58 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. What, we discussed, were the headlines from the event? No one was sure, as we agreed that Musk had not really broken any news.

      I noticed the same about the presentation. It seemed like Musk is becoming more adept at adept at selling his vision (e.g. addressing "why invest in space" criticism), but shied away from any concrete information about SpaceX's plans.

      He even joked about "it's not done yet" so many times I suspect there isn't much to report at the moment. I wonder what's the reason for this update now.

    2. At times, however, Musk was frustratingly vague. After the speech, I felt no more confident about when the massive Starship vehicle will actually make an orbital launch attempt. For those who follow SpaceX closely, this came as a disappointment, especially as this talk marked SpaceX's first substantial Starship update in more than 28 months.

      A tour of their facility a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

    1. V. Conclusion60. Based on the foregoing, your affiant submits that there is probable cause to believe that ILYA “DUTCH” LICHTENSTEIN and HEATHER MORGAN violated 18 U.S.C. § 1956(h), which makes it a crime in relevant part to conspire to conduct or attempt to conduct a financial transaction involving the proceeds of specified unlawful activity, knowing that the property involved in the financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, and knowing that the transaction is designed in whole or in part to conceal or disguise the nature, location, source, ownership, or control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity. For purposes of this section, specified unlawful activity includes wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1343, and computer fraud and abuse, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030. 61. Your affiant submits there is also probable cause to believe that ILYA “DUTCH” LICHTENSTEIN and HEATHER MORGAN violated 18 U.S.C. § 371, which makes it a crime in relevant part for two or more persons to conspire to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose, and to do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy.

      They're arresting them because they moved and sought to hide the movements of funds gained from an unlawful activity, not because they actually engaged in the original unlawful activity.

    1. “short books to feed your craving for ideas.”

      Newnewss for the sake of Newness. "Empty information calories".

    2. Anderson insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story.
    3. Amid wildfires and the Delta surge, its theme was “the case for optimism.”

      Talking not doing.

    4. This previously undiscovered branch of math would, he said, “create inexhaustible free energy, end all diseases, produce all food, travel anywhere in the universe, build the ultimate supercomputer and artificial intelligence, and make obsolete all existing technology.” He got a standing ovation. The video went largely unnoticed until 2012, when a handful of science bloggers found it and pilloried Powell’s claims. The talk, they said, was constructed entirely out of meaningless jargon. In an online forum, a theoretical physicist said that Powell was “either (1) insane, (2) a huckster going for fame or money, or (3) doing a Sokal’s hoax on TED.”
    5. and I felt hopeful about the future

      Isn't that the actual (positive) purpose of TED? The whole self-delusion about how talks create progress felt tacked-on at least to me, like the mission statements of any large company. Did people really take it seriously?

    6. The primary function of TED, by contrast, is to predict the future.

      Are you sure about that? Even if that were its mission, it doesn't have to be TED's primary function or effect. I suspect most people listen to be inspired (as entertainment), not to actually see the future.

    7. he grew tired of TED and, in 2001, sold it to Chris Anderson, a British media entrepreneur who made a fortune building websites (including the popular video game site IGN)

      Wikipedia mentions "The IGN website was the brainchild of media entrepreneur Chris Anderson", but I can't find any accurate source on how much he was actually involved with their operation (maybe only responsible for the website)?

    8. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible.

      I agree with the criticism on this. For actual change you need to do things instead of talking about them.

      Many TED speakers may be credible on the topic they talk about (like Bill Gates, who does spend his time funding public health projects), but even then the value of talking about their achievements could be limited. Those talks may inspire listeners, but that cannot come at the expense of actually doing the work, or thinking that solely articulating ideas creates progress.

    9. But, Gates adds, the future might turn out okay. He has an idea.

      What's the alternative? Telling people that the future is not ok? Would people listen to talks like this?

    1. only 12-15% understanding/retention

      If you're simply reading to inform yourself about a topic, it may be worth reading a couple of book reviews, and listening to an interview or two, rather than invest the significant amount of time necessary to really engage with the book.

      A few hours of skimming and reviews/interviews may get you to 25% understanding and retention, which in many cases may be more than enough for your needs of being basically informed on the topic. Compared to the 50 - 100 hours necessary for a deep, analytical engagement with the text, that would only get you to 50% understanding and retention.

      I like your summary of the article but disagree with the author. If one is measuring the "understanding percentage" of a book, I think he's actually looking for short-form information or answers (like gathered from a book review or blog post) rather than a book. For me, the value of the best books comes from the inspiration and impulse for original thought it gives. Not everything in a book is valuable for everyone, nor should it be.

      For textbooks, of course cutting the detail gives you an overview more quickly, but it's just an overview. And this entire point doesn't apply to fiction books.

      Maybe it's a question of what type of understanding we want from each book. Sometimes that's answers, sometimes that's understanding, sometimes diversion or inspiration -- they're not all the same. Consulting reviews but not the book is an awesome shortcut to get answers, but then you're not reading the book, but the reviews.

      I think the gap between thoughtful, slow reading and quick reading is much larger. Assuming of course that slow reading means thinking about the sentences, probably highlighting passages and scribbling a few notes.

      Doesn't apply to every book of course, and depends on the aspect of understanding you want (your own thoughts or what the author meant).

    1. As a tumultuous 2020 roiled American politics, Chinese people began turning to Wang’s America Against America for answers. And when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the book flew off the shelves.

      Effect of the 2021 US Capitol attack in China -- seeing it as emblematic of the west's societal problems.

    2. a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance

      What is he referring to here?

      • In somewhat simplified terms, focusing on and exceedingly valuing new things over our cultural inheritance?
    3. Officially referred to as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign, this transformation is proceeding along two parallel lines: a vast regulatory crackdown roiling the private sector economy and a broader moralistic effort to reengineer Chinese culture from the top down. But why is this “profound transformation” happening? And why now? Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.

      What a great introduction to the article.

      • Ha, I didn't catch the foreshadowing until your reply here :)

      • That's the awesome thing about open web annotations -- we can come here from all kinds of different places, yet help each other to learn more from reading.

    1. Mobile is the largest segment in gaming, with nearly 95% of all players globally enjoying games on mobile. Through great teams and great technology, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will empower players to enjoy the most-immersive franchises, like “Halo” and “Warcraft,” virtually anywhere they want.

      That mobile games (and not immersive PC or console games) are mentioned here tells you a great deal about their direction, and they kind of audience they want to attract.

      Update: this most likely refers to their cloud gaming service, to bring actual PC/console games to mobile devices. I still wonder if this new audience has an effect on the types of games they produce.

    1. Google survived enormous VC funding because it could legitimately absorb large amounts of money.

      What's an example of a company that can't absorb large amounts of funding? I assume Google used it to improve their infrastructure to support an incredibly large userbase. Uber for example used most of its funding for marketing and kickstarting their marketplace. The general ethos of "hypergrowth" seems to be trying to get to scale as fast as possible.

      So the argument here is not to chase scale by throwing money at it, but only invest when it's required? Does the second case actually exist outside of boostrapped startups?

    2. The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble didn't do it just because they were pulled into it by unscrupulous investment bankers. Most were pushed just as hard from the other side by VCs who'd invested at high valuations, leaving an IPO as the only way out.

      Aren't IPOs by definition about diversification for existing investors?

    1. You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms

      This is what I often do, and I'm frequently frustrated there aren't any alternative words for many expressions that capture the same thing.

      Like the author here, it never occurred to me that a good dictionary would be a solution, since I never saw one.

    2. Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”?

      It depends on the goals of your writing, in general, using uncommon words makes you harder to understand.

      I also suspect not all people find joy in expressive language, or don't even notice it as non-native speakers online.

    1. My public writing is a counterpoint meant to complement the popular point.

      The guiding reason behind Derek Sivers' writing.

    1. You need to become your most intelligent critic and have the intellectual honesty to kill some of your best-loved ideas.
  2. Feb 2022
    1. The degree to which “incomplete” applications leverage the underlying software platform for execution of all business logic may ultimately prove to be less important than the degree to which these new internet-based organizations land on effective organizational scalability models.
    2. contract theory
    3. Applications built on Ethereum transitively inherit the “completeness” of the underlying platform
    4. One answer
    5. What about “incomplete” projects? Their need for dynamic, human, subjective inputs to ongoing operations makes them difficult to computationally verify and automate.
    1. Argument that popular modern dictionaries are taking the wrong approach by defining words as plainly as possible. That makes it no fun to use them except for definitions.

      For writing at least, using something like the original Websters dictionary is a great help to improve your style.

    1. Intruguing argument about how to allow more tinkering with software -- making it really easy to contribute, not just possible.

      I think for example the note-taking community is on a path towards that -- a lot of the fun is about finding your own worflow and contributing to editor plugins you like.

    2. “Well, it’s Open Source, I guess I could go download the source code… but… meh, it’s so far out of my way, not worth it,” and the urge fizzles out. I think that a lot of potential human creativity is being wasted this way.

      This reminds me of physical tinkering, like building or fixing your own small furniture. That's also hard with the products we often buy today -- it's difficult to fix minature electronics which are meant to be replaced.

      But with software (esp. open source) it could be easier, as everyone can have the same tools. I very much resonate with the idea of tinkering more and using less standards.

    3. Making changes or additions to the standard library was as easy as making changes to my own code

      For many people, making changes to code at all is hard. The few times I remember actually forking a library to add functionality, it meant hours reading into the codebase and polishing my change to commit it upstream.

      I like the author's argument, but it's not not just the friction to view source code -- many technical architectures are also needlessly complex or non-standard.

    1. Paul Graham argued in 2005 (just before starting YCombinator) why venture capital is traditionally unfriendly to founders, and how it sets itself bad incentives.

    1. Learnings: - Take a lesson from good hill climbing algorithms, and drop yourself in unfamiliar situations to find your career maximum. - Progress in artificial games (e.g. career ladders) is fun, but you're likely to miss the bigger picture.

    1. In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions.
    1. Yak Shaves

      Definition: "Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.”"

      Intuitively I assumed the term meant to stay lean and frequently reduce all complexity down to the bare minimum, but it's somewhat of the opposite :) This idea in general might also be called serendipity.

    1. Learnings: - It's easy to assume people in the past didn't care or were stupid. But people do things for a reason. Not understanding the reason for how things are is a missed learning opportunity, and very likely leads to unintended consequences. - Similar to having a valid strong opinion, one must understand why things are as they are before changing them (except if the goal is only signaling).

    1. Rebel Wolves said it will be a studio built on “the foundations of fairness, teamwork, and openness [...] unified by the mission of putting the team first —ALWAYS— [...] they believe that happy people create great games

      You can't help but notice the shade thrown over CD Project Red with this statement. The development of The Witcher 3 was notorious for its crunch, I can only imagine it was worse for Cyberpunk 2077.

      https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/

      https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red

    1. The cloud advantage was one of the main pillars upon which the Stadia business was built, and there just isn't any evidence that this theoretical benefit is working to Google's benefit in real life.

      Has better latency != can have better latency. If there's demand for Stadia I assume they could use more of those data centers. But not sure the performance of Stadaia is the problem here, it's far far easier to use Stadia than Gefore NOW. Yet, people don't use it.

    2. "The fundamental benefit of our cloud-native infrastructure is that developers will be able to take advantage of hardware and power in ways never before possible, and that includes taking advantage of the power of multiple GPUs at once."

      Notably, this goal has been stated before, I believe by Microsoft for the Xbox 360? Running demanding workloads in the cloud elastically makes a lot more sense than buying hardware you rarely use.

    3. Google killed SG&E about one year after Stadia launched, before the studio had released a game or done any public work. In a blog post announcing Stadia's pivot to a "platform technology," Stadia VP Phil Harrison explained the decision to shutter SG&E, saying, "Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially."

      I suspect Google wanted faster, more measurable results than is possible with game development. There's a reason why tech companies are vastly more profitable than game companies.

      I don't particularly see the shame in changing a strategy that isn't working. As an early user of Stadia I do see the lost potential though, maybe that's where this is coming from.

    4. With Stadia's consumer model going down the drain, Google announced it would pivot Stadia to become a behind-the-scenes, white-label data center service that the company will reportedly re-brand as "Google Stream."

      I think that makes a lot of sense. Google doesn't want to do the "platform building" Microsoft and Sony excel at, and it doesn't have to.

      Imagine playing or trying out video games simply on the developers website.

    5. For Nvidia, the speed of the 3080 package makes for a solid sales pitch: This cloud PC is probably faster than your home system, so cloud gaming is worth it. Cloud gaming will always present a latency tradeoff, but that latency is easier to accept if you're getting otherwise-unattainable graphics quality along with it.

      Smart strategy by Nvidia.

    6. One of the many problems the platform faces is that Stadia hardware is only good for Stadia. It can't run anything other than Stadia, so Google is reluctant to invest in this single-use hardware and keep it up to date. The Stadia computer you're renting from Google is pretty outdated.

      I would love some sources on this.

    7. Stadia certainly isn't available in "over 200 countries." It's available in just 22 countries, or about 10 percent of the scale Pichai heavily implied Google could work at.

      Do the other countries have sufficiently fast internet infrastructure to make streaming work well for many people? Is there demand for Stadia there? What's the criticism regarding this exactly?

    1. First, there is the life insurance rationale. Although the chance of a planet-wide calamity extinguishing our species is low, it is not zero.

      Notably Steven Hawking (and others) warned about this year ago already. Not to take away from Musk's achievements, but he's not the first to recognise and work on this problem.

      https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interstellar-travel-starmus-speech

    2. For the first time in 4.5 billion years, a creature living on Earth has the ability to do something about this threat by helping humanity to become a spacefaring species.

      Classic article about the topic: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

    1. One source described the Q&A as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at extracting some kind of accountability from Stadia management.

      There is no accountability to people inside corporations, only to results. Which is working as intended, companies are meant to make money by serving customers, not employees.

      The simple "truth" here is that these Stadia games likely wouldn't have been successful without a lot of additional investments.

    2. We will confirm the SG&E investment envelope shortly, which will, in turn, inform the SG&E strategy

      That's corporate speak for "prepare for budget cuts". If nothing would change, they'd have said so directly.

    1. Amid seemingly intractable problems here on Earth, a vision of the future can resemble a life raft, and in the absence of viable alternatives, substanceless promises of space travel, crypto-utopias, and eternal life in the cloud may become the only things to look forward to.

      Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?

    2. his talk proved to be one of many ideas worth spreading. “This is by far the most interesting and challenging thing I’ve heard on TED,” one commenter posted. “Very glad to come across it!”

      That's the problem -- making it easy to feel good about consuming content passively.

    3. speaks about how each of us can, like her, become a creative genius

      Is this the ultimate form of culturally accepted bragging? How many people discover they can be vaguely "inspiring" instead of delivering substance? Maybe that's what's wrong with the world.

    4. “This American Life” and “Radiolab,” and maybe narrative podcasting as a form, are inspiresting.

      I agree -- they're larely without substance but "interesting" and "inspiring". Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

    5. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true?

      It is becoming to be true.

    6. as if he could see his own bright future unfolding before him.

      He did see a bright potential before him, and that's precisely why he had a change at succeeding. I don't like the latent criticism about innovation in this article, it feels mostly like envy to me.

    7. The coming decades would not be about gatekeeping or rigid disciplinary boundaries or exclusivity, Anderson said. The future was about openness, connection, democratization of knowledge, collectivity.

      Was it not? I broadly see 2000-2010 as exploring the early potential of the internet, without major cultural problems (but ending with the financial crisis).

    8. TED 2015

      For reference, here are the "the most popular talks of 2015": https://www.ted.com/playlists/320/the_most_popular_talks_of_2015_1