As a founder who has gone through scaling processes, I am quite impressed at Zuckerberg's ability to remain relatively competent and relevant at the top role throughout the whole journey. The skillset required changes quite a lot in each phase.
There are very few cases where the archetypical young garage-founder has stayed on top in the long-run.
I’m sure there will be a ton of unexpected complexities that arise only when you are trying to push the limits, like in all engineering domains. And it’s all a highly interconnected system, you cannot expect to dramatically change the water flow without impacting others aspects.
I know it is quite distant, but from my experience in large-scale data engineering, 90% of the time goes in addressing subtle issues that can only be observed hours into a job, the rest of the issues are quickly resolved earlier. I am assuming that such complexities will be so much harder in physical systems, and even more so in biological systems.
Sounds cool but for such experimentation you would want relatively fast experimental iterations to get anywhere, and this would take literal ages. You can play around with growth speed of course but that’s a different question and might be in some ways opposed to achieving height.
I feel like it’s never made clear in what way the water is used up in these cases.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
What do you mean? Did you read the article? There’s so much evidence showing that it was the opposite.
Their profits shot up 3x in 2023 and 5x in 2024. They had 70%-140% profit margins. They publicly said that the end of the flu was a risk for their profits. There’s plenty of messaging recording explicit price collusion.
How is that a natural supply shortage?
The underlying economic factor is simply that monopolies or cartels will always try to manipulate prices in their favor if they can.
The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.
I assume that the PowerPoints can be absolute slop because they do not matter at all, the power is elsewhere.
It all comes to names here. The world puts waaay too much faith in successful people being successful again, and too much of the success is attributed to their inherent talent. It’s a classic fallacy of authority.
Ironically, because everyone thinks that everyone thinks that they will succeed, investing on them does yield good returns, because others are likely to invest after. And they do indeed continue to succeed!
It’s as arbitrary as tulips. Bubbles of names. That’s why it’s weirdos, because it’s quite random who is chosen, and I suppose weirdos have a more pronounced brand.
Of course it’s not completely arbitrary, there’s real merit in cracking the initial chicken-and-egg, depending on where you start in life. And there are plenty of ways of squandering the opportunities that come after. But still.
I would be glad to learn if you are willing to explain, this what I found from trusted sources, but it would be great to know if there’s additional nuance.
> The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia)
Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border".
EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot just copy-paste contemporary disputes and prejudices a thousand years ago. In the historical context it’s just like most borders between different civilizations. The point is that they were a collective organization getting together to defend their land.
> Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger.
And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.
As far as I remember, from when I was closer to academia, in NL postdocs had to be offered a permanent contract after 3 temporary contracts, with a maximum of 1 year per temporary contract, or something like that. I believe this wasn’t exclusive to postdocs and it is a general law for most professions.
In recent years in Spain they aggressively decreased that threshold to the point where most employees need to have permanent contracts. Interestingly it has led to significant growth because, among others factors, it has increased consumer confidence, and it has been a much smaller burden on companies than expected.
Perhaps the term “permanent” contract is confusing to some. It’s not in the sense of a functionary or tenure, where you virtually have a job for life unless there are extreme circumstances. A permanent contract is an indefinite contract, one without a specific end, where firing you needs to be properly justified, but you can be fired, certainly.
It must be more general than that, otherwise the cells wouldn’t be able to repair their area if the damage came from the wrong direction (repair is not center-out).
The model generally learns to generate each pixel from its surroundings, even if the surroundings are partially missing.
In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.
Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.
To me, it is intriguing as a toy model for how cells are able to grow into complex tissue and organisms based only on local information, and how they are able to repair and recover harmed tissue.
Of course, this is as close to cells, as neurons from neural networks are to real neurons. And I have no idea what it could be applied to (inpainting/outpainting?), but it’s interesting as exploratory research.
Oh scientists are leaving science in droves, certainly. Often becoming sales-people for deep-tech companies, which is rather sad.
This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.
It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.
And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.