It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.
Why would you expect technological improvements to only shift supply curves right under perfect competition? I'd also expect it under oligopoly or even monopoly. You also might think there'd be more tech improvement under oligopoly, on Schumpeterian grounds that oligopolists can internalize the benefits of tech research.
A monopolist has no reason to decrease price because there is no competition. As we saw with Bell Labas in the US it is entirely possible for a monopoly to both have world class research and burry it for decades, viz. magnetic storage https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...
Technological improvements don't reduce prices as much in a monopoly, but they still do reduce prices to increase profits. Profit is always maximized at MR=MC, in perfect competition, oligopoly, or monopoly.
I changed to it for car navigation. It's a less cluttered interface and integrates better with voice control than Google maps. I still use Google to find out what's around me in a city, which is probably where the money is.
I think it might be the opposite. You make cheap products for everybody because you are going to make money off subscriptions. Personally, I think it's a reasonable strategy, but it might mean they lose their focus on high-end craftsmanship.
I'm sorry, are my MacBooks Pro, Air, and (my spouse's) Neo not some of the best built laptops you can buy? Maybe there's something better, but these are inarguably some of the best. Absolute top of the line.
See the Verge (I think) reviewing similarly priced laptops priced around the Neo. They were plastic crap, even if they had better specs elsewhere.
the M line of macbook pro's are beautiful, well crafted, long lasting machines.
MacOS might not be your preferred way of working, and you might prefer cheaper options or USB-A ports, but there is really nothing you could arguably call bad craftmanship in those machines.
In addition to the sibling comment, I would point out the touch bar was poor craftsmanship and the butterfly keyboard was also poor craftsmanship. They both are addressed now, but there were several years where we had to live with them.
Their software craftsmanship has really suffered in the last 10 years.
I thought the touchbar was pretty neat, it was just a mistake to replace the function row with them. It also was hard to get adoption because it wasn’t available on desktop Macs or their cheaper laptops so developers had no incentive to really do anything interesting with them.
I think a better implementation might have been to have it be an alternate mode for the trackpad and sell external trackpads that also had it so it could be used everywhere. But I get why that didn’t happen, the touchbar was basically being run with a mini Apple Watch SOC built into the MacBook Pro, and it’s primary use was to have the Secure Enclave on it. The touchbar itself was a deal where they could find a use for having an otherwise idle smartwatch’s worth of computing power in there, but that wouldn’t be doable if it’s sold as an external device.
I mean, they're not bad, but they have spicy chargers, the corners are uncomfortably sharp, the keyboard often doesn't register, the LCD is prone to vertical bars and other issues even without physical damage and is extremely sensitive to bumps and other minor damage elsewhere on the laptop (not even the display itself), and so on.
Some of these are consequences of what makes them feel "premium" or even "solid". Aluminum is a terrible material for bumps and drops because it dents, and that often damages the internal components.
I've never bought a Mac, I have used them for work. They are the best built laptops on the market, bar none. Too bad their OS is awful. Its not just marketing.
Have you actually looked at apple products and compared them to the competition? The different in quality of finish is really stark in my experience. Some other manufacturers have some products which have some nice features. Whatever you think of the software or ecosystem, almost Apple hardware is just nicely made.
I've been thinking about an R package, or maybe a more general treesitter-based package, to reorganize functions in a project. Something like a tui which shows you functions in files in folders and lets you copy and paste them around; and maybe use graph analysis to automate this, analysing function dependencies and putting each "community" of functions into one file.
Is there any interest in this? There are per-language complexities, for example R functions are often preceded by a roxygen block which ought to travel with it. Has anyone done something similar?
I think that'd be cool, but I'd say that Claude Code/Codex is often used for this exact thing and they do a decent job of it (at least in my experience with R). Usually once I've kind of wrapped up my model or data work I'll just ask "okay, now organize this so it makes sense", and it usually does a great job at organizing the helpers, etc.
I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years. Here are some quotes from what used to be a pretty interesting and thoughtful community:
> Ah, the Elon manoeuvre: trying to make would-be assassins hesitate by using your own child as a shield.
> the words and narratives that Sam Altman promoted caused so much fear and uncertainty and anger that someone thought their only option was to attempt a horrific crime.
> Sociopath who rides high ego wave and drinks his own kool aid, acting highly amorally and then complaints that his actions have some (benign) consequences.
> A cavalier attitude and allegiance to nothing but capital doesn't make you immune to basic human morals, and humanity will, rightly in my opinion, punish you whether you like it or not.
These comments are disgusting. The people who made them should be ashamed. But they are probably too stupid to be, assuming they are people and not bots, which I no longer feel certain of for all too many comments here.
First time I hear about that, reading the Wikipedia page it very much doesn't sound like murder: the victim was threatening people on the train with killing them, specifically also a mother with a stroller. The aggressor applied what they were taught as a non lethal hold.
Why a person died during a supposedly non lethal hold definitely needs to be investigated very thoroughly. Either it wasn't non lethal, was applied the wrong way, or there were some other contributing factors.
That choke hold was vastly vastly vastly more dangerous than what happened to Altman here.
"Scary people on the subway deserve to be put at extreme risk of death" is what I'm talking about. Somehow that violence doesn't bring out the "violence is never the answer" crowd.
Have you asked yourself why someone went as far as hurling a molotov at his place in the first place?
I would never, but you have to understand that serious pain and harm is being inflicted on people, AT SCALE, by the advent of AI. I'm not even talking about Israeli, Palestinian, or Iranian kids. People in America with terminal illness are losing healthcare.
I don’t think they’re bots, the strength of feeling is real.
Rightly or wrongly people feel cut out of society at a time when the tech elite are not only making billions but seem to be actively trying to ruin everyone else’s lives, they are legitimately hated.
And when you’re that hated you do need to be careful, money can’t protect you from everything. At the end of the day we do all have to live in the same society.
(I don’t have this strength of feeling personally but some people do)
> I've skimmed the thread here and I am now seriously considering leaving HN for the first time in about 15 years.
I'm finding a lot of the comments here pretty reprehensible, but no more reprehensible than the collective shrug the community gave towards murdered Palestinians, or threads about dead Iranians as a result of American bombs that get flagged off the front page. That doesn't make them acceptable or okay.
Those people's lives are/were valuable, too. It's disgusting that we try to keep HN "clean" of those horrors and the people that flag those threads should be ashamed. Ditto those who think the killing of innocent civilians is okay.
Well, you know, dead palestinians aren't paying their salaries or investing in their companies, so they aren't as important as a accelerator that in the last batch had 90+% of 'AI' companies.
Think of the investments they may lose. We can't have any of that can we?
No, people don't have "have rights to have and voice their opinions whatever it may be" on this site. What people have the right to here is use HN as intended. That intended use is described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Mobs foaming at the mouth, triggered by a disturbed person's violence into a mutually foaming frenzy, is not an intended use of this site. I shouldn't have to tell any of you this.
But you are the moderator. Not me, not the person I was responding to. You have different opinion about people having opinions here at the HN. I have different opinion of the matter. This is great! This is what I am actually talking about! I come here and other sites to learn what people think. To discuss! Share ideas! Have an argument! IMHO whole freaking purpose of internet!
> he deserved it [...] I'll have a toast the day he croaks
As I said to voidhorse (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728150), this is obviously the kind of thing we ban people for—as anyone who reads https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html should know; but given that this thread is a mob and mobs derange people, I'm going to cut you some slack and not ban you. Just please don't do anything like this on Hacker News again.
> For a social scientist, you're either a really poor one, a poorly read one or one with a complete inability to read the room.
Personal attacks are also unwelcome here. Lashing out at a fellow community member is mean and shameful, and also undermines whatever argument you were making.
So the time series are provided with no context? It's just trained on lots of sets of numbers? Then you give it a new set of numbers and it guesses the rest, again with no context?
My guess as to how this would work: the machine will first guess from the data alone if this is one of the categories it has already seen/inferred (share prices, google trend cat searches etc.) Then it'll output a plausible completion for the category.
That doesn't seem as if it will work well for any categories outside the training data. I would rather just use either a simple model (ARIMA or whatever) or a theoretically-informed model. But what do I know.
If it works for predicting the next token in a very long stream of tokens, why not. The question is what architecture and training regimen it needs to generalize.
I think I'm in the same boat as you are, in preferring more conventional approaches to time series analysis.
I'm curious as to how this would compare to having an actual statistician work on your data, because I feel that time series work is as much an art as it is a science. To start, selection of an appropriate timeframe is always important to ensure our data doesn't resemble either white noise or a random walk, and that we've given the response time of our data appropriate consideration! I find that people unfamiliar with statistics miss this point - I get people asking why I might use a weekly or biweekly timeframe for data when they reckon I should be using hourly or daily data. Selection of appropriate predictors is also important for multivariate time series and I have no idea how this model approaches that.
I also have questions about how interpretable the results outputted by this model are. With a more "traditional" model, I can easily look at polyroot or the [P/E]ACF, as well as various other diagnostic tools, and select a relatively simple model that results in a decent 95% prediction interval. I've always been very wary of black box models simply because I wouldn't be able to explain any findings derived from them well.
From skimming the blog post, is MAE all they're using for measuring the output quality?
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