sushibowl

joined 1 year ago
[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The numbers are different because the site doesn't naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single "package."

One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking "which distribution has more software available."

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 10 points 6 months ago (5 children)

They say that because https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total says so. Debian unstable has 38k packages according to that page.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 17 points 7 months ago

Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you

This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There's a pretty good explanation of it here.

The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 26 points 7 months ago (1 children)

but is this prompt the entirety of what differentiates it from other GPT-4 LLMs?

Yes. Probably 90% of AI implementations based on GPT use this technique.

you can really have a product that's just someone else's extremely complicated product but you staple some shit to the front of every prompt?

Oh yeah. In fact that is what OpenAI wants, it's their whole business model: they get paid by gab for every conversation people have with this thing.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 2 points 7 months ago

It's generally accepted wisdom that the American government is bad at doing anything at all and therefore should suck as much corporate dick as possible to get the corporations to do things instead. A flawless system to be sure.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not impossible, although the loudness wars are pretty much over nowadays. All major music services and players have volume normalisation, many by default, so there's not much point to it any longer.

Also it's pretty tough to find a decades old record still in mint condition, and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 1 points 8 months ago

So is Uber, since this year. My point is, all of these companies ran hundreds of millions of dollars in the red for years before turning a profit.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Before they went public, who was foolish enough to invest in a company that has never turned a profit?

You'd be surprised. The basic strategy of losing money hand over fist for years to grow yourself to as large a user base as possible, before finally aggressively monetizing that user base, is well established in silicon valley. Investors would not even raise an eyebrow at the loss numbers posted by Reddit because of how exceedingly common that is.

And it has worked several times, making some people ridiculously wealthy. Good examples are Amazon, Facebook, and Uber. So usually companies on this level have raised hundreds of millions to sometimes billions of dollars in investment capital, allowing them to operate at these levels of losses for years at a time.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Because you're exchanging stock worth $193 million for an equivalent amount of dollars, there's technically no profit or loss involved in the transaction. In the same manner, when paying stock as a compensation, you secure services valued at $193 million for an amount of shares worth the same: the transaction is entirely equal. So you don't make or lose any money by paying in stock.

Of course, the trick is that the value of the CEO's work for one year can be whatever he says. If your claim is that they could have gotten more value out of the stock had they sold it in the IPO, I think you are absolutely correct in that regard.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 64 points 8 months ago (12 children)

Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package?

No. His normal salary is around 300k a year. This $193 million figure was the presumed valuation of a stock/options package he received ahead of the IPO. It doesn't cost the company anything to pay him in stock, so it doesn't affect the profit/loss calculation.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 24 points 9 months ago

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that excuses anything. If you bought a hard copy with the understanding that a digital copy came with the purchase and now they're taking away the digital copy, that's still a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal" type move.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 18 points 9 months ago

I agree but also disagree. It's true that machines are capable of fine motor control much more quickly and accurately than humans. But this by itself is often not enough.

This achievement should be somewhat surprising because of Moravec's paradox: the observation that, opposite to what early AI researchers expected, intelligence and reasoning skills are comparatively easy for a computer to simulate, while sensorimotor skills are in fact incredibly hard. Notice how, for example, chess engines started beating human players in the 90s or so, but we still don't have a robot that can do something as simple as pick raspberries (because surprise, for a machine picking a raspberry is actually hard as shit).

view more: ‹ prev next ›