跳至主要内容

2023-05-05

Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI"

  • A leaked internal Google document claims that open source AI is doing better than Google and OpenAI in terms of speed, customization, privacy protection, and capability.
  • The document suggests that Google should focus on enabling third-party integrations, collaborate with the open-source AI community, and make small variations of models more than an afterthought.
  • Recent progress in open-source AI models has implications for big tech companies' business strategies.

Industry Reactions

  • LLMs are getting cheaper to run, potentially leading to more affordable AI models on consumer hardware.
  • A discussion about the use and accessibility of different AI models in open source software, and the potential for crowdfunding and compensation to accelerate progress.

Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs

  • Prime Video's tool for monitoring every stream viewed by customers helps identify perceptual quality issues and triggers a process to fix them.
  • The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduced costs for the Video Quality Analysis (VQA) team at Prime Video.
  • The new architecture reduced infrastructure costs by over 90%, increased scaling capabilities to handle thousands of streams, and allowed for even higher quality and a better customer experience.

Industry Reactions

  • Some prefer serverless compute options with "scale to zero" features, while others rent servers instead of buying racks, but these options may not always be the most cost-effective solution for every use case.
  • AWS teams found that microservices and serverless components were too expensive for their workflow-driven tasks and opted to move to a monolith structure on EC2 and ECS rather than using AWS Step Functions and Lambda functions.

So this guy is now S3. All of S3

  • This website is best experienced by visiting the website directly.
  • Please visit the website to read the article.

Industry Reactions

  • The article highlights issues related to domain ownership verification, SSL certificate verification, and potential solutions to increase security.
  • The Bluesky developer team faces several errors in the verification process, but suggests that they are fixable and provide necessary feedback to improve the protocol.

Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC

  • The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Facebook has failed to comply with a 2020 privacy order and has caused new harm, including misrepresenting Messenger Kids' access to private youth data.
  • The FTC has proposed changes to the 2020 order, including prohibiting Meta from launching new products on its platforms without written FTC compliance confirmation and preventing the company from monetizing any youth data it collects.
  • Meta has 30 days to respond to the proposed changes, but the FTC will determine whether modification of the 2020 order is in the public interest or justified by changed conditions of fact or law.

Industry Reactions

  • FTC's order to show cause (OSC) almost entirely redacted, raising questions about Facebook's actions
  • Discussions around Facebook's violation of privacy, harmful impact on society, and need for regulation

The money spent on lotteries doesn't go to the park

  • Recreation.gov charges fees for managing lotteries for access to national parks and destinations, such as The Wave, Angels Landing, Half Dome, and more.
  • The fees charged range from $5 to $10 for every lottery application, with varying fees for successful applications going to both the Recreation.gov and specific parks or destinations.
  • Recreation.gov earns more revenue from lotteries than the parks or destinations, and some permits can be booked outside of the lottery through Outdoor Status.

Industry Reactions

  • Some commenters suggest alternative systems such as raffles or auctions, while others criticize these options as potentially disadvantaging poorer individuals.
  • The article raises concerns about accessibility to public lands, which should not be dependent on one's programming skills or financial resources, and suggests solutions such as charging nominal fees and making tickets non-transferable.

EARN IT Act undermines the privacy, security, and safety of law-abiding users

  • The EARN IT Act undermines the privacy, security, and safety of law-abiding users while making child sexual abuse crime prosecutions more difficult.
  • The bill increases the risk of liability for any service that offers end-to-end encryption and ensures that offering those services will be considered as evidence in cases brought under state laws.
  • Coercing services to abandon encryption only makes us more vulnerable to government overreach and attacks from hostile foreign adversaries, and will undermine, not assist, prosecutions for CSE and CSAM offenses.

Industry Reactions

  • Discussions on Hacker News cover a wide range of topics, including the moral acceptability of pornography, end-to-end encryption, Tor exit nodes, children's issues, and the state of politics.
  • The conversation highlights the ongoing debate about how to balance privacy and security concerns in the digital age, including the role of end-to-end encryption in criminal investigations.

The seven programming ur-languages (2021)

  • The article introduces seven "ur-languages" in programming that serve as the basis for different programming paradigms: ALGOL, Lisp, ML, Self, Forth, APL, and Prolog.
  • Each ur-language has distinct collections of fundamentals, such as ALGOL's sequence of assignments, conditionals, and loops, and Lisp's prefix expressions enclosed in parentheses.
  • The article recommends branching out from fundamental ALGOL to learn other ur-languages for a broader understanding of programming, with Forth being an integral language to study, especially through McCabe's book FORTH Fundamentals, Volume 1.

Industry Reactions

  • The comments section discusses the inclusion of hardware definition languages, message-passing languages, and probabilistic languages into the list of ur-languages.
  • The post and discussions provide insights and recommendations for intermediate programmers looking to expand their language knowledge.

Mojo might be the biggest thing to happen in programming for decades

  • Mojo is a programming language based on Python that offers improved performance and deployment options.
  • It allows developers to opt into a faster mode and optimize memory usage.
  • Mojo is designed to work with modern accelerators and can produce fast, small, easily-deployed applications.

Industry Reactions

  • The language is built on a minimal Python-like core and features optional strong typing and tight performance integration with LLVM-based MLIR.
  • Some developers are excited about Mojo's potential for modern accelerators and its ability to solve the "two languages" problem in machine learning, while others express skepticism due to past issues with Swift and debate the need for a new programming language.

Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

  • Shopify is undergoing significant changes to refocus on its main quest of making commerce simpler, easier, more democratized, more participatory, and more common.
  • As a result, Shopify will be smaller by about 20%, with some team members leaving.
  • Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics, becoming the preferred logistics partner for Shopify, allowing everything about Shopify Logistics to be more ambitious and global in nature.

Industry Reactions

  • The layoffs imply a contradiction with Shopify's company culture and values, leading to a possible loss in loyalty. Critics argue that efficient capital deployment should not come at the expense of employees' job security.
  • Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke claimed in a tweet that the company is hiring aggressively and aiming to double its team size again in 2021, following a doubling of the engineering team in 2020, leading to positive responses but also skepticism about the company's ability to compete for talent in the future.

Googlers angry about CEO's $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs

  • Google employees express anger over CEO Sundar Pichai's $226 million compensation package following layoffs and cost-cutting measures.
  • Internal memes have circulated comparing Pichai to Shrek's Lord Farquaad, criticizing Alphabet's authorized $70 billion stock repurchase program, and emphasizing that Pichai's compensation is 808 times higher than the median employee's.
  • These memes and complaints have sparked discussions about the balance between executive compensation and employee benefits within large tech companies.

Industry Reactions

  • The discussion also focuses on income inequality and whether engineers should earn more of the company's profits, while some argue that CEOs are excessively overpaid.
  • The controversy surrounding Pichai's compensation package reflects growing scrutiny on CEO pay and income inequality in the tech industry.