> It doesn’t seem like aviation became safer because pilots took risks
That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).
They have a different culture and values, the US’s strengths lie in individualism and the character of the individuals that live here, and that’s both good and bad. But it’s entirely unsurprising that when responsibility and ownership is sharded up into trillions of tiny pieces and diffused that the outcome is awful.
I'm certainly a fan of Japanese products. They are high-quality, etc. And everything was clean and orderly and amazing as a short-term visitor over 20 years ago. I would not be quick to say it is a better culture though, I suspect some negative are quite hidden, and lurking underneath the cultural norms. Again, as an outsider, I have lots of positive thoughts about Japanese culture.
I think you are overcomplicating things. You have a power envelope, and you have to design your application around it. That's pretty much it. From an engineering perspective, there's no real complexity when it comes to the hardware, software protocols operate one level higher. Your app lives and dies by its power budget.
Another interesting use case would be using the card as part of a crypto escrow.
The problems being solved here are:
- walking around with a device that can access a large wallet that could be accessed under duress or coercion
- Key Pairs are hard to remember and type
___
- pre-pay an escrow online with $100
- have a payment card in your pocket
- meet person with another card
- set a payment amount
- touch cards
- escrow unlocks the amount as soon as either card pushes the update online - which if online could be immediately
- card confirms the transaction??
- can also delay the transaction, and if both cards are lost in the meantime, the transaction doesn't go through
- can also specify the payment amount as "set later"
- receiver can also request an amount
- escrow can be funded after the meeting
- good for 1:many payments too, eg splitting a bill
____
cards could also be Key Pair generators, for transferring public keys to other cards, with the exchange recorded for later use. No escrow required. A lot of benefits over handing out printed QR codes of addresses.
Okay so everytime I need escrow I will have to do all this? And use a different account anyway? Does not seem more convenient than current systems. Seems like you're trying to make the problem meet the solution instead of making the solution meet a problem and not considering actual user experience.
I don't know a lot about this area, but I like the [1 doge = 1 doge] thing where people completely stop thinking about dollars and crypto-to-fiat conversion.
The card can work with Lay-buy/lay-by:
_____
You go into a store, pick something out. Get a crypto address for it and the amount required with your special card. They set the thing aside. You leave and return to the store when the transaction has gone through and get your stuff.
You don't pay immediately because you don't want to be walking around with a crypto wallet or a crypto debit card. The merchant doesn't want to pay fees either when dealing with an intermediary. There's no fiat conversion either, at least not as a given.
_____
Gemini says this:
"If you want to do this today, ask the merchant to print or email you a dynamic checkout invoice/QR code so you can complete the transfer on your own device later."
But how widespread is that?
"It is virtually non-existent at retail scale. While the underlying technology exists, you will practically never encounter this specific workflow in the wild."
The "special card" is an evolution of that use-case and organizes it better. You can leave home without thinking about dollars, ready to pay with crypto and not worry about being robbed. No worrying about stockpiling a bunch of receipts either. It's just a 2-step buying process, that's the downside. The shop also has to hope you end up paying once they set it aside. Maybe they'll need a deposit. They can offer deliveries?
Another idea is to pay online and collect it later. Use the card to authenticate yourself when you collect. That would need some decent tech backing it. Make it non-committal where if you don't collect within a certain time frame, you get your money back but lose a penalty chunk.
Isn't this what smart contracts are designed for - crypto transactions tied to real world events? The "special card" provides those events.
The benchmark is nice but it's very much biased towards flagships i.e. not very useful in practice if you are trying to ship production mobile apps. Apple historically is extremely stingy when it comes to RAM and they never bothered giving iPads and iPhones more ram until fairly recently (most likely because of ML demands). Your covid era 10th Gen iPads only have 4GB of RAM for the base models.
The Android ecosystem is much more liberal when it comes to RAM because their Dalvik VM JIT (their Java Android Runtime, partially AOT compiled and partially JITed) design is not particularly memory efficient. But the main issue with Android is that their mid/low end (think the Samsung Galaxy A series, the OnePlus Nords, the Motorola Gs etc.) are very inefficient when it comes to single core compute performance compared to iPhones, and it gets worse once you factor in power efficiency. The high end Android flagships running the Snapdragons elites (especially post Oryon acquisition) have no problems matching if not exceeding Apple hardware performance in terms of raw power but they are much more power hungry.
At the end of the day, the current gen of "pocket scale" LLMs are still far from being able to be deployed at scale on mobile. Maybe in another year or two once RAM prices have fallen enough and mobile manufacturers build a lot more matmul and memory circuits into their SoCs instead of a tiny mostly useless "NPU/tensor processor" that doesn't have enough RAM to run anything useful. Current gen production mobile ML still heavily rely on traditional transfer learning like Apple's Core.ML (tiny pre trained models, with perhaps the final layer inference head swapped out).
If you want a good example of production mobile ML, take a look at FUTO keyboard's transformer model for their keystroke prediction/autocorrect which operates in near real-time.
I would say right now 100M-300M params is about the maximum you can do if you want any reasonable level of performance on your "average" non flagship mobile. I would keep to sub 100M for power efficiency sake.
I love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue:
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
Is this comment on shipping costs from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh based on your experience? If there is a less expensive way then share the approach to help others :)
It could be bureocratic barriers. For example, Turkey recently changed importing laws so that anything(even stuff sent to you for free) from outside the country is subject to tariffs & import costs. Importing a cheap component worth 1$ costs like 300$.
i don't know how trustworthy rateships.com is, but according to them shipping costs to nigeria and trinidad are similar. and as for the last mile, the cost probably goes up because local shipping is rather unsafe (higher rate of theft of packages).
I am in Asia, this means nothing, it's the largest continent on earth. I don't pay as much for shipping as the author does, but his struggles are nevertheless relatable: most sellers refuse to ship here, most of those who do want dozens and dozens of dollars for it, and some (few, usually Chinese) sellers save the situation from being completely hopeless.
In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
> In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
In my experience, the only demographic who complains about “Asia = east Asia” are people from South Asia, aka Indians/desis
Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
1. "Asia" and "Asian" are different words, which mean different things.
2. There is a dialectal difference specific to "Asian" between England, where Pakistani immigrants are prominent, and the United States, where they aren't.
Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian.
The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.
It's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.
Genuinely curious which class of laws that would be.
I assume you mean in the US but the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act makes no mention of race and anti-miscegenation laws speak of Mongolians(presumably to mean people of East Asian ancestry in general).
I think Oriental in the US like the alternative Asiatic applied to all Asians from Istanbul to Vladivostok.
To add, thinking about that comment. It is quite offensive. It essentially comes down to "brown people are all the same". I assumed it was the result of ignorance rather than bigotry, but it being the only comment from a new account makes me think otherwise.
When the term started out, There was nothing called United States (As a country or its current culture/s). And I am not sure if this happens outside the US anyway.
In the context of microcontrollers and electronics, the likeliest intended meaning was shipping from China, South Korea, Taiwan and perhaps Japan, because that’s where the bulk of the fabs are.
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
As someone from the DACH region I very much agree with this. I don't see a shift from typical US opinions to opinions often held in the DACH region. Not at all.
> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of commas in numbers, spacing between quotation marks and words, failing to use context clues to infer timezone), and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.
HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.
I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.
While I appreciated your source
1.) I doubt 99% of Europeans work during 3am - 9am
2.) At least there can be other reasons:
2a.) EU times and African times are basically the same and Africa has a huge population.
2b.) India is closer timewise to EU/African time zones
2c.) What are about posts afterworks?
" RL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase. "
Any proof?
> How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN
For starters, most Bay Area residents are not active on HN on a sunny Sunday afternoon during peak brunch time, a Giants v Rockies game, a social race in the Marina, during the weekend right before college move-in begins for a number of UCs, and the first weekend after the K-12 school year started.
Secondly, the technical conversations on this HN are somewhat divorced from those which are common now. Firstly, no one cares about system cards or micro-level model changes and performance anymore - the name of the game now is eval, harness development, RL/reward engineering, and model-agnostic development.
Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure.
Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. Everyone here knows a UCLA grad has the exact same opportunties right out of college as a Stanford grad. Most high value careers like startups, PE/VC, big tech, etc recruit from a mix of 20-30 public and private schools that I have listed multiple times on here. And to add to that - "MBAs" as a moniker is nonexistent as most of us who are in decisonmaking roles here in VC, Corporate leadership, and mid-level management are engineers who never did MBAs or any kind of grad school (except our Chinese/Indian peers because of the F1 OPT).
Additonally, most people are levelheaded about AI - they don't deride it as useless but they also don't think it's going to destroy all jobs. On HN you get very black-and-white and highly polarized thinking that AI is only going to lead to X or Y.
And finally, I notice a degree of European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism that is nonexistent in the real world. I have co-hosted events with EU consulates, helped direct European startups to get American funding, and vice versa, and had pretty personal and unfiltered conversations over drinks with pretty high level Europeans and Americans, and the kind of acrimony you see on here is nonexistent IRL.
Not a single mention of pickleball, hyrox, Kdramas, Yemeni coffee, women's basketball, and other stuff currently in the zeitgeist in the Bay is very telling.
I dont know about the social aspects since I don't live there, but as far as AI goes, it's not just HN. There is no place where you get balanced takes that match the work that we actually do day to day. I suspect part of this is accelerated by the media practices of the hyperscalers like anthropic and openai - they make doomerism super profitable for publishers. One of the most natural emergent counterweights to doomerism is over-skepticism. That is my theory for why it is the way it is. The remaining over-hype is a counterweight to this over-skepticism (I'm not talking about altman hyping his business, I mean the general tech people going around bashing sutton and lecun and mentioning "AGI")
Even publications, semianalysis is the only major, decent one in my experience (excluding personal blogs).
Everything is low SNR for AI - have you seen ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS recently?? There is almost no point even going except for meeting people which we do by scheduling talks back and forth every few months anyways.
I also find IRL, then a carefully curated twitter timeline with the politics toggle on the settings page set to off, are the only ways to get high SNR information about AI.
I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here.
> I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here
I agree. The thing is, a lot of us moved to Lobsters [0] because of the higher SNR. That is probably the closest to what would be heard amongst engineers in the Bay.
Interesting, mind extending an invite? I completely forgot about that place. I remember it being the one that blocked the brave browser. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore though.
Pickleball and Hyrox is very common in the DACH region, Hyrox was invented in Hamburg...
" Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. " Non existent in DACH region or CEE because why should it?
" Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure." I think people with problems are more likely to post and secondly maybe you are convoluting your social circle with the whole SV.
No I'm a long time Bay Area tech person also and what alephnerd is saying tracks with the interest profile of my circle as well. Predictably I was not on HN during a great weather day with plenty going on. This weekend was also Oakland Pride :)
I haven't done the analysis to see whether it's DACH influenced or not but the rhetoric here does not feel Bay Area shaped at all and hasn't for years. It feels like what happens when too many people read about the Valley from too many Techcrunch articles but don't actually live here. It's largely a worldview composed of too many online articles and gripes.
This is a good example of someone who is out of the loop.
Luma was always a public events app optimized for discovery. Partiful on the other hand was meant to be a a replacement for FB private events when hosting a house party or private gathering. Basically, Luma was always designed for M-F and Partiful was always meant for Sat/Sun.
I would say modern autoland (both GPS based and ILS types) systems are a little better when it comes to handling emergency issues like maximizing range and endurance but the problem with autoland is that they require a lot of things to work perfectly and will refuse to take any risk (autoland systems are not probabilistic like Tesla FSDs, they are mostly automatic traditional control systems). So if the plane will miss the threshold by a few feet the autoland won't even attempt it.
That's pretty much the job of test pilots even today. They are usually dual trained pilots and engineers/technicians, and their job is basically to QA new planes. In military aviation especially test pilots are often feeders into the astronaut program (a different but similar type of daredevil).