I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.
Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.
This is conflating two kinds of pink. The pink made from combining ends of the spectrum is most commonly termed ‘hot pink.’
The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.
Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.
I'm not a hardware expert here but this strikes me as inaccurate, though the actual performance can be scenario dependent.
The Jetson hardware is targeted to low power robotics implementations.
The Jetson Orin is currently marketed as prototyping platform, and I believe it does not generally challenge recent Apple Silicon for inference performance, even considering prefill.
In the latest Blackwell based Jetson Thor, the key advantage over Apple Silicon is its capable FP4 tensor cores, which do indeed help with prefill. However, it also has half the memory bandwidth of an M4 Max, so this puts a big bottleneck on token generation with large context. If your use case did some kind of RAG lookup with very short responses then you might come out ahead using an optimized model, but for straightforward inference you are likely to lag behind Apple Silicon.
At this stage, professional inference solutions ideally use discrete GPUs that are far more capable than either, but those are a different class of monetary expense.
The story as told may be inaccurate but it wasn’t simply ‘what we had at the time’ either.
The 74 minute length resulted from Sony rejecting the Philips 60 minute 11.5cm diameter “Pinkeltje” disc size in favor of a 12cm diameter.
It’s quite possible that Sony’s Norio Ohga simply argued that the 9th symphony or various operas fitting would be enough of an advantage for the slight size increase without meaningfully decreasing portability.
Meanwhile the LP crowd was flipping sides like it was Ultima VIII (slight exaggeration). Why would it be critical for a new format to do away with multi-disc releases if the customer base has already grown accustomed to them?
For classical music it's a problem because the long track lengths mean that you'll have to flip the record over in the middle of a piece. This was enough of an annoyance that one French label in the 70s created special records just for classical music with extra tightly packed grooves that could hold close to an hour on each side (https://www.discogs.com/label/184887-Trimicron). The downside of this is that the maximum recording volume is significantly reduced so there's a lot more background noise than on a normal record.
I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.
I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.
Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.
Or (and I hate how cynical I've become) "How can I justify buying an outrageously expensive custom-made suit?" Oh yeah, I'll write an article about it, ha ha.
On a less derisive note, a friend and I were riding the JR line in Tokyo when my friend pointed to the hand stitching on the suit of the salaryman (or not? ChatGPT tells me "yakuin" refers to the moire powerful decision-making company employees) standing next to us.
That was a cool thing about public transportation where even the high-flyers travel with gaijin tourists.
Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is child’s play compared to the modern strategy of inciting discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale disinformation.
Don’t forget that part of the reason there’s a compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China’s own concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates the other way.
I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t at least provide the potential for the CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence on western audiences.
You fundamentally misunderstand the rights American citizens have that are being violated. The government doesn't get to decide where it's citizens get their information from. We're supposed to be free to come to our own conclusions even if presented with propaganda and disinformation.
Once the government decides it has the right to curate what media it's citizens are exposed to you are living in a n authoritarian state.
I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an appropriate trade-off.
The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular media content being censored but about the manipulation of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign source. I think people should be given the freedom to choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to think that we as a whole are not susceptible to influence, often without even being aware of how we are influenced.
To the end that the US has a national security interest here: We have other laws on foreign political influence like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs around free speech and free association, but these elicit much less controversy. There’s a fundamental question: should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US Constitution is a death pact.
If the only place nearby to kick a ball around with friends is on an incline, turns to mud half the year, filled with dog droppings, pocked by holes in the ground, peppered with fire ants, lined with poison ivy behind the lopsided structures that stand in for goals, and you utterly hate it-- you might spend a lot of time there anyway.
AT&T was broken up based on location, hence the term Regional Bell Operating Companies.
I’m not sure how the relative straightforwardness of that approach maps to a company that basically has two main supply chains (737 in Renton and everything else in Everett with North Charleston as a satellite.)
Regarding the similarities between Hawaiian and Japanese: There are theories among linguists that there is a connection between Austronesian languages and Japanese. These theories don’t seem to be infeasible, but are currently lacking sufficient supporting evidence.
I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.
Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.
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