thephyber

5,477 karmajoined 13년 전

Interested in genetic programming, bug bounties, and automation in software. Programming iOS apps these days.

comments

I don’t think we should use current prices as landmarks for large scale demand. That Studio’s current prices is inflated because of a (presumably) short term supply crunch, not because the average user is willing to pay $24k for a home AI inference device.

It assumes that RAM remains supply constrained and that none of the existing RAM contracts are cut short.

But Meta and xAI putting A TON of AI compute onto the market. OpenAI and Anthropic are raising the costs of inference (by reducing how much inference users get via subscriptions). And we haven’t seen Oracle / CoreWeave struggle to pay their debts yet, but they will be selling assets once they get close to that point.

Also, FWIW I couldn’t get delivery to my residence when I lived in a ski resort town. I was forced to use a PO Box, which put the burden of the last mile on the user and took that burden off of the postal service. I’m guessing lots of farmers who don’t live on main roads/routes have to similarly use PO Boxes.

I agree to the extent that this is about tradeoffs, hence my last paragraph about “moving the slider”.

USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.

Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.

This iOS feature isn’t only about locking out users from some features/apps.

It turns a complicated phone into a much more simple one. Both kids and the elderly can benefit from it.

My only issue is that the was only introduced in 2024, so older iPhones can’t benefit.

3일 전discuss

This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.

(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.

You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.

(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.

(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.

(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).

If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.

7일 전discuss

It’s much more complicated than that.

In a society where everybody is already driving to school, work, food, shopping medical appointments, gas stations, kids sports, etc this is just a marginal additional trip for the consumer.

Having redundant logistics companies (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Amazon, WalMart, Uber, etc) all making deliveries optimizing for something other than _minimum distance traveled_ means they aren’t optimizing for the same thing the consumer would.

Also, there is the game theory aspect. When a consumer mentally thinks they can just make a $5 purchase on Amazon and get it delivered the next day “for free”, they are less likely to take care to shop in bulk / batch their purchases. Nobody goes to CostCo for a $5 trip (except for the weirdos who go there just for the hot dog / pizza lunch). I personally don’t like the hassle of CostCo for less than a $200 shopping trip.

8일 전discuss

Most likely the vendor will make a judgement call about whether they care to comply. If they do want to comply, they will likely exempt all Virginia data from the collected data set and contractually require and downstream user to indemnify them if a Virginia person is affected by their data set.

8일 전discuss

It’s important to understand that in the USA, data is owned by the collector (eg. The app or SaaS who generated it), not the person who is described by it.

Until this legal regime changes, we will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with laws like this.

8일 전discuss

“As an excuse” is a weird way of saying “responding to national supply and demand”. 100% of the suppliers who didn’t have to cull all of their chickens raised their prices.

8일 전discuss

Those contributed.

But also, the news isn’t privy to an actual price fixing conspiracy while it’s happening. To the extent that a news org reports on it, it’s because someone within the system grows some ethics (very hard to burn a bridge when it means no more revenue in the industry). It took even the regulators years to build a case for it.

People have long complained about the consolidation of the chicken production chain in the US. Only 2-3 major companies control most of the supply via contracts. The farms are required to follow the terms of the contract closely when raising chickens or risk getting locked out of the major distributors. Post-consolidation, the industry is ripe for abuse.

The combination of very strong contract enforcement and weak regulatory enforcement means the industry is effectively rent-seeking by design. This much was known, but without subpoena power, actual price fixing is just a suspicion.

11일 전discuss

I think he’s saying that if the 10 people witnessed a murder via gunshot that it would be mighty suspicious if the state didn’t bother to bring any forensic evidence of the shooting to court and instead relied solely on those eyewitness testimonies. At some point the absence of forensic evidence might look more like a deliberate attempt to keep exculpatory evidence out of reach of the defendant than a good faith attempt to prosecute.

12일 전discuss

USDS and Code For America were reasonable, level-headed, modest efforts at improving government for the people using tech experts. They tried to work within the existing orgs and within the existing authorities to improve services via tech projects.

DOGE only existed because voters were convinced to hate the faceless people who work in government instead of hating the rigid legal requirements and checkbox system that every government employee is forced to follow.

12일 전discuss

It was a social panic. AI PR convinced tech execs that companies who didn’t adopt AI as a significant part of their workforce would fall behind (and in capitalism that means they lost market share and revenue). Investors likely put pressure on execs to do this in addition to the AI PR campaigns. FOMO is chasing the carrot you see everyone else getting, but this was more like chasing the thing that supposedly deters the stick.

It’s also worth mentioning that it still might be the right business strategy for some companies / industries. We are only 3 years into the revolution of AI for business processes and in previous revolutions there were riots, sabotage efforts, factories still being created in the style of the previous revolution, etc.

12일 전discuss

We tried it. DOGE was a complete failure of tech startup idiots asking models questions as if they were oracles and blindly trusting them to make subjective decisions about which Congressionally-created programs we should kill. Some of the tech were smart enough to realize how much damage they did and got out quickly.

15일 전discuss

> The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking.

Strawman.

> Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy

This isn’t true. Voters are occasionally very willing to vote in demagogues, authoritarians, and fascists.

The founding fathers knew that democracy came with it the chance of mob rule.

The solution isn’t to guarantee that nobody has any anonymity online. It’s to make society more resilient by increasing media literacy. Countries which border Russia (notably Finland and Ukraine) are doing an amazing job at resisting the industrial volume of manufactured propaganda. Countries with gullible people just become victims to it.

15일 전discuss

An individual phone… while targeting a specific crime and a specific suspect. The person could use a different phone and remain anonymous.

The difference is that one is very granular and done in reaction to a crime. The other is a wide scale collection of data which is necessary recorded.

17일 전discuss

No, an airplane is a physical thing we interact with which has intrinsic value, physical transportation. This is a perfect example of what money is not.

Money is not the token (the coin or paper bill), but the component of the ledger the token represents. Sometimes there is no physical token, only an entry in a ledger (eg. digital transfers after fractional reserve banking). The intrinsic value of the metals in the dime are (usually) worth less than the face value of the denomination, hence the discussion that the _story_ is more important than the physical _token_.

The author of Sapiens is a very famous speaker on many topics HNers like. He’s worth a listen.

18일 전discuss

All of those poor agents will be laid off from their support chat jobs and their roles will get outsourced to India and Philippines.

18일 전discuss

I don’t understand this logic. The acquisition doesn’t guarantee the project dies and staying unacquired doesn’t guarantee the project continues.

The state of OSS funding is precarious. The acquisitions at least guarantee some runway for the maintainers. Maybe the acquirer has alternative intentions than to simply bankroll the project’s the way it was, but at least someone is paying to keep the maintainers fed.

After having worked in the JavaScript ecosystem for over a decade, I don’t think _any_ project of significant size is guaranteed to last or have support. We need to be thinking about resilience (_when_ the framework stops being supported), not pretending like using OSS projects without paying them should magically give you some support contract/assurances.

18일 전discuss

Perhaps.

But if these are popular apps / APIs, then the number of affected households is significant. Authorities / investigators will have to treat IPs as likely proxies and not the geolocation of the human initiating the request.