COVID is still around. And so is a lot of the damage that was done by it.
Comparing COVID impact on countries that had strict lockdown and vaccination policies with its impact on the countries that put no effort into fighting COVID at all? The difference is measurable. By all accounts, fighting COVID is something that was worth doing at the time, and good COVID policy saved lives.
The problem is, the difference is measurable, but it's not palpable. There's enough difference for it to show up in statistics, but not enough that you could look out the window and say "hey, we don't have those piles of plagued corpses in the city streets the way they do in Oceania and Eastasia, the lockdown is so worth it".
Everyone could see the restrictions, but few could see what those restrictions were accomplishing. Which has a way of undermining people's trust in the government. Which is a sentiment that lingers to this day in many places.
I really don't think we "solved" COVID as a social/political problem. If tomorrow, some Institute of Virology misplaced another bit of "science that replicates", we wouldn't be much further along than we were in year 2020. Medical technology has advanced, and readiness did get better, but the very same societal issues that made it hard to fight COVID would be back for the round 2 and eager for revenge. We'd be lucky to be neutral on the sum.
If there is a Covid round 2, and my government tries to implement another lockdown, I will flaunt the rules as brazenly as possible. So will almost everyone I know.
My trust in the government has completely evaporated; the “cure” was worse than the disease, by far.
Now if Covid round 2 is significantly lethal even to young people, that’s a real problem! The government wasted its social capital on Covid round 1, and left us exposed to a serious pandemic.
That if Amazon acquired it, this would enable it to horizontally integrate and take control of yet another market? This, eventually, woudl lead to lower prices for consumers...
The context of the conversation is one of a horizontal monopoly, in a market that's near saturation, operated by a megacorporation that could afford to ignore profits or losses indefinitely, in the specific industry of robot vaccuums. So maybe the question is "why on earth would someone think supply and demand does apply here?"
I believe he’s asking why the parent poster was suggesting monopolistic consolidation would be good for the consumer, contrary to what all theory and experience would suggest.
*shrug* I gave him the argument baseline argument commonly known because it claims that costs become lower (and thus the merged entity claims to pass lower costs to the consumer) that normally flies at the FTC.
That Amazon wasn't acquiring it for it's business acumen and was actually acquiring it for some secondary purpose (i.e. market consolidation, data extraction)
IMO, if you haven’t been getting a significant productivity boost from LLMs in a technical field, it’s because you lack the basic brain plasticity to adapt to new tools, or feel so psychologically threatened by change that you act like you do.
Your home setup is much less efficient than production inference in a data center. Open source implementation of SDXL-Lightning runs at 12 images a second on TPU v5e-8, which uses ~2kW at full load. That’s 170J or about 1/400th the phone charge.
These models do not appear from thin air. Add in the training cost in terms of power. Yes it's capex and not opex, but it's not free by any means.
Plus, not all these models run on optimized TPUs, but mostly on nVIDIA cards. None of them are that efficient.
Otherwise I can argue that running these models are essentially free since my camera can do face recognition and tracking at 30fps w/o a noticeable power draw since it uses a dedicated, purpose built DSP for that stuff.
Here’s a description of the actual manifesto from the NYT:
> The 262-word handwritten manifesto that the police found on Luigi Mangione begins with the writer appearing to take responsibility for the murder, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It notes that as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not. “To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” he wrote. The note condemns companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
> The handwritten manifesto found on Mangione contained the passages “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document.
The extensions display an estimate based on how many of the extension's users disliked the video. Youtube doesn't expose an API for getting the exact dislike count, except to the creator of the video.
> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.
This sucks. I was at Google many years back and I remember her to be an awesome product leader. In fact even though I was another org, she was helpful and really helped me and our team.
excuse me for this offtopic (?) tangent, but can you please expand on what does being a good/amazing product leader mean? every kind of context helps, as I have no experience working inside these huge super-successful corps. thanks!
Makes insightful directives on what to put in as the core value of a product. When you are making stuff that the world really hasn’t seen before, it’s really hard to know what people want, as they often can’t tell you directly.
I’m not familiar with Susan’s work directly, but for example, it’s widely accepted that YT has the best revenue share and payout for its creators compared to competitors like twitch or TikTok.
Someone has to really sit down and figure out how getting paid for making internet videos works. It didn’t exist before.
Also great product leaders give team members principles and tools to work with (like metrics), so they don’t need to micromanage every decision, and the product can still be cohesive.
To save a couple clicks, here’s the main context linked in the article:
“Per X, the MrBeast video is technically not an undisclosed ad. There is a pre-roll ad for Shopify in the video, which is labeled as such. X boosts posts containing pre-roll ads, but because the post itself is not the ad, it doesn't have the label.”
All of the top 3 cities are places with a low official population and a large working population - Eglin's official pop is 2.8k, but has 80k workers. It's the "most Reddit addicted" city because of an obvious statistical artifact.
