AM radio paywall? Where?

I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”

I wonder if their compositors would be laggy and bloated with features, too?

The actual updates: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en#requirements-5k&zippy=%2Crequirements-for-sending-or-more-messages-per-day

We can never know exactly. For me I always think about the (incidental) complexity of these huge apps like Instagram.

Somebody mentioned the phone overheating when watching Reels - those short videos. Here’s a made-up example (but I’ve written some software for video streaming services)…

Those videos are pretty short, and some people skip the clip even after less than 1 second. Instagram want that next video to be playing instantly (gotta get that dopamine hit ASAP!). A strategy you could take is have the app load the next, say, 5 possible videos in the background before you’ve even seen them. When the user swipes, that video is already playing. To make this even faster we could execute some recommendation decisions on-device rather than on some servers (over a relatively much slower 4G connection).

With all this complexity comes greater chance of some unexpected behaviour. Instead of loading 5 videos, maybe we accidentally load 100 and never clean up the old ones. Maybe after an OS update we need to change the way we mark a task as low priority.

Cool insight - thanks! All points even more to bad planning by the Instagram team as you said originally.

I guess I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. Apple put shitloads of R&D into power-efficiency. Can’t imagine the culture at Instagram/Meta is like that.

I can imagine it’s a collection of bugs where it’s sorta the OS’ problem but sorta the application’s problem. It probably reached a stalemate. Nobody really wanted to spend the extra engineering effort; maybe it would all have to be undone then rewritten again to get something out in time.

Instead they’re bitching about investments in science.

Agreed. To be fair, I can also see where the frustration comes from. We see “deals with the devil” being made, but the (disappointing?) reality is tech progress often looks like that. Flashy stories with pie-in-the-sky ideas get headlines and funding. Meanwhile the boring, difficult work continues on in the background. From the outside it seems non-sensical and inefficient: why couldn’t they just invest money directly into GPS research without all the military stuff? But, fortunately, some amazing stuff does come out of it too.

This is a tricky one. Are the developers themselves responsible or also managers and leadership? I don’t have an answer to this.

I wonder what the UN’s track-record is with cybercrime and surveillance historically. Anyone have any links to share?

I see where you’re coming from. Battery electric vehicles I think are a good example of trickle-down. It seems the R&D for electric cars affordable to wealthy people leads to new infra and tech for a changing power grid, buses, trains and bicycles.

But two examples you raised:

• corrective lenses
• refrigeration

have clear quality-of-life and health benefits. Supersonic passenger flights feel more like a luxury and convenience compared to food preservation.

Hopefully in the development of reduced flight times between other sides of the world we perform research with impact beyond flight. Things like improved materials, fuel, aerodynamics that could be used for trains and trucks. I’m not an engineer but I hope it works like that!

Interesting thought; I’d hope so. Maybe some material physics/chemistry research that makes some stuff cheaper for trains (I’m not an engineer so totally out of my depth here).

Ha yes just had a look. Seems like a funny thing to brag about when they’re not the ones administering the storage system!

Which post?

That makes sense. But I guess there’s these questions: at what resolution? For how long? Maybe the status quo is such because it’s simpler code. The project is still relatively young. I wonder where/how we can discuss these things?

From that article:

the company said it wants to avoid “having invested in network capability and performance that will not ultimately be enjoyed by end users”

Hilarious. What do NBN Co. think the rest of the world does with the higher performance?

54USD (80AUD) per month for 50/20 in Sydney, Australia. From a provider called Aussie Broadband

Uh… am I missing something here? (I don’t have a computer science degree) What about GPT from OpenAI? Amazon Web Services?

What about smartphones? They seem pretty popular. How much computing on them can you do without a network connection?

Because they can’t or are not willing to investigate what happened at this particular company nor to its staff. The push of the story is therefore about what’s happening on Twitter (“getting absolutely roasted”) because people connect with action.

A better story could recount the events up to now. Maybe something like this?

1. Find some fired staff members. How long were they working there?
2. Tell a little story of the day the staff first heard of the layoffs.
3. Show the layoff message or paraphrase what was said to them by CEO or whoever
4. Interesting point: Were they told they were being replaced by a large language model or some “AI” tech?
5. Now include the obnoxious tweet by the CEO

Finding this information and weaving it into a story that people go “And then what happened?!” is difficult and takes time. It’s hard to justify when you can get clicks from shit like this article.