You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss? Many people charge more than that per single billable hour. I would put your salary side by side with that number, which is your boss's perspective, and reconsider.
Fully loaded costs for an average employee at a bigco are scary. Not $200 but significantly higher than the number on your W2 by the time the company pays vacation, benefits, unemployment insurance, etc.
I've seen people try to argue for resources using reasonable but abstract arguments, and it just never works. The fact of the matter is that I want $200/month, on top of my other asks, and that comes out of somebody's budget. I just don't see folks snapping their fingers and $200 a month (discounted for now!) appears. Good for the other guy I was replying to if that's the case! I just don't see it though.
I agree... Medication Resistant bacteria is a problem everywhere. There's probably no money in a new antibiotic, but... Having something new to fight TB would be nice, and there's still prestige, even if you "just" brought it to market and didn't discover it.
I would think there are pharma teams in China or India, maybe even Russia that could replicate and further develop something like this, given the initial paper and PR.
My immediate thought - there probably are these teams overseas doing these things - just, our media/markets shun them.
I mean, the covid vaccinations - people are/were doing their nut about the Euro/US versions, but the Russians had their own, the Chinese had two, and I am aware that the Chinese were handing it out to other countries as part of their aid programs (the effectiveness of those vaccines, however, has been questioned, especially in comparison to the Euro/US ones, but I'm not sure if that's reality or politics, it's so damned hard to tell these days)
American salaries and research funding are way bigger. The best scientists around the world have a strong incentive to emigrate. And the ones who don't, can't do much with the scarce funds they have, compared to America.
The reality is that 95+% of drug candidates fail the trials. And a lot of them only fail during the Phase-3 where the efficacy is tested. It's likely that large companies tried it in-house and found that it's either too toxic or is ineffective in-vivo.
Looks like there are none, which is the typical result. If you worked in a drug-discovery-adjacent field, this is an utterly normal scenario:
1. University/startup company finds a promising drug candidate that works in-vitro. They make a press-release, researchers write their theses, and move on.
2. Drug companies pick that up and run small-scale tests. These tests are negative, usually because of unexpected toxicity.
Looking at the molecule in question, it's likely what happened here. It's a covalent inhibitor, meaning that it permanently binds with the protein. It's also allosteric, meaning that it binds to the target enzyme but not at the actual active site. This is a huge red flag for toxicity, because it's likely going to bind to other proteins that can have similar configurations.
3. But the underlying idea is sound, so companies keep working on alternative approaches. They are likely looking for non-covalent compounds now, or for things like "suicide inhibitors".
4. You'll see actual trials in 10-15 years after the initial press-release. Most likely for completely different compounds, targeting the same mechanism.
There was what I thought was a breakthrough in Schizophrenia diagnosis and treatment - the University of Washington held that groups of genes acting in concert were causing the disease, and, in fact, there were multiple variants of genes producing (what had always been suspected) different diseases that were bing lumped together.
For the longest time I had been trying to figure out why nobody was taking the research seriously, why there weren't diagnostic kits available that determined which variant people were actually suffering from, and using the appropriate drug regime to manage the specific condition the patient had.
Then, last year I saw a paper being discussed (some 5 - 10 years after the initial paper), and it was building on the Washington research - it appears to me now (keeping in mind that I am a layman and an outsider) that the research /had/ been taken seriously, but it's seen as a signpost on the pathway rather than the destination.
There was practically no responsibility taken by the author, all blame on others. It was kind of shocking to read.
Anyone using these tools should absolutely know these risks and either accept or reject them. If they aren't competent or experienced enough to know the risks, that's on them too.
And it doesn't even have to do with these tools in the end, this is a disaster recovery issue at its root. If you are a revenue generating business and using any provider other than AWS or GCP and you don't have an off prem/multi-cloud replica/daily backup of your database and object store, you should be working on that yesterday. Even if you are on one of the major cloud providers and trust regional availability, you should still have that unless it's just cost-prohibitive because of the size of the data.
It was also to put Cursor and Railway on blast and complain about how they should have safeguarded him from putting a gun to his database and pulling the trigger.
That should be buried, I agree 100% with their headline and structure over yours.
For comparison, if the amateur did it by hand but the result was sloppy to read, would you prefer "Amateur solves an Erdos problem" or "Amateur came up with a novel approach to a problem that later turned out not to be totally stupid and terrible for once"?
What do you mean by the Gell Mann part? The output from this tool may be bad, but AI music in general is extremely good. My playlist is largely "AI artists" at this point and they're really good, to the point where if you look them up online, it's mostly people being finding out they're AI and being sad about it (I also felt this - would love to see them live, but they're not even real).
I know what music I like. I said I wanted "dystopian, ambient, droning music with ear-filling, warm bass. No drums or beat."
What came out was some pretty generic dubstep that one might hear on a Verizon commercial circa 2018. Subjective, sure, but a big miss given the instructions I gave it.
Now let's say I ask it to generate code to scrape all real estate listings that were recently taken off the market. The output looks good enough to me, and I'm happy. But is the underlying architecture just as bad as the music?
Got it, I like that. I see what you mean but I think a lot of that is just this tool is bad - like coding models from a year or two ago, they look convincing, enough that you waste your time on their bad decisions.
I think SOTA on both fronts has already reached exceptionally good though.
The one thing people seem to agree upon is that AI is a lever of control. What's surprising to me, in all my naïeveté, is how eagerly people will enforce this at the behest of billionaires.
Or till that Asimov story happens in real life to you, you are in a room with people arguing about who is AI and who it not - and in the end you were actually the only human left.
OMG, some of those are legit good. That said the AI seems minimally guidable. It seems to ignore three majority of instructions in https://suno.com/song/25b16ab7-bfea-451d-abb3-8b52cdd783d0?s... so I guess like most tools, it's fine if you want to get what you're given but not really control it.
Jensen came across as incredibly defensive and intentionally close-minded, shows that even billionaires suffer from "a man can't understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it."
Your assertion is silly: did Tesla selling electric cars into China stop them from delivering their own industry? They were going to develop their domestic industry regardless.
We simply don't know the counterfactual, if they had unlimited access to Nvidia chips, how far ahead would their models be?
I thought Jensen’s comparison to Huawei’s cell phone hardware infra (towers and networking) to be an interesting comparison- that shutting them out of a market was one of the causes of their current position in the market. It made them more dominant in the end.
ChatGPT has more web traffic than X, Reddit, Bing... Crazy to say they wouldn't be able to capture meaningful ad budget. IMO partnering on this is a blunder.
It comes together quickly, though. They don't need to learn how to become a company that knows how to sell advertising; they can instead just pay some other entity to do that.
It's OK to not have complete vertical integration. (They probably don't fix their own toilets, either.)
And if it makes as much money as it seems must be possible, then they can just buy one of the advertising partners that are already have plugged into their system and shitcan the rest.
I have no strong opinion on the original thesis but your fact doesn't make the point you think it does; you're right that no one lives in most of Australia, nearly everyone is concentrated together on the coast. Australia is a bit more urban than the USA overall from a population perspective, despite being vastly less dense overall due to the areas that no one lives in. So there would be fewer people to carry the cultural individualism.
About 9 out of 10 Americans live in cities (incl burbs) and the same holds for Australians. Sure, there's fewer notable population centers in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and you got nearly everyone), but there's also just 10x fewer people than in the US so that kind of matches too. I think the picture you link to distorts this, it does not account for the fact that there's simply way fewer Australians.
I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
> I'm not convinced that if there were 300m Australians, that they'd still all live in those 5 cities (with every city being 10x bigger). I think there'd be more of them.
I don't think so either, but because of the climate and geography, I also don't think there'd be 10x more cities, similar populations, I think you might end up with 2-3x more, really, at most.
That's a rather expansive view of cities based on what the US Census categorizes as urban vs. rural. Between myself and a couple neighbors, we're on close to 100 acres, but that's urban according to the census because we're not that far from a major city and fairly close to some smaller ones.
I get furious every time this comes up and somehow there are bootlickers ready to defend big tech on it.
My ~2 person small business was almost put out of business due to a runaway job. I had instrumented everything perfectly according to the GCP instructions - as soon as billing went over the cap the notification was hooked up to a kill switch, which it did instantly.
GCP sent the notification they offered as best practice 6 HOURS late. They did everything they could to not credit my account until they realized I had the receipts. They said an investigation revealed their pipeline was overwhelmed by the number of line items and that was the reason for the lag. ... The exact scenario it is supposed to function in. JFC.
Almost wish the people defending it were paid. Almost more intelligent to rush to the defense if there were a direct financial benefit.
Part of it is possibly the curse of knowledge. Someone in the 99th percentile of cloud configuration experts simply can't recall their junior dev days.
In my junior dev days I always paid for the resources I used. Just because you consume a lot of resources by accident that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to pay for it. Accidents do not absolve you from liability.
It's not about not paying for the resources you use. It's about not having any mechanism to limit those resources, despite that being an entirely reasonable thing for the cloud providers to provide.
Using these platforms is like giving everyone in your business a credit card with an infinite limit. If someone steals it, or anyone makes a mistake, your liability is literally unlimited for no reason at all other than complete laziness by the counterparty.
These are completely normal and expected concepts in commercial contracts that the cloud providers just have no respect to provide. I would even wager that their bigger customers have this in their contracts and only SMBs get screwed like this.
This is not about paying or not paying. It's about cloud providers not having working tools that let you limit your spending.
If I don't set up a budget and run up a huge bill, fine, sure, I should probably pay for it. But if I follow best practices and set up a rule like: "if usage > X €, then stop accepting jobs", and I do it correctly according to the vendor's instructions, yet it still lets me blow past the budget, that's entirely on the vendor.
I know software is special. That's why software defects are acceptable while a crumbling bridge is not.
With that said, should this apply to other industries? If I clip a warehouse shelf on my first day driving a forklift, should my wages be garnished for life to cover the inventory? Or is the inherent nature of the logistics industry such that an accident does not always imply liability? (Or other)
That mutually exclusive with our originating comment you think?:
"...I always paid for the resources I used. Just because you consume a lot of resources by accident that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to pay for it."
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