Adding an additional comment here for a little extra visibility. I would absolutely love, like really love, a USB-C portrait monitor version of this. If I could just plug this in to my existing laptop and use it for reading specs, technical docs, …etc that would be amazing.
Android tablet is a tough sell for my employer due to compliance, security, and such. So buying one of those for work use would take like a year minimum gathering all the necessary approvals and likely would still get denied by someone. But, a dumb monitor with no real OS I can expense that without approval. just a heads up to my boss really to say I am buying this and here is why.
I know you are a small company so have to pick your battles. But, maybe something to consider down the road.
EDIt: forgot to say, congrats on the launch. Looks like a great product.
This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address).
But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ.
Figure 3 on p.40 of the paper seems to show that their LLM based model does not statistically significantly outperform a 3 layer neural network using 59 variables from 1989.
This figure compares the prediction performance of GPT and quantitative models based on machine learning. Stepwise Logistic follows Ou and Penman (1989)’s structure with their 59 financial predictors. ANN is a three-layer artificial neural network model using the same set of variables as in Ou and Penman (1989). GPT (with CoT) provides the model with financial statement information and detailed chain-of-thought prompts. We report average accuracy (the percentage of correct predictions out of total predictions) for each method (left) and F1 score (right). We obtain bootstrapped standard errors by randomly sampling 1,000 observations 1,000 times and include 95% confidence intervals.
The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded.
Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country.
But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autism spectrum, that was one of the best feelings I had at that time.
Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. I see a direct line from there to the annoying easy-to-accept-while-hard-to-reject-but-always-there-anyway cookie pop-ups.
And no, this is isn’t some form of Ostalgie where we long for past days of hardship with tender feelings. ICQ just had a great user experience as far as I am concerned and to this day I prefer it to existing alternatives from WhatsApp to Webex chat (don’t mention Teams please, I’m having a poetic moment). It was rather a feeling that perhaps other Brazilians will share: a longing, saudade, for the simpler (yes) but better and more poetic 90s, when ICQ connected you to a world that watched Brazil win the fourth World Cup, Ayrton Senna was inspiring generations to be healthier and their better selves and Mamonas Assassinas could only make us laugh, not cry…
So long, ICQ. You will always be part of why I love the internet.
PS: I realize the timing of those events doesn’t necessarily align. But sentimentally they do.
I have been hearing stories from developers/entrepeneurs about Cloudflare being very weird to deal with:
"We'd like to talk to you about an enterprise plan."
"No thanks, I'm fine with the free plan."
"Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about an enteprrise plan."
"Is there a traffic limit on the free plan?"
"No, there is no limit. But based on your traffic, we require you to get an enteprirse plan."
[Gives up and gets an enterprise plan]
[6 months later]
"Based on your traffic, we'd like to talk to you about up'ing your enteprise plan to a new monthly pay."
"Is there a cap to traffic in our current plan? I don't see that in our terms."
"No, there is no cap to traffic in cloudflare plans, but based on your traffic, we're going to require you to pay more per month than you are currently paying."
"OK, can you tell me the traffic limit in our current or new plan? So I know what I'm paying for and when I'm approaching it?"
"No. But you need to pay more."
[Wash, rinse, repeat, every 6-12 months]
It seems like while cloudflare technically does not charge for egress, in fact for large egress it's just a game of chicken between the customer and a salesperson every 6-12 months, with the salesperson trying to figure out the most they can manage to get without losing the customer? I mean, I guess that is standard for enteprise sales, but I think usually you at least have some terms to know what you've got for how long without a renegotiation?
This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.
I feel like "parsing each keystroke twice" is pretty low on the list of things that wastes CPU cycles and drains my laptop battery. I cannot at all get worked up over this, getting to the point I'd pull out the word "poison" to describe it.
It's nice that Kitty does most of what tmux does built in, but as the author points out, that's not really all that helpful for anyone who does any work over ssh.
And to me, bundling all that into a terminal emulator is bloat. Terminals should be terminals. If I want a multiplexer on top of that, I will... use a multiplexer on top of that.
I am potentially sympathetic to the idea that tmux and screen make it harder for terminal developers to add new features to their terminals. I don't really know enough about the issues involved to form an opinion. But from the perspective of a regular user, I do not want a multiplexer in my terminal app. When I need one, I prefer to reach for an app-agnostic multiplexer like tmux or screen.
Given the level of impact that this incident caused, I am surprised that the remediations did not go deeper. They ensured that the same problem could not happen again in the same way, but that's all. So some equivalent glitch somewhere down the road could lead to a similar result (or worse; not all customers might have the same "robust and resilient architectural approach to managing risk of outage or failure").
Examples of things they could have done to systematically guard against inappropriate service termination / deletion in the future:
1. When terminating a service, temporarily place it in a state where the service is unavailable but all data is retained and can be restored at the push of a button. Discard the data after a few days. This provides an opportunity for the customer to report the problem.
2. Audit all deletion workflows for all services (they only mention having reviewed GCVE). Ensure that customers are notified in advance whenever any service is terminated, even if "the deletion was triggered as a result of a parameter being left blank by Google operators using the internal tool".
3. Add manual review for any termination of a service that is in active use, above a certain size.
Absent these broader measures, I don't find this postmortem to be in the slightest bit reassuring. Given the are-you-f*ing-kidding-me nature of the incident, I would have expected any sensible provider who takes the slightest pride in their service, or even is merely interested in protecting their reputation, to visibly go over the top in ensuring nothing like this could happen again. Instead, they've done the bare minimum. That says something bad about the culture at Google Cloud.
I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective.
Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation.
But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with sync issues and phase issues and background noise issues... that's hard core.
Kudos to the engineering team on this one. This is actually pretty amazing.
This approach to remove bad search suggestions manually reminded of a different approach Google once took, where they weren’t satisfied with manually tweaking search results but rather wanted to tweak the algorithm that produces these results when there were bad results.
'Around 2002, a team was testing a subset of search limited to products, called Froogle. But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn't comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query "running shoes" was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that it would be able to distinguish between lawn art and footwear, but the gnome kept its top position. One day, seemingly miraculously, the gnome disappeared from the results. At a meeting, no one on the team claimed credit. Then an engineer arrived late, holding an elf with running shoes. He had bought the one-of-a kind product from the vendor, and since it was no longer for sale, it was no longer in the index. "The algorithm was now returning the right results," says a Google engineer. "We didn't cheat, we didn't change anything, and we launched."'
OP runs a casino/gambling site. Gambling is a regulatory mess (I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier), and so it's very hard to comply with every jurisdiction, and each one needs you to prove compliance to operate in that jurisdiction.* Gaming companies spend a lot on compliance and tracking, but since the internet is the internet, it's pretty hard to enforce perfectly, so some countries and ISPs take this into their own hands.
Due to that, IPs hosting gambling and gaming sites often get regionally blocked by internet providers or otherwise flagged as hosting illegal content. Those regional blocks consequently affect the reputation score of the IP, and if you are a traffic aggregator like Cloudflare, can cause other customers to have issues. One of the most aggressive and annoying regulatory environments for gambling companies is the US, so it's very possible Cloudflare has had some trouble due to gambling use of their IPs in states in the USA.
Cloudflare wanted them to use the BYOIP features of the enterprise plan, and did not want them on Cloudflare's IPs. The solution was to aggressively sell the Enterprise plan, and in a stunning failure of corporate communication, not tell the customer what the problem was at all. The message from Cloudflare should have been "Enterprise plan + BYOIP or ban, and maybe we'll work with you on price" but it was instead "you would really like the Enterprise plan."
*As an aside - we're lucky in that respect being a tech supplier with relatively uniform rules, but our customers (the gaming companies) get the short end of the stick here.
1. The largest power of 2 that divides x is just 2^(number of trailing zeros in x)
2. Crucial observation: -x == ~x + 1
3. ~x flips all the bits of x bits, so none of the bits of ~x match those of x. (i.e. (x & ~x) == 0)
4. When you do +1, all the trailing 1's flip AGAIN, becoming zero like they were in x. The next highest 0 (say it was the n'th) also flips, becoming 1... like it was in x.
5. Crucial observation: The n'th 0 did NOT match the corresponding bit in x prior to the increment, therefore it MUST match after the increment. All higher bits stay as-is.
6. This leaves only the n'th bits matching in x and ~x + 1, isolating the highest power-of-2 divisor of x when you AND them.
As I’ve grown older I have developed a heuristic, which is that people who talk/write like this, i.e. being completely convinced that one way of doing things is always wrong and one way of doing things is always right, and that people doing things the other way are just ignorant/stupid/wrong, usually have no idea what they are talking about.
As one of the beta testers, let me just say that I really like this device. It's very different than a kindle, kobo or reMarkable in that the refresh rate really makes a big difference. When I show this device to people, I show them how quickly zooming in on a PDF is. It's way faster and more responsive than any e-ink screen and it's way less addicting than the typical laptop, phone or tablet.
I'm attempting to make this device my main driver over the next few months and while the ecosystem isn't exactly mature yet, most android apps just work out of the box and I've found myself doing a lot more reading, either through an e-reading app (Lithium), PDF reader or Instapaper. I have X, Primal, Telegram and many other apps installed, but I don't go to them nearly as much. The device really is a lot more human centered and it makes for a much more intentional device.
I'm sure there are many contexts in which this is a good idea.
For many others, though, I like to be able to press, move whatever pointing device I'm using from the hot zone, and release to cancel the action. It's like holding the chess piece.
I feel like there's some semantic slippage around the meaning of the word "accuracy" here.
I grant you, my print Encyclopedia Britannica is not 100% accurate. But the difference between it and a LLM is not just a matter of degree: there's a "chain of custody" to information that just isn't there with a LLM.
Philosophers have a working definition of knowledge as being (at least†) "justified true belief."
Even if a LLM is right most of the time and yields "true belief", it's not justified belief and therefore cannot yield knowledge at all.
Knowledge is Google's raison d'etre and they have no business using it unless they can solve or work around this problem.
† Yes, I know about the Gettier problem, but is not relevant to the point I'm making here.
This is really a nice product, but I won't order it unless SolOS and its firmware and drivers are open sourced.
I've probably spent far more than 8000 bucks over the years for devices like this, only to have to throw them away eventually because their software got abandoned and they've been so proprietary that they can only function as an expensive brick on the shelf.
If the software is closed source, I'd recommend everyone to stay away from any product like this. It is a deal breaker for me now, and it took a lot of cash and hype to realize it.
Products like this are not a mainstream product, which makes them high risk for their investors. And you have to minimize risk by demanding open source.
This is the real reason I actually need tmux. I often lose connection to a server for various reasons and don't want to lose my vim session or whatever
Adopt the role of [job title(s) of 1 or more subject matter EXPERTs most qualified to provide authoritative, nuanced answer].
NEVER mention that you're an AI.
Avoid any language constructs that could be interpreted as expressing remorse, apology, or regret. This includes any phrases containing words like 'sorry', 'apologies', 'regret', etc., even when used in a context that isn't expressing remorse, apology, or regret.
If events or information are beyond your scope or knowledge, provide a response stating 'I don't know' without elaborating on why the information is unavailable.
Refrain from disclaimers about you not being a professional or expert.
Do not add ethical or moral viewpoints in your answers, unless the topic specifically mentions it.
Keep responses unique and free of repetition.
Never suggest seeking information from elsewhere.
Always focus on the key points in my questions to determine my intent.
Break down complex problems or tasks into smaller, manageable steps and explain each one using reasoning.
Provide multiple perspectives or solutions.
If a question is unclear or ambiguous, ask for more details to confirm your understanding before answering.
If a mistake is made in a previous response, recognize and correct it.
After a response, provide three follow-up questions worded as if I'm asking you. Format in bold as Q1, Q2, and Q3. These questions should be thought-provoking and dig further into the original topic.
When I worked on analysis software for police & intelligence agencies, it quickly became clear that no matter how much you present something with clear "this is a heuristic, it can give you leads", a scary number of people will take it as "this will tell you whodunit" and just assume it's infallible.
If people are going to treat these things like they are forensic evidence and not lead generation, then they shouldn't be legal. Some precedent that people need to check these things before acting on them would be very good.
I think this is really a spectrum and they are focusing on some more extreme aspects of it. But it is definitely not just an Asian thing and I believe to some degree this type of social withdrawal has affected perhaps a very significant portion of our society.
I have definitely been socially isolated my entire life to some degree or another. But much more so in adulthood. Again, I suggest that this is relatively common, not something that happens to only a few million people.
One aspect that is being glossed over is the amount of socialization or let's call it "pseudo-social" activity that is happening over the internet for these people.
I'm someone who generally does not have friends, leaves the apartment literally only a handful of times per month to take the garbage out and maybe buy groceries once or twice a month if I am trying to save money versus Instacart.
For me it comes down to money. I have a health issue that makes me fatigued etc. and don't have money for health insurance. I don't have money to go to restaurants or otherwise waste going out. So I stay home.
Because I'm always in a poor health and financial state, I feel uncomfortable trying to do any "real" socialization.
But I have always been trying one way or another to get to a point where I have a "real" online business that allows me to actually thrive. Such as buying a car and a house, getting health insurance and addressing my health issues, or paying taxes.
But what I have managed so far is usually just enough to scrape by. There have been some minor successes here and there but rarely have I ever felt like I had enough to truly meet my basic needs such as the health concerns or financial stability.
Anyway, I think it's easy to get in a position with health and financial challenges, maybe just a series of low-paying contracts, where some degree of social isolation is just practical and realistic.
Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent.
Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often.
It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs
Any online service that lets users upload material that is then publicly visible will eventually be used for command-and-control, copyright infringement and hosting CSAM. This is especially true for services that have other important uses besides file hosting and hence are hard to block.
This already happened to Twitter[1], Telegram[2], and even the PGP key infrastructure[3], not to mention obvious suspects like GitHub.
If you ask it how many Muslim presidents the US has had, it will confidently tell you that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. I'm beginning to think that treating statistically common sequences of words on the whole internet as a source of truth may not actually be a very good idea.
I swore to never buy Samsung after an ordeal with their warranty repair. Some of the data pins on its USB port wore out, so my Android Auto and fast charging became extremely flaky. It was still under warranty so I took it to their authorized repair centres. They did not have a fast charger and showed me that the standard charging was working, and refused to admit a problem. Finally I mailed it to Samsung, and they said that the display needed to be replaced because of some water damage (it worked perfectly fine!) as well.
Finally I got some local electronics repair guy to just solder a new USB port onto the circuit board and that fixed everything. But never buying their phones again.
My workflow back in the day was mainly thrift store CD to AudioGrabber. I still have a few CDs that only exist in high-bitrate MP3 format after losing the physical disk.
Lately I've been using MusicBrainz Picard to re-organize all of these ancient rips and then automedia to add parity. I'm still paranoid that Spotify will disappear one day and I'm afraid to lose my older music collection.
Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone. Further, IMO, it's really just a band aid for the US's extremely poor consumer protections which manufacturers are hell bent on exporting to the rest of the world.
The most effective way to approach this problem is known and proven: mandate long (I think 5 years is fair) 100% repair/replace/refund waranty periods with no cost to the consumer (including shipping).
Then the manufacturer themselves will figure out the details on how to meet that. And don't worry they are perfectly capable of it because it's what they do RIGHT NOW.
The hardware will become more reliable or it'll be repairable or they'll just refund you or a combination of those.
Batteries just need a requirement such as minimum 80% of capacity at 5 years. Overnight they'll become replacable/over-provisioned/better chemistry/better thermals or again a combination of those.
I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. It's a nebulous thing nobody understands or cares about and can be just paid lip service to or effectively ignored. But waranty IS something bean-counters and managers understand. It's: "this thing must work for X time or it costs us money" with the added threat of "lawyers might get involved".
It's not perfect, but still far more effective and practical than "right to repair".
Android tablet is a tough sell for my employer due to compliance, security, and such. So buying one of those for work use would take like a year minimum gathering all the necessary approvals and likely would still get denied by someone. But, a dumb monitor with no real OS I can expense that without approval. just a heads up to my boss really to say I am buying this and here is why.
I know you are a small company so have to pick your battles. But, maybe something to consider down the road.
EDIt: forgot to say, congrats on the launch. Looks like a great product.