> Xi is head of state as president, but not head of government (like King of England).
Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.
What I'd like is a good bidirectional Latin <-> English AI translation model, ideally downloadable (though even an online version with an interface like DeepL - which doesn't do latin - would be better than the current situation of having nothing at all). It probably wouldn't be on par with the best human translators, at least not at the beginning, but that's not a problem.
For that matter, I'd even say that it can be dangerous to choose cofounders within one's friend circle. It tends to make people more blind to lacks and red flags (for the needs of a tech business) that would clearly be recognized as disqualifying if selecting someone who isn't a friend, on the basis of a focused rational evaluation.
(*) edit: chickenshit: I just spent some time putting together a chicken story made of mostly chicken-related unicode emojis, math/logic operators and "chicken", but the hacker news site apparently doesn't really support emojis and removed most of them, thus ruining the story.
> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?
My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:
> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.
A lot of it is also that the tech/VC way of things is to try to build everything yourself, and to assume the mechanics of the problem is easy and doesn't require a lot of domain knowledge. Whereas the software required to orchestrate all of these systems and provide insight is complex and needs a lot of software. I think it's a classic case of misunderstanding how complicated everything is and assuming that because you have been given a bunch of VC money that it's somehow a mandate to build everything yourself. It's what happens most of the time when a "tech" company interacts with the physical world. Like how my Nest thermostat always learns to do the opposite of what I want at any point in time.
> I would love to see shader compilers merged into regular compiler toolchains
they are already using the same compiler infrastructure: pretty much every relevant shader or otherwise GPU oriented compiler out there is based on LLVM. As for the parts of the toolchains that are different: that's simply because GPUs and CPUs are inherently very different.
> so that CPU and GPU code can be easily mixed in the same source file
what advantage would it have to mix together into the same source file the code for totally different targets with totally different parallelism models? I find it cleaner and simpler (apart from maybe trivial one-liner shaders that you can embed in a string) to keep them separated. Also makes debugging much easier.
> what advantage would it have to mix together into the same source file
It would be easier to share data structure declarations between the CPU and GPU side (MSL can already do this by sharing header files, a complete integration would just be the next step). GPU buffers and images could be described with [[attribute]] annotations (also very similar to what MSL does to extend C++ with shader semantics).
E.g. maybe a GPU buffer with vertex data could be described like this:
[[gbu_buffer]] vertex_t vertices[] = {...};
...instead of calling a CreateBuffer(...) 3D-API functions, etc... (the code that's generated by the compiler might actually call a 'builtin' CreateBuffer function under the hood).
TL;DR: MSL is already halfway there by using standard C++ extended with custom attributes, it's just missing the last step to merge the Metal shader compiler with Apple's Clang toolchain.
PS: also if shader functions could be directly defined as 'regular functions' in CPU-side source code (and behind a special function pointer type), there would be no need for string literal shenanigans like this:
(and shader compilation would happen during the regular build and would also generate regular compiler errors - with current toolchains that's only possible with a lot of build system magic)
One could put together a phrase where that one would clearly come out when speaking it out, though not (or not as clearly) in written form, e.g.:
"Frag mal den Wirt, welche Alkohol-Konzentration s'Lager-Bier hat"
Thank the FSM it isn't. But then again, a god is not what determines the price of any given type of work. That would be not a god but… salary negotiations (at the individual level) and more generally the job market (in the larger statistical view)
> Life is not some kind of economic art project.
Neither are salaries. Nothing artsy about them. Instead, they are simply determined by the level at which two sides find together in agreement to the exchange of work against money for a price they mutually agree upon. "Job Market" is just the word for the statistical view across all individual such transactions.
Then: Ugly as that Google thing was, its intent and effect was to prevent competition ("poaching") by a handful of big competitors. Ugly, sure, but that only represented a small fraction of the tech industry. Equating these "Google et al" of that context with the job market of the tech industry is just absurd. That being said, de-facto-cartel behavior like that on the employer side or like unions on the employee side do make the job market somewhat less of a free market.
> What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous.
Aside from the fact that - again - there was no mention of "worth" in my comment, that sounds like you being triggered at the colloquial shortened use of "someone's worth" for what a person can get paid on the job market, because you conflate that by equivocation with some philosophical, emotional or moral notion of personal "worth" (all of which are subjective btw) and feel indignation at the projected idea that those two totally different things would be equal for some people. Well guess what: they aren't. The job market is not at all about what people are "worth" in those senses but only about what "market worth" not they as persons but their work time has, i.e. for what value they can expect to find someone else who will be consenting to give their money in exchange for that work time.
I avoid the term "worth" for precisely that reason: that it tends to trigger by equivocation and thus sidetrack from the rational economic background of the link between individual salaries and the job market, when in reality nobody is arguing that the "market worth" of the work someone is selling would be equal to the (philosophical, societal, or whatever other, let alone financial) "worth" of that person themself. While the former is sometimes colloquially shortened to "someone's market worth", the job market is not about the "worth" of people but about the level at which, statistically, they sell their work time i.e. at which they find someone who consents to pay that much for it.
I know that quote is not yours, but it is the claim we are discussing and that you are defending.
> I avoid the term "worth" for precisely that reason: that it tends to trigger by equivocation and thus sidetrack
You're the only one engaged in side tracking.
> that sounds like you being triggered at the colloquial use of "worth" for what a person can get paid on the job market, because you conflate that by equivocation with some philosophical, emotional or moral notion of personal "worth"
Nope.
> The job market is not at all about what people are "worth" in those senses but only about what "market worth" not they as persons but their work time has, i.e. for what value they can expect to find someone else who will be consenting to give their money in exchange for that work time.
Yep.
Except, markets are never perfect. It is not unusual that individuals who can produce a lot of value for companies can struggle to find employment that provides commensurate pay. The reasons for this are diverse. One example is the explicite collusion that Google engaged in. Other examples are Cargo cult disfunctional hiring practices, ageism, racism, sexism, elitism, nepotism, ...etc the list goes on and on.
My whole point is that "What people are worth and what they can get paid are not synonymous".
Edit: In this specific case, a major factor is the bargaining issues that arise with "joint employment". The associated ruling allows workers to bargain more directly with the entity for whom they are producing value.
You project some personal conception of "worth" of x as if it was some normative and objective value inherent by essence to each category x would belong to. It's not.
For whatever x, your estimation of the "worth" of x may differ from mine or that of any third person. The estimation of what x (be it a product, a service, or work time for a job) is worth to someone is inherently totally subjective to the eye of the beholder (be they seller or buyer, e.g. employee or employer… or external observer) and situation: The price that you'd be willing to pay out of your pocket for someone else's development work is likely much lower to the price you would ask for you doing the same work.
You're free to set your personal subjective estimation of what your work time is worth at, say, a gazillion dollars p.a. For whatever reasons, justified or not to others. Doesn't change the fact that it may or may not not be subjectively "worth" that much to people who are in principle interested in buying that work (though not necessarily at that price). For whatever reasons of their own.
There is no such thing as an inherent objective "worth", only subjective "worth" in the eye of each subjective beholder. All of that is totally subjective.
Objectivity of "worth" only exists in the purely observative statistical sense: In particular, "market worth" is simply the term for the value at which statistically two sides (each with their own subjective "worth" estimation) mutually consenting to the transaction find together.
> In particular, "market worth" is simply the term for the value at which statistically two sides (each with their own subjective "worth" estimation) mutually consenting to the transaction find together.
This is an idealistic and simplistic understanding of how markets work. Information asymmetry, power asymmetry and other structural issues (not to mention deliberate malfeasance) can lead to two employees who could produce equivalent value to a company, receiving very different offers or salaries.
Contracting companies often serve a role in creating a structure that limits the negotiating power of employees. You argue for "mutually consenting" agreements on estimating value while ignoring that fact in this particular case a middleman has been put between the two parties to limit any potential mutual negotiation.
small specialized forum sites (like they were the norm in the days before big centralized social media) - much as I too prefer them to big centralized social networks - do have some big pain points though that are why they lost web share to big social media: isolation from other communities and user account/authentication.
In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."
The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.
In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.
Uhm: the king of England (which incidentally happens to be king of quite a number of other territories that have yet to fully emancipate themselves from monarchy) is NOT the head of government in any of the the territories he is king of, but merely the head of state… which in constitutional monarchies is a rather formal show pomp role with very little political power. Conversely, the head of government in the UK with actual executive power is the Prime Minister, not the king.