That's sorta what MetaBrainz did - they offer their whole DB as a single tarball dump, much like what Wikipedia does. I downloaded it in the order of an hour; if I need a MusicBrainz lookup, I just do a local query.

For this strategy to work, people need to actually use the DB dumps instead of just defaulting to scraping. Unfortunately scraping is trivially easy, particularly now that AI code assistants can write a working scraper in ~5-10 minutes.

I mean this AI data scrapper would need to scan and fetch billions of website

why would they even care over 1 single website ??? You expect instiution to care out of billions website they must scrape daily

This is probably the reason. It’s more effort to special case every site that offers dumps than to just unleash your generic scraper on it.

Sure. Development at Google is glacially slow because nobody does any work, and so they're only publishing releases bi-annually because there aren't enough substantive changes to make quarterly releases seem important. This will also allow the teams to move to biannual OKRs instead of quarterly, which lets ICs and line managers do half as much work while giving executives justification for why they need twice as much headcount.

When it comes to large bureaucracies, always assume laziness over malice or strategic competence.

Commuting and residential patterns changed too. A lot of Googlers purchased houses in the Tri-valley during COVID instead of living in apartments in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or SF. Now they have a Dumbarton or 237 commute instead of something Caltrain-accessible. Tech companies also started laying off in 2022, and stopped hiring in the Bay Area; I'd bet that total employment along the Caltrain corridor is significantly lower than in 2019.

The Bay Area also needs way better last-mile transportation. I looked into taking Caltrain to work; it'd take 22 minutes to Caltrain the ~15 miles to the nearest Caltrain station, and then another 22 minutes to shuttle the 2.5 miles to work.

Health and medicine is very far from deterministic. Your drug interaction checker is deterministic because the non-determinism is handled at a higher level (the doctor / patient interaction) in the health care system. Individual patients often respond wildly differently to the same medicine even in the absence of drug interactions.

Similarly the non-determinism in ChatGPT should be handled at a higher level. It can suggest possibilities for diagnosis and treatment, but you should still evaluate those possibilities with the help of a trained physician.

Even if they are good at problem solving, a series of 10-minute appointments spaced out in 2-3 month intervals while they deal with a case load of hundreds of other patients will not let them do it. That's the environment that most GPs work under in the modern U.S. health care system.

Pay for concierge medicine and a private physician and you get great health care. That's not what ordinary health insurance pays for.

That's the crux of it. My only point was it's nothing intrinsic to training or ability; they're often hamstrung by the larger system.

We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy. The big issue with all transactions done under significant information asymmetry is moral hazard. The person performing the service has far less incentive to ensure a good outcome past the conclusion of the transaction than the person who lives with the outcome.

Applies doubly now that many health care interactions are transactional and you won't even see the same doctor again.

On a systemic level, the likely outcome is just that people who manage their health better will survive, while people who don't will die. Evolution in action. Managing your health means paying attention when something is wrong and seeking out the right specialist to fix it, while also discarding specialists who won't help you fix it.

> We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy

This is just factually not true. Healthy people subsidize the unhealthy (even those made unhealthy by their own idiocy) to a truly absurd degree.

Well, the biggest consequences aren't financial, they're losing your quality of life, or your life itself.

But the effects aren't just financial, look in an ER. People who for one reason or another haven't been able to take care of themselves in the emergency room for things that aren't an emergency, and it means your standard of care is going to take a hit.

Ah yeah, good point.

Sure?

So they do end up bearing most of the brunt of their own decisions. But you're also right, it's not entirely on them.

It's hard to see how H-1B hiring could move meaningfully either up or down, given that the number of H-1Bs is capped at 65,000 [1] (+ 20,000 for advanced degrees), no company is going to pay for the process of getting an H-1B visa and not actually hire into it, and if a person on an H-1B loses their job they lose their visa in 60 days. You know exactly how many H-1Bs there are in the country: it's mandated by Congress.

What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Most people install induction stoves as part of a larger kitchen or home reno. If you're switching over from gas you probably didn't have a 50amp 220V circuit anywhere near the stove. But kitchen renos have to bring the kitchen up to code, so if you're bringing in an electrician anyway to redo all the wiring, might as well put in a circuit for the induction stove, and code requires that it be on a GFCI.

The folks who just want a drop-in replacement are probably not getting induction - they're the ones who complain about the necessary electrical upgrades being too expensive.

That seems to be what Impulse is targeting - standard size drop in inductive with a lot of high tech features (for the price) and a ludicrous battery, so you don't need to upgrade the wiring (since you don't cook 24x7 after all.) No ideas if the numbers work out, but they're definitely aiming at a perceived gap...

Yeah, my new induction range after a kitchen microwave fire is on, I think, a 40 amp circuit. But the whole kitchen electrical (and, indeed, much of the house) was being redone anyway.

Though if you don't do it, someone eventually decides to start a competing company, fix all the problems, demonstrate that they can be fixed, take all your customers, and put management out of a job.

Yup, that was one of Steve Job's principles: he recognized that someone was going to do something better and take your market share — so it is best if you cannibalize your own market share before they do.

I will never not talk about how bonkers it was that Jobs got up on that stage in 2005 and launched a complete replacement for the iPod mini, at the time the best-selling portable music player and it wasn't even close.

How many other execs would have the courage to do that vs letting the current thing (microdrive player) settle and holding the new thing (flash memory player) in reserve to launch only in response to a competitor gaining traction?

Not if your company buys the competition out before they become a threat.

No guarantee that they or their investors will be willing to sell to you, and in some cases it means that management in the upstart ends up taking over the acquiring company, as with the Apple->Next, Disney->Pixar, and Time Warner->AOL mergers.

I sometimes wonder if this is the real reason for the AI bubble. Major cloud providers are trying to front-load their computing purchases in case geopolitical trouble makes it impossible to get computers. At cloud scale, that's billions of dollars in new investment. So they kick off a new computing paradigm, hype it up, and now their cost of capital for this new investment is significantly lower because they can sell it as getting a piece of future revenues. Basically just a way to make shareholders pay for geopolitical hedging.