Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings.
I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can.
People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.
Businesses don't pay for costs solely with revenue, they also use cash from loans. Revenue is used to pay off loans, so higher interest rates mean loans become more expensive. To maintain constant loan repayment costs through a projected year, the total amount of those loans has to go down. With lower cash from loans, costs have to be cut and payroll is one of them.
I think this partially explains why everyone is doing layoffs regardless of revenue performance: they all have to adapt to the same conditions of higher interest rates.
But regardless of whether any big tech co. needs loans or not, the cost of any investment they make, as well as the referred-to-present value of any payoff from it, are anchored to the interest rate. And the recent upward movement in the interest rate -- not to mention high inflation -- has drastically (relative to the ~0% interest days) raised the costs and lowered the payoffs.
Tech (both Big Tech & startups) is also getting hammered hardest first here mostly because those are the ventures that attracted investment of the lion's share of 0%-minted dollars, and that investment is vaporizing at the same time that the ROI (payoffs - costs) on lots of those firms' WIP has gone negative.
Need? No. But they can invest cash on hand into things that have a higher yield than the base interest rate, and operate the business using loans at the base interest rate.
Even Apple with its giant cash war chest uses loans. A lot of their money is in offshore subsidiaries and would incur a tax if they on-shored it to the United States. It’s often cheaper to borrow money and pay it off with earnings than to pay taxes on the money.
Every price includes an interest rate derivative, even if you pay with cash.
If interest rates are high, then buying something has a higher opportunity cost since you're forgoing earning interest on your capital. As patio11 put it in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/banking-in-very-uncer..., "when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall."
Cashflow is hard ... On the one hand you must pay 200,000+ employees everywhere in the world at regular intervals without fail. But on the other hand, the cash to do that is tied up in various places, it's in a different country, it's in various interest-bearing bonds or shares that cannot be redeemed quickly, or it's even in future revenues that you've not received yet. And it wouldn't be efficient to have a massive cash float on hand in country-specific bank accounts, when that money could be invested profitably.
The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding SEO.
What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better keyword matching to generate results, but Google is developing ways to match query vectors to document vectors using stuff like BERT. Google is looking at the knowledge graph of entities that emerges out of the content we write and is trying to figure out which relationships between entities are important to a query and which result set has the best coverage and diversity. This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics and bury the point inside of it.
The other major shift in Google is how they consider links. PageRank is still around in some form, but there could be other link-based algorithms that serve similar purposes. The last few years of core algorithm updates put a lot of importance on receiving links from news websites for any keyword with commercial intent. If you want to rank, go hard on public relations.
The result is a real loss of accuracy and a lot more false positives that are semi-related to the query.
>This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics
Is it accurate to call organisations that write text according to google's incentives 'publishers' or are they merely spammers trying to maximise their pageviews and conversions?
Yup. IMHO spam has become so good at mimicking genuine content, it's hard to recognize even for a human curator. There's so many websites in the top google results that I'm sure are entirely AI generated, which exist for the sole purpose to propagate affiliate links and ads.
Yes. It's like the results when people realized you could have a classifier trained to match a person's face, reversed to generate a new face based on the classifier. There are a few extra steps, but the web is just recipe sites and product reviews that look like what the google ranking algorithms idealized site looks like.
I'm going to argue no. Unemployed people are not lazy sponges mooching off of an extra, measly $300/month.
The easiest explanation is that teenagers are cheaper to employ for a certain segment of jobs and won't quit when their 5-15 year career job opens back up.
This is idealism getting lost in the sauce to the highest degree. If you ever find yourself thinking "reality is just math", you must remember: the map is not the territory.
Right, but his whole point is to defend the idea of saying, "what if the math is the reality, what happens then?" It's sort of the same jump that pushed QM forward in the first place of discarding all the assumptions about particles and orbits and just went purely to what was necessary directly in the math.
In the paper he advocates going farther and saying, there's no independent "space" just the vector and space(time) emerges purely from the evolution of that vector.
If your territory is a map, then the map might be the territory.
>what if the math is the reality, what happens then?
Magic. Reversing the relationship between reality and our interpretation of it literally means bending reality with ideas. In this case magic is matrix multiplication.
Yeah. I think the downside is that you end up even further into the "shut-up and compute" paradigm of physics that we are already in.
But if you get predictions from the theory that turn out to be true in the end (like entanglement, Bell's inequality, etc) then it gives you a lot of confidence in your theory.
I don't know how it'll turn out. At this point people are throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks to get physics out of the local minima it seems to have found itself in.
I don't think Carroll or anyone else is naively wandering into this endeavor from a philosophical standpoint though.
I fully agree to the last point. He had (and probably/hopefully continues to have) very interesting discussions on all kinds of topics ranging from physics to biology to philosophy to psychology to social topics to ... in his mindscape podcast
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
Sure, but I think the analogy breaks down in this case.Here the map contains precisely the same amount of information as the territory, no reduction of dimensionality,no loss of resolution. Everything that can be said of the territory can be said of the map and we're left with a case in which the only unique non-shared property of the territory is "physical existence", whatever that is.
I may be risking sounding like a fool here, but isn't there kind of a real distinction between saying that there are underlying mathematical patterns in a reality that behaves like a state machine, and saying that literally this function and starting condition are isomorphic to the universe?
Like if on a low level it turns out that everything is, I don't know, cellular-automata-based, that would be a more useful frame than wandering vectors in a Hilbert space. But if we get to the end of physics and found that, in fact, you could rederive everything from that one explanation, it wouldn't be unfair to say that the universe is that vector, and perhaps some functions.
I guess really I'm wondering if it matters more how the universe is 'computed' or what it's 'computed on'. In a non-simulated universe, of which it seems there must exist at least one, there would at some point just have to be laws without causes. If those laws corresponded to some simple bit of math, it wouldn't be wrong to merge map and territory.
edit: That's not to say that I actually think the paper is correct. I'm definitely not far enough along in my education to be 100% sure, but there are enough suspicious features and a high enough bar that I'm doubtful. I just meant to mount a general defense of 'what if it's all math' type explanations.
Imagine living in a virtual reality and hearing that the reality is just a computation.
Would it be metaphysical? Not really, because it does not speak about anything but the computation which, by construction, is the reality of such universe. It claims no knowledge of the computer implementation details which are mot reflected in the computation, like its power consumption or the color of the chassis, or even the fact that a chassis might exist.
I think that sticking to intuitive and customary notions of reality when experimental data contradict them is not scientific. Science is all about building a better model that fits more and more experimental data points as tightly as possible. If such model introduces notions that the mundane experience entirely lacks, while still describing these mundane phenomena perfectly, it's time to admit that the reality is indeed "weird", and it's your mundane intuitions which are wrong (or, rather, apply narrowly).
Also, the end result of science is the math that fits the experiments, that is, the model of reality, the language of it is math. You can ask whether there's something behind that math, like you might ask whether there's something behind the computations in a virtual reality universe. I assume we can't see past this border with scientific means, only with metaphysical.
Pretty much anything can be dismissed with an adlib of the form "It's [boring subject] as [thing I don't like] riffing on [some other thing]." It never captures the nuance, or why X as Y riffing on Z might still be interesting or enlightening.
But it helps you realize there's nothing obvious about reality. We can question everything, even that maybe we're experiencing reality in a time based manner due to a fluke but theres actually no evolution - we're a static map of space time, and us idiots pretend we evolve and change direction.
That might have been true for a couple of years if you just compare pure computing power, as soon as you factor in build quality and compared it to Thinkpad X1s, XPS & Co you were in similar price ranges again. Or if you don't care about build quality, another classic is the high-res displays (and software support) which took the competitors years and some might argue that they're still not there.
Oh and there was also a couple of generations where Apple had pretty much kind-of exclusivity on Intel's newest CPUs and they were really only available in MacBooks for the first few months.
Yeah, all stuff that sucked. There is even more, Staingate, Bendgate, ... Never said Apple is flawless :) You think the comparable offerings from Dell, Lenovo or HP are flawless? Oh I have news for you.
You know what, if you look close enough, "they all suck".
Not for comparable quality, you weren't. The prices varied depending on features but it wasn't twice as much unless you failed to control specs (I remember forum posters accusing everyone of being fanboys when they came up with a number like that by comparing, say, an Apple device with an SSD to something with a previous-generation processor and spinning metal drive). If you're buying comparable quality you get fairly comparable cost.
Well it's essentially just a placeholder name for what we don't know ;P
Along a similar vein, I find the concept of "Dark Energy" really hard to swallow. To me it seems like such a bizarre assumption to assume a force akin to anti-gravity instead of assuming plain old gravity.
Except that dark matter is often described as exotic and actually existing but not yet discovered. And I'm not talking about the publications that platform charlatans like Michio Kaku
I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can.
People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.