TFA author. How does the word "dispatching" hint at the order of magnitude of anything? What orders of magnitude do depend on is your competition. Outdoing a CPU at operation X is easier than outdoing a GPU at X [assuming the GPU does X reasonably well] which is easier than outdoing a DSP at X [assuming the DSP does X reasonably well]. If your competition is reasonably optimized programmable accelerators, your opportunities to beat it start shrinking.
A group of 100 is 10 groups of 10. Does the autonomy of the group of 10 shrink as predicted by Paul Graham's "virtual person" argument? It might or it might not - and it's certainly not obvious that the constraints imposed on a 10-people company by their relationships with the external world are any better or worse, from any given angle, than the constraints imposed on a 10-people team by their relationships with the company employing the team.
Why do people contribute to projects like Linux or LLVM without getting paid for it? (Of course lots of them get paid to do this, but many are not.) It's not exactly easy calories for a caged lion, the way Graham describes a corporate job taken by recent college grads. Instead, people choose to work in these large groups because they want to make an impact. You can instead contribute to TinyCC or MenuetOS - smaller team, less impact. Are Linux or LLVM uninspiring? Were they only inspiring when they were too small for most of their current practical uses?
If productivity is concentrated in small companies - or companies of size X - why aren't companies of this size drive the other companies out of business? I think that market realities point in the direction of there being economies of scale and diseconomies of scale, without a single one-size-fits-all procedure for determining the optimal firm size for any particular endeavor.
If you work on/for a startup and that startup succeeds, it will more often than not have to grow. If you're unlike Paul Graham who sold his startup and then invested in countless others and made lots of money but did not keep working on the thing he'd built - meaning, if you're what he likes to call maker as opposed to primarily a money-maker - you will want to keep working on the thing you built. And this desire to keep working on that thing is what will prompt you to adapt your views on group size and how people thrive and lions and sugary food. And when you'll see what a hundred people can make out of what was started by ten, it will be very rewarding.
If a collar sits comfortably on a cat's neck, the cat will remove the collar. If a collar sits very tightly on a cat's neck, it's somewhat uncomfortable.
What if you're not home? It is for such occasions that cat flaps were invented. However, today's cat flaps either open for any cat, or they're RFID-based, and for that to work, you implant a chip into your cat, which I find utterly barbaric.
Now what could be a great improvement is a cat flap identifying your cat(s) and letting them in based on computer vision, instead of relying on implants. I'd pay good money for it, provided that it worked in all weather conditions and all cat conditions (a wet and dirty cat needs to get in even more than a dry and clean one but I expect false negatives in these scenarios.)
They don't show a comparison to bfloat16 PEs/FMA. IEEE half precision uses a larger mantissa than bfloat16, and the cost of multiplication is proportionate to the square of the mantissa size. I'd expect much lower gains relatively to bfloat16
It's certainly the case that neural nets work flawlessly because they're like the brain - ask any journalist. Without doubt, an image of the brain enhances NN performance
(TFA author) If it's a really important patent for an individual inventor as opposed to another one to add to the company's portfolio mainly to grow its size, then of course you want to do prior art search. I wasn't talking about the individual inventor's situation as I'm not familiar with it; perhaps you could elaborate on your reasons why your feelings are mixed after the process. I was talking about the situation of a typical company's employee. And yes, it's an "easy legal defense" for a product company to forego prior art search, but it's not an urban legend, it's real legal advice I heard from real lawyers.
The same applies to the lawyer's experience. If you're an individual inventor, you're gonna look for the lawyer with the best experience and the law firm with the best price (and IMO you're right in that the $1000/hour lawyers aren't necessarily the best for you.) If you work for a company, someone will find a lawyer to deal with your stuff and the lawyer will behave very confidently, in a "business as usual" kind of manner, when you explain them the basics and they keep not getting it, and you might naturally assume that's how things are supposed to work, when instead what you should do is push back against whoever set you up with this lawyer and insist on getting one with relevant experience.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. I admit that I find it hard to see how to control the exfiltration of data once it's been figured out by a badly sandboxed program. But the idea that systematically addressing side channel attacks in a sandbox is really hard seems very valid. I mean, the exploit described in TFA is quite the argument in favor of this point.
At my end, I wonder where the author ever saw deterministic computer systems. In my experience, you have to work really, really hard to get even a system computing outputs from inputs without processing any external events in-between to produce deterministic results, with things like floating point hardware and software and parallelism APIs, not to mention your own bugs, working overtime against you - to say nothing of faulty DRAMs and other such delightful phenomena.
A company leaving a large market will be outcompeted by a company which doesn't; for companies, ignoring profits kills them. If it's anyone's job to respond to China's government, it's other governments', as they can take losses more easily but still not easily enough to get by without coordinated action (easier for governments than companies since there are fewer governments and new states don't form as quickly as new companies.)
You mean if everyone teams up and makes their case politically, we'll all make far more, in real terms? So teaming up increases overall productivity? (Not impossible but would need more evidence than teaming up increasing bargaining power, though of course the latter needs evidence, too as a junior unionized worker doesn't have bargaining power against senior workers whom union arrangements incidentally tend to benefit.)
I'd think one is more qualified to address local challenges than global ones. Certainly all those people made their money focusing on the US market, not only because it's big and governed by relatively uniform regulations but because they understand it better than any other. For the same reasons, it's IMO far easier to be effective as a philanthropist closer to home. (This is not to say there aren't exceptions to this, just that there's a certain tendency for it to be true. Of course there's the somewhat-Rawlsian argument that you should focus on those worst off first; without addressing this argument in itself, I think you should also focus on those whom you can make better off most effectively and who in turn will likely do the most philanthropic work once their own situation improves, and at least for a US billionaire, US citizens sound like a great target demographic on both counts.)
"I don't believe it's my position to enforce the amount of whitespace another developer has to use in their editor."
I suspect this might not be my most popular comment, but I honestly think that this is why tab users might actually make less than space users on average. On average, it's more productive to enforce things than leave everything configurable, thus different everywhere, thus harder to make sense of and debug. I knew brilliant people who don't want to "enforce" and decide and dim people who happily enforced and decided and it's always amazing how badly the former do career-wise relatively to their talent and effort, and how well the latter do relatively to theirs.
(Of course there might be another explanation for the data and I don't claim that my just so story is in any way scientific; though I think it should pass as a scientific theory in the social sciences.)
You can say this about any level of democracy though (that its downside is populistic decisions, or, more precisely, decisions that you or I think are wrong.) It's easy to find a country where most decisions are made by elected leaders and they chose leaders you or I find terrible, who proceeded to make a lot of bad decisions. I don't see an argument either for more or less direct democracy here (though I guess with some data and given a belief of what decisions are "good" one could construct an argument.)
The US population for instance prohibited alcohol and then undid the prohibition, and I think the least that can be said in favor of this process is that since then there's seemingly a consensus in the US wrt prohibition. I'm not sure such consensus is achievable when elected officials enact laws, not to mention when a Supreme Court reinterprets the constitution to de-facto enact a law.
Overall, to me it seems that decisions will be made and reversed no matter what's your process, and it seems that referendums are a great way for the population to "own" the decision - not just affect it but feel responsibility for it.
Also I'd guess that more direct democracy would reduce both stability and corruption (people are more likely to change the status quo, harder to bribe, and not as likely to form 2 or some other small number of groups voting together on every issue as professional politicians.) It seems that we have a lot of both stability (presumably a good thing) and corruption (presumably a bad thing) and it doesn't look like a terrible gamble to attempt to reduce both.
Source: my day job