George Hotz thinks silicon valley companies are all scams... in comparison to... Chinese companies????
I think this guy may need to travel the world a bit more.
A lot of companies here are shiite, but you really need to understand what the competition actually looks like under the hood. And I'm not just talking about Chinese government efforts to crank out more commodities, which has been a Communist metric of success since Mao Zedong's time.
I sometimes wonder whether the sudden rise of "gender politics"... is all part of some sort of conrolled oppopsition narrative.
"Gender politics" is used heavily within Russia to provide a contrast to "masculine traditional values" which in turn are used to convince 100,000s of men to (quite ironically) be turned into cannon fodder against Russia's real or perceived enemies. And even more ironically is used by security services and the military in the form of rape against (male) political dissidents and soldiers.
I wonder if anyone at old school Nvidia remembers if the NV1 card did quads to try to win a contract with Sega, or if the designers at Sega overtly wanted a card that would do quads. My suspicion is that this must've been shitty influence from Sega.
The Sega Saturn released in November 1994, with one of the most mind boggling bad hardware designs ever committed to a console. The thing had two CPUs, and unlike every console or 3d rendering machine to come later, actually rendered quads rather than tris. This is because you can more easily render lots of sprites for 2d games with quads (!!!). It was allegedly extremely difficult to program for such that its complexity stymied emulation for years after its release. I also read that Sega (which is actually a US company) had some sort of weird dynamic with its Japanese division such that the Japanese side of the company would design and ship hardware without consultation from the American side. Allegedly, the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog (Yuji Naka; who is currently in prison for securities fraud) would not pass the 3d engine used to build "Sonic Team's" first 3d game to the American team what was supposed to develop the main 3d Sonic game for the Saturn, and the main programmer for the Sonic 3d game engine in the US (Ofer Alon, who went to to found the company behind the 3d modeling software Z-brush) could not get a 3d sonic game to run on the Saturn because he tried writing the engine in the "slow" language "C", rather than 'ol fashioned assembly like Naka's team.
Nvidia weren't chasing Sega. The NV1 was really just an evolution of Sun's GX graphics card, which did quad-based accelerated 3D in 1989 (though no texture mapping, GX was limited to flat-shaded quads, or emulating gouraud shading with tessellation)
Quads vs Triangles was kind of an open question as of 1993, when work on the NV1 started. Triangles are simpler, but Quads allow for a neat trick where you can do forwards texture mapping and get a much better approximation of perspective correct texturing, than you can with triangles.
Nvidia went all in on this approach. Not only did they support 4 control point quads, but the NV1 can render 9 control point quadratic patches. These quadratic patches not only provide a really good approximation of a perspective correct textured quad, but can represent textured curved surfaces in 3d space.
Quad-based approximations are much cheaper to implement in hardware than proper perspective correct texturing, which requires an expensive division operation per pixel. And the forwards texturing approach additional benefits with optimal memory access patterns for textures. The approach seems like a win in this era of limited hardware.
The problem is that forwards texture mapping sucks for 3D artists. Artists are fine with quads, they still use them today, but forwards texture mapping is very inflexible. Inverse texture mapping (UV coords) allows you to simply drape a texture across a model with UV coordinates. Forwards texture mapping requires careful planning to get good results, you essentially need to draw the texture first and build your model out of textured quads. Many Sega Saturn games rely on automated conversion from inverse textured models.
By 1996, you could just add a divider to your hardware and get proper perspective corrected inverse texturing, and there was no reason to do proper quad support, just split them into two triangles.
As someone who works in the AI/ML field, but somewhat in a biomedical space, this is promising to hear.
The core technology is becoming commoditized. The ability to scale is also becoming more and more commoditized by the day. Now we have the capability to truly synthesize the world's biomedical literature and combine it with technologies like single cell sequencing to deliver on some really amazing pharmaceutical advances over the next few years.
I don't think luddites have a tendency of getting chosen to be CEOs of successful companies, nor do they have the tendency of creating successful companies.
Certainly, but I interject that I do dislike how the modern perception of "Luddite" frames them as unthinking objectors to progress when really they were protesting their economic obsoletion. We should have CEOs who care about the consequences of what they're doing to the poorer classes. That's basic human decency, but we're saddled with what amounts to sociopaths and psychopaths instead.
This is a terrible conundrum. The nations that sink resources into improving aggregate economic measures are the most competitive and quite possibly even the most likely to triumph in armed conflicts. The average per capita GDP will be enormous, but the median per capita GDP will be incredibly small.
The vast majority of voters would vote for the shittier economy, which in fact is what we are seeing right now? And who ends up being the winners? Presumably dictatorships that can sink capital into things like automation while simply not giving a shit about the desires of the citizenry...
Illumina has held a virtual monopoly over high throughput sequencing over the past 15 years, basically cancelling what many expected to be a drastic decrease in the cost of DNA sequencing.
Now a company called Stratos (acquired by Roche in 2020), has developed a new sequencing technology that claims to be better, more accurate, and cheaper
If it's going to take another 10 years to turn this into a usable product...
Better spew out some marketing BS to move the needle on MSFT stock price...
Modern banks don't have the personnel bandwidth to physically verify the identity of more than a few tenths of a percent of their customers on a given a day, at that rate it would take them close to a year to physically verify the identities of every customer once.
For example BofA has ~70 million customers, 3,700 retail branches, if each has three tellers at any given time of operation (generous at BofA these days, where you'll usually find one) and is open 8 hours a day, and average time to serve a customer is 20 minutes:
3,700 * 3 tellers * 8 hours * 3 customers / hr = 266,400 customers / business day
70 million / 266,400 customers = 263 business days
I think this guy may need to travel the world a bit more. A lot of companies here are shiite, but you really need to understand what the competition actually looks like under the hood. And I'm not just talking about Chinese government efforts to crank out more commodities, which has been a Communist metric of success since Mao Zedong's time.
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