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shubhamjain

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Total fertility rate doesn't tell the number of births women eventually have

ourworldindata.org
3 points·by shubhamjain·há 4 meses·0 comments

Algorithmic Feeds Need to Be Banned

shubhamjain.co
4 points·by shubhamjain·há 4 meses·0 comments

Algorithmic Feeds Need to Be Banned

shubhamjain.co
3 points·by shubhamjain·há 5 meses·1 comments

Will AI Disrupt My Field?

shubhamjain.co
1 points·by shubhamjain·há 5 meses·0 comments

Ask HN: Is it just me or techno-optimism died in the past few years?

48 points·by shubhamjain·há 7 meses·41 comments

Every Fear Is Just Perceived Lack of Control

shubhamjain.co
5 points·by shubhamjain·há 10 meses·2 comments

comments

shubhamjain
·há 2 meses·discuss
The kind of garbage that gets to the front-page is mind-boggling. Okay, maybe there's some useful trivia here, but combined with the headline, it's just trash clickbait.
shubhamjain
·há 3 meses·discuss
If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon.

It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner or later peak is going to be reached (if that hasn’t happened already)
shubhamjain
·há 3 meses·discuss
The article sounds like the author is visibly upset why these videos are being shared, which are mere “propaganda” to them. “Slop”, “factually inaccurate”, “Iran, the most repressive country for press freedom.”

“We spoke” is doing a more than necessary work here. Maybe just ask a few things and wrote what we had decided to write. My problem isn’t with those claims, which are true, but setting a narrative where a single country is exploiting social media for propaganda while clearly ignoring the crimes of much worse actors here.
shubhamjain
·há 3 meses·discuss
Probably never. I think it's been at least a decade since the fear over them became mainstream. Yeah, it's possible these things can take time to show up but considering the scale of their presence and how long we have been using them, we would have at least seen some definite relationship between them and some serious health concern. Look at the article itself, the health impact is conveniently buried in the last section, and it just repeats over and over how they can found everywhere in the body but nothing on what can possible happen.

So much of the scare revolves around the same framing, "microplastic" have been found in breast milk/blood whatever, but never seen one mentioning what it can possibly cause. Is it too hard to fathom that the answer is "nothing"?
shubhamjain
·há 3 meses·discuss
I think it's a pretty good case. I always wondered why would the inventor would use pseudonym in the first place. Surely, not even the most visionary person could anticipate how hugely popular the thing would become. This is why I was intrigued by Newsweek investigation [1]. However, seeing this article, I am leaning towards the person being someone who had been active in crypto culture for a long while, before creating Bitcoin. The story about Napster, and the paranoia around government going after the inventor ties in nicely towards the motivation to remain anonymous.

The word, phrasing use is a good evidence. I do wonder though why didn't the author try to analyze the source code similarly? Did it prove something to the contrary?

Also, Satoshi jumping in to defend block-size out of the blue sounds too reckless for someone so careful about anonymity. Possible explanation might be that he let his guard down seeing an attempt to "butcher" his creation.

In any case, I am convinced that it was most likely a single person and if not Adam, I think there are no more than 3-4 people who are possible candidates.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-2479...
shubhamjain
·há 3 meses·discuss
Was expecting to learn how SMSes work on the cellular side. Nothing of that sort. This is probably the worst AI slop article I have ever seen with the same thing repeated multiple times, short stupid sentences, which I can only assume is a product of someone pushing his tool/prompts to rank well in search engines.
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
> OpenAI is struggling to monetize. They turned to showing ads in ChatGPT, something Sam Altman once called a “last resort”, while Anthropic is crushing them with the more profitable corporate customers and software engineers. Their shopping feature flopped and they shut down Sora, both supposed to be revenue drivers.

I don't think Sora ever thought of as a "revenue driver" considering how notoriously expensive and unpredictable video generation via inference is. OpenAI is just a repeat of Uber—minus the scandals—in a different decade. Uber got itself into tons of businesses related to transportation on the assumption that it would all be viable "one day." Same stuff that OpenAI is going.

I would say, once the bubble bursts—which is likely, considering the geopolitical environment—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet are likely to be the winners, with a lot of small players at the tail end. Anthropic won over programmers and OpenAI on everyone else. For millions of people, AI = ChatGPT, so I would bet that OpenAI can still become profitable, once they cut down their expenses.
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
Amazing! Kudos to Hollywood, for going to this length to license the work, credit the author, involve him in the project. To respect realism as a goal for its own, even though "no one will notice" and a similar image might be "just a prompt away." I know how common is the latter these days.
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
I always wondered what alternative reality are people supporting the administration are living in and this right here is the answer. As someone put it, Americans love to fool themselves in believing they are the ones 'winning' because they killed more people even if it means completely failing at the original objective.
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
I would like to point out that Bram Cohen seems to be obsessed with “better merges” and had a verbal spat with Linus on Git when it was just taking off (2007).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8118817

It’s pretty weird that he has gone back to the same idea without understanding why Git’s approach is better. I would say VCS is largely a solved problem. You can simplify a few things here and there, maybe improve support for binaries and few other things, but that’s almost on the top of existing systems. The foundation is rock solid, so it doesn’t sound very sensible to attempt something from ground up.
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits.

Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?
shubhamjain
·há 4 meses·discuss
You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat.

At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
The post seems to be comparing quarterly figures for tax with annual profit. The doc they cite clearly $25B as provision for income tax.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
Where is this figure coming from? According to Meta's press release, the effective tax rate is 30% [1].

> The full year 2025 provision for income taxes includes the effects of the implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during the third quarter of 2025. Absent the valuation allowance charge as of the enactment date, our full year 2025 effective tax rate would have decreased by 17 percentage points to 13%, compared to the reported effective tax rate of 30%.

[1]: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
I was wondering if it was because of heavy-handedness of the administration, but apparently:

> The policy change is separate and unrelated to Anthropic’s discussions with the Pentagon, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Their core argument is that if we have guardrails that others don't, they would be left behind in controlling the technology, and they are the "responsible ones." I honestly can't comprehend the timeline we are living in. Every frontier tech company is convinced that the tech they are working towards is as humanity-useful as a cure for cancer, and yet as dangerous as nuclear weapons.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable that it would be hard to get majority of these free users to pay for anything, and hence, advertising seems a good bet. You couldn't have thought of a more contextual way of plugging in a paid product.

I think OpenAI has better chance to winning on the consumer side than everyone else. Of course, would that much up against hundreds of billions of dollars in capex remains to be seen.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
I always assumed “tech company” meant using technology to build a fundamentally better car from the ground up. I don't know at what point the bait-and-switch happened, it was suddenly about pursuing every stupid moonshot fantasy at the cost of making better cars.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
The mystery I can wrap my head around is how Tesla has avoided getting hammered despite being hit from a hundred different directions. What exactly is the market pricing in?

They peaked around 2021, and even after posting multiple quarters of disappointing results, the stock is still trading above 2021 levels. For almost any other company, slightly lowering guidance or missing estimates by a few percentage points simply tanks the stock. But for Tesla, no amount of Musk’s idiocy seems to be enough to seriously move it.
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
The very fact that people are siding with AI agent here says volumes about where we are headed. I didn’t find the hit piece emotionally compelling, rather it’s lazy, obnoxious, having all the telltale signs of being written by AI. To speak nothing of the how insane it’s to write a targeted blog post just because your PR wasn’t merged.

Have our standards fallen by this much that we find things written without an ounce of originality persuasive?
shubhamjain
·há 5 meses·discuss
> The article does point out exactly this problem, but glosses over the fact that most artists don't want to change to popular art. Only a few can, and most don't want to.

I don't think author hides the fact. It's plain as day that to make a living, you need to sell art which resonates with people. You can still find room to be creative within that constraint, but you can't ignore the audience.

Artists should quit the illusion that they can create whatever they please and expect the income to automatically follow.