Last time I checked, his actions secured him 30 Billions USD now, 1 Trillion USD in the future. Also, He is in AI and robotics now.
Anyway, still don't get why Theranos failed to pivot to something else when they couldn't do the single drop blood thing and failed. Was there something contractual in their investment rounds? Was it because they were into healthcare? Was it because she was trying to be Steve Jobs instead of Musk?
It seems to me that Elizabeth Holmes could have promised that the test are coming next year and just release repackaged Siemens machines with a cloud integration and pretty UI and figure out products down the line and keep promising that single drop tests are coming next year. Then pivot to AI and robotic.
And the AI videos are going the same way as full self driving:
1) looking like Tesla is easily two year, probably more behind everyone else
2) the others are seeing real SOTA performance ... and are not planning products because they think it won't work, or at least not yet
I must say ... really reminds me of the Tesla autopilot situation.
And I'd add 3) the really impressive robots, ie. the ones based on Boston Dynamics, are not based on ML algorithms. They are augmented by AI, not running actual AI algorithms in the control loop. The founder was an electrical engineering professor who moved into a CS direction (you know the sort of person who insists not just writing control loops in realtime, in assembly, but actually develops custom hardware for those algorithms. And I don't mean FPGAs or DSPs, I mean actual circuits)
So the entire approach of Tesla (and a lot of other startups) could be very wrong, and could very well be 5 theoretical breakthroughs removed from being feasible.
100%. We are seeing the bet of hard coded functions vs AI learned functions play out for us over the next year or two. Waymo has special case code for so much of their stack. Tesla removes special case code and replaces it with inference. Same with the Boston Dynamics vs Tesla robots. Tesla is making a bet that custom case code isn't going to scale nearly as fast as AI inference scales. Good news is that if one feels strongly one can place bets with one's money! If one doesn't feel strongly you can just comment on HN or Reddit or just watch.
It’s really hard to do sarcasm online in a way which is clear, still funny, and doesn’t normalize beliefs you oppose or make it easy for people to dismiss you with the “both sides” fallacy. It’s been a staple of internet humor for decades but I now think that was a mistake.
that is because they are all using non deterministic approaches, aka expecting that a single detailed prompt with 10000 words is going to generate a stable application. Because prompts dont have replay value, you have to split it into one microtask per agent and validate the output with deterministic fallback as and when required.
Thats why those Engineering fields have strict rules, often require formal education and someone can even end up in prison if screws up badly enough.
Software is so much easier and safer, till very recently anonymous engineering was the norm and people are very annoyed with Apple pushing for signing off the resulting product.
Highly paid software engineers across the board must have been an anomaly that is ending now. Maybe in the future only those who code actually novel solutions or high risk software will be paid very well - just like engineers in the other fields.
> people are very annoyed with Apple pushing for signing off the resulting product.
Apple is very much welcome to push for signing off of software that appears on their own store. That is nothing new.
What people are annoyed about is Apple insisting that you can only use their store, a restriction that has nothing to do with safety or quality and everything to do with the stupendous amounts of money they make from it.
It's literally the case of Apple requiring signing the binary to run on the platforms they provide, Apple doesn't have say on other platforms. It is a very similar situation with local governments.
Also, people complain all the time about rules and regulations for making stuff. Especially in EU, you can't just create products however you like and let people decide if it is safe to use, you are required to make your products to meet certain criteria and avoid use certain chemicals and methods, you are required to certify certain things and you can't be anonymous. If you are making and selling cupcakes for example and if something goes wrong you will be held responsible. Not only when things go wrong, often local governments will do inspections before letting you start making the cupcakes and every now and then they can check you out.
Software appears to be headed to that direction. Of course du to the nature of software probably wouldn't be exactly like that but IMHO it is very likely that at least having someone responsible for the things a software does will become the norm.
Maybe in the future if your software leaks sensitive information for example, you may end up being investigated and fined if not following best practices that can be determined by some institute etc.
That's not a very compelling counterexample, when you consider how often countries with governments force other countries with government to do as they want, often with nothing but economic or soft power.
> Apple is very much welcome to push for signing off of software that appears on their own store.
Just to be clear, apps have to be notarized/signed to run on an Apple device. For macOS, notorized apps aren't required to be distributed in the App Store. Due to sandbox restrictions, some dev tools are distributed independently.
Or there are two versions: a less capable version for the App Store and a more capable version distributed independently.
Software developers being paid well is result of demand, not be cause it's very hard.
Skill and strictness required is only vaguely related to pay, if there is enough people for the job it won't pay amazing, regardless on how hard it is.
> Software is so much easier and safer, till very recently anonymous engineering was the norm and people are very annoyed with Apple pushing for signing off the resulting product.
that has nothing to do with engineering quality, that is just to make it harder to go around their ecosystem (and skip paying the shop fee). With additional benefit of signed package being harder to attack. You can still deliver absolute slop, but the slop will be from you, not the middleman that captured the delivery process
There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors.
In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded.
In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places.
In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district.
In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent.
In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that.
You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.
I say the exact same thing about living in NYC. It is statistically safe if you look at murders per capita compared to a rural area. But that one statistic tells you nothing about what kind of random crap you have to put up with on a day to day basis taking a 45 minute subway commute daily that isn't collected in any statistic.
The youth tend to be much less absolutists for free speech and don't value anonymity as much as the elders of the internet(!), at least that's my observation. They are much more familiar with people who are into all these things for the profits and don't idealise the WWW as the old folks used to. My guess is that they were born in already corrupt world where online professionals were doing everything for money and dirty tricks like rage baiting and astroturfing were already the norm and as a result they don't have a grand mission fantasy about the internet. Also, because they were born in an already online world they don't see the disturbances of trolls as disturbances in their online persona that is a toy for their real persona, they see trolls as trouble makers to their real persona which is fused with their online persona.
Back in the day of forums personal banning wasn't a thing, we had to see everything until someone did something bad enough to be deplatformed from the forum. In the current social media, you can just block people you don't like, you don't have to endure their "content".
The censorship is built-in in modern platforms. I prefer the old ways personally but in the old days the profile of the people was different.
Not people doesn't mean that they must be bots, IMHO it means not people who are having opinions but social media workers or entrepreneurs who are having opinions based on metrics that fulfill their KPI which are often stuff like increase engagement, increase followers, increase revenue, get a talking point into the trends, make people talk about a brand or a politician etc. Many large accounts on Twitter are openly corporate accounts of some social media companies and many others are freelancers.
People are not having concerned citizen ideas 24 hours a day everyday, those are obviously professionals who are having concerns about the society, race, jews etc in order to fulfill some goals. Those are not real people, you won't be able to change their minds with argumentation because they don't speak their mind in first place. That's for Twitter of course, in other places they have other productions like "tradwifes" on Instagram or reviewers on Youtube. They are all businesses or indies trying to become businesses. They all use analytics and do A/B testing to acquire and steer their content ideas to the platforms liking. Platforms decide what will be shown to the users, they of course need to run their own business and they also pursue their own KPIs but as cost of doing business they allow other businesses to insert their KPI into the algorithm in exchange of money or favors. For example when there's a new movie release upcoming they can pay the platform to boost engagement on content about their movie, platforms also incentivize the creation of such content by paying certain influencers if they create a content that feeds into the campaign(i.e. if they do a dance from a movie that is being promoted they get paid if their dance video meets the quota). They can do all this for consumer products but they can do it for political stuff too.
Almost no genuine content, its all one big reality show all orchestrated by the big tech. I mean sure, there is genuine content but they are all fillers or trying to win against the flow.
just google it ( https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+of+twitter+is+bots+... ) and then go through what you believe is right and makes sense to you. I don’t use social media myself for over 6 years now but when I take my wife’s phone I haven’t seen many people anywhere other than influencers :)
It's not that more houses are needed, its that more houses are needed at specific location and the people in that specific location don't like the idea of demolishing houses and make them taller or turn a city park into housing.
There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.
The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.
Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.
It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.
People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
Yes, No, Yes?
I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.
GP wasn't differentiating between different types of updates in their argument, because it doesn't make sense - they're discussing the economics of it, which doesn't care if you're fixing bugs or not.
>> How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.
while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.
> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.
hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.
that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics.
People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.
People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.
One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.
The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.
It wasn’t one time fee though.
The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches.
A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.
To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it
The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.
But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.
It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.
If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.
I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.
I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.
So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.
So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.
Interestingly, places that used to be shit holes are becoming better or at least show a desire for becoming better. For example in eastern Europe, there are movements that demands democracy and destruction of the establishment.
So if all the world is against the establishment, it only makes sense that shit holes become better places and better place become shit holes.
That's it I suspect that these moments can be quite fragile. Turkey was crashed, Georgia was crashed, Belarus was crashed, Russia was crashed, Ukraine is fighting generational war, Serbia is teetering, Bulgaria is on to something but its only a spark ATM. However, the crashed ones also did not stabilize, they just become brutal and visibly oppressed and IMHO anything still can happen.
When I read the title I hoped that EFF was going to do exactly that.
There’s also a way to improve it: Sell “age verification cards” in physical stores. Just like they are verifying that minors aren’t buying alcohol or cigarettes, they can verify that these cards are bought only by grown ups. Sure wouldn’t be perfect but it greatly improves anonymity and especially in paid-for adult services can be used as a payment method so repeat verification will happen for top ups.
Anyway, still don't get why Theranos failed to pivot to something else when they couldn't do the single drop blood thing and failed. Was there something contractual in their investment rounds? Was it because they were into healthcare? Was it because she was trying to be Steve Jobs instead of Musk? It seems to me that Elizabeth Holmes could have promised that the test are coming next year and just release repackaged Siemens machines with a cloud integration and pretty UI and figure out products down the line and keep promising that single drop tests are coming next year. Then pivot to AI and robotic.
Edit: I think I forgot that “\s”
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