Amazon remains totally complacent of these issues which are now professionally hacked by China based providers day in and out. Tons of vitamins are now fake and downright harmful. A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.
I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.
I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!
Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.
This is great article but it is ruined because author chose to use substack. I don't know why people keep following herd and endup publishing on substack. If you already don't know, Substack has disallowed ChatGPT to crawl anything so you cannot take AI assistance to work on the content. They got this content for free but they want to gatekeep it for profiting from it. Additionally, substack is intentionally horrible at letting allow nicely formatted pdf or readable versions downloaded to lock out the content even further. No one in their right mind should be using substack.
Folks, really, using GitHub pages with static website generator is all you need. Your content will be nice and truly freely accessible to everyone.
At different points he has claimed (1) current models are not intelligent at all and can never be intelligent like us, (2) also we need to ban current models because they will outsmart us and take over the world.
Depending on how he can get interview or get seat at the table, he may chose exact opposite of positions.
The doge.gov website is just amazing. You can browse through the entire org chart of a typical government, average age of employees, avg salary in that department and so on. I hope they upload this data on GitHub and open sources for the future keeping. I am becoming fairly certain that all these will be removed when ruling party changes. Doge guys truly rock for doing this.
And now, keep in mind that US govt is likely still way more "efficient" than most others on the planet.
I lost faith in Marcus after just a few interactions. He is indeed what one would refer to as "crackpot" in academia. The most glaring thing was that he is technically extremely shallow and don't have a clue about most of the details. I also got impression that is enormously enamored with having attention and recognition at any cost. Depending on weather, he will change directions and views, basically just do anything it took to get that attention no matter how ridiculous he looks doing that.
While writing this, it occured to me that he would get even goose bumps at reading this comment because it, after all, I am giving him attention.
All these articles proposing "intuition" as secret magic dust is quite funny. This is culturally amplified by movies and media ("May the force be with you", "follow your feelings").
In reality, intuition is simply a pattern recognition mechanism that sometimes work. Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. Our intuition has always said Earth is flat, Sun rotates around us, time is constant... Virtually every single thing in science is how our intuition (aka the primitive pattern recognition) was so magnificently wrong.
PowerShell should be taught in university as example of how poorly designed system devoid of taste and aesthetic looks like. It's an ugly monstrosity that makes me puke every time I try to use it. The only reason some people might like it is because they have been tortured by Windows defaults for many years and finally they got used to this utter mediocracy.
YouTube is absolutely the business that is resting on laurels, just like Google Maps and Gmail. Sometime I wonder if these products have any real active development teams at all besides ads. YouTube massively screwed with users by forcing poorly executed botched migration to YouTube Music. Even outsiders can see that this was entirely internal Google politics which powerful people like Wojcicki should have been able to avoid but she didn't. It just makes me wonder if these billionaire leaders of Google products really care anymore about anything. There is visibly an utter lack of hunger at the top and these people clearly should have been spending more time with family leaving these products with more hungry minds. YouTube recommendations are crap and it's still amazing that in 2024 just clicking one video will fill up most of recommendations with same thing. It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. TikTok took full advantage of this but YouTube CEO just kept napping at the wheel. Ultimately, the original product mostly just kept going but the measure of success is not about retaining audience but what it could have been if there was an ambitious visionary leader at the helm.
This is amazing sales tactics! So, you buddy up with insurance, they create a checkbox and recommend you for a revenue cut! Now you suddenly have millions of customers out of nowhere and your product gets installed on billions computers before you even know it. I have seen this tactic get used for many mediocre products. For example, 3rd party dishwasher soap recommended by dishwasher company. Amazingly powerful. I don’t think most of CrowdStrike employees even knew they were in more than billion computers with paid service. The CEO was just busy doing brutal marketing of this pointless product.
Genuine question: How the heck crapeware like CloudStrike got into all critical systems from 911 to hospitals to airlines? My understanding was that all these critical systems are just super lazy to upgrade or install anything at all. I would love to know all the sales tactics CS used to get into millions of systems for money!
I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generation can use what previous generation has built.
These studios used to make ton of money because only a few are in town. Now, every teenager is his/her own studio and content pool is so vast that their revues must shrink. They have nowhere to run. I think their end state is to publish on YouTube/Netflix and continue living at fraction of revenue that they are used to. That's what they should prepare for and plan for. Their existence and importance was supported by scarcity imposed by cable network and they need to understand that. But instead they live in fantasy of becoming next Netflix and burn in billions of dollars in debt.
This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content. They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else but that kind of thinking would be beyond their competency. It's no wonder they go in such huge losses despite of having loyal audience and monopoly over unparalleled content. To this day I cannot get over the fact that there are literally millions documentaries out there made with a lot of love and hard work but only available through DVD or mailing in a check to some dude. Similarly, lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators. Fortunately, audience did digitized them nicely and uploaded over to torrents and that's the only way to get them today. Same goes of out of print books and magazines. The producers of this content could have easily digitized it and uploaded over to some marketplace and made at least free coffee money for rest of their lives but surprisingly they just never get around doing it. IMO, it just expresses complete naivety and disregard to importance of their own content. They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.
There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.
So, NanoGPT took 1.8 days on 8xA100 for 124M model training on 30.7B tokens using flash attention. This would translate to 14.4hr for 10B tokens. With llm.c it is ~1.5 hr which is almost 10X speedup!
Does this look ballpark correct? Is there any summary of where majority of this improvement comes from?
This doesn't make sense. There are tons of other business which will have higher day to day return and property appreciation. I don't think anyone was craving for car wash subscription and I don't know of anyone having car wash in their checklist monthly item. Those people exist for sure but not in that kind of demand that a town needs even two of them.
I think this is just another instance where private equity is creating imaginary business model of subscriptions and selling it to its investors. The money managers will get huge management fees and will disappear before the whole thing collapses in coming years. Meanwhile, they will run a lot of good and necessary businesses out of town.