
My summer class was taught by the late professor Wojbor Woyczyński at CWRU and it completely changed my understanding of statistics. Instead of rote memorization, we built the foundations of statistics from the ground up in Mathematica. The subject felt so alive and it clicked in the six short weeks of the summer session.
I suspect the first-principles approach would resonate with the HN crowd. It certainly did for me. Should you be interested, check out the book he co-wrote and used to teach the class: Introductory Statistics and Random Phenomenon. https://catalog.case.edu/record=b2504793
Anyone interested in this application of machine learning might be interested to read How Emotions are Made by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. She makes a compelling case that emotions cannot be reliably understood through facial expressions alone, and that context must be included to improve our own human accuracy at the task, let alone machine accuracy. While this article is about a textual dataset and so not an exact parallel, I think some of the same principles apply — namely that greater context is often needed to interpret an emotion from a message.
My partner's QuickPath (swipe) keyboard on her iPhone would type the word "abortion" just fine, but mine would not. We guessed that it's because she's typed the word before and I hadn't. A small test seemed to prove that right. I found this surprising, but maybe it's old news to everyone else.
Check out r/jimmyjohns from around December 27 for more. A few commenters indicate that the online ordering system uses DoorDash under the hood. Perhaps some cache entries got mixed up? Just thought it was fascinating.