the sad part of this is that volume/priority at TSMC shifting from consumer chips that get sold to you and me, to corporate chips which likely will get sold to OpenAI/Amazon/MS or some other corporate datacenter, means that the un-democratization of computing power is well underway....
mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...
(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).
I mean sure it is fun to pick one company and hate it, but this is not the point being argued here.
But the point here is that a few companies are outbidding everyone else, hoarding shittons of compute and putting it into their data centers, to rent to people. This is effectively taking compute ownership away from consumers and centralizing compute i.e. un-democratising.
Apple outcompeting other companies to put their products into the hands of regular people is vastly different.
If consumers cared about compute ownership then they wouldn't be buying iPhones. This feels like a fairly natural progression of things, albeit a bit disappointing to Apple fans.
Plus... Apple kinda wastes it. Not to be judgy, but we don't need 2nm chips to hardware-accelerate Netflix and Pornhub. The iPhone is locked-down, there's no worry that it will be a poor gaming platform or disrupt valuable workflows. A new iPhone chip means nothing anymore.
Between the $99/year sideloading, Liquid Glass and fighting fruitlessly against CUDA, I think Apple needs a break to reflect on why their software strategy is so unpopular with everyone. The hardware advances are doing them more harm than good at this point.
TSMC is a for profit business. Why would they care about the moral virtue purity of the applications running on their chips? Seriously illogical statement
Oh, they definitely don't. I'm just pointing out that Apple can afford to forfeit the latest nodes without sacrificing anything important, whereas Nvidia cannot.
Intel seems to be very competitive again when it comes to laptop battery life. If macbooks again get the reputation of sluggy and overheating that's not great for sales.
I mean...there is a whole discussion about the questionable ethics of the research methods in the verge article. And human subjects and issues-of-consent questions aside, they are also messing with a mission critical system (linux kernel), and apparently left crappy code in there for all the maintainers to go back and weed out.
> I don't think it's unethical to send someone an email that has bad code in it.
It's unethical because of the bits you left out: sending code you know is bad, and doing so under false pretenses.
Whether or not you think this rises to the level of requiring IRB approval, surely you must be able to understand that wasting people's time like this is going to be viewed negatively by almost anyone. Some people might be willing to accept that doing this harm is worth it for the greater cause of the research, but that doesn't erase the harm done.
See another comment I made in this thread about GKH's response - the UMN group submitted a handful of small patches as part of this study, and "wasted" probably a handful of man hours or at worst a few man days of maintainer time. I don't really consider it a waste because evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
GKH's response was to waste man weeks or man months of maintainer time persecuting every last commit that happened to come from umn.edu, despite having zero reason to believe these commits were more suspect than any other institution's commits.
> evidence that critical open source infrastructure doesn't bother to run static analysis before merging code from randos is actually useful information that the public deserves to have.
It's totally possible to obtain evidence of that without being an asshole to kernel maintainers. Which is the kind of thing that an ethics review conducted before the experiment could have pointed out. If the goal of the experiment was merely to demonstrate the lack of routine static analysis capable of catching such vulnerabilities, then the experiment's design was not justified and the experiment was needlessly harmful to non-consenting participants.
2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.
1) They did not hit stable. GKH is referring, in this email, to a legitimate attempt to contribute from a student at UMN. Whether or not this student was part of the hypocrite commits study, I don't know. But it's not a hypocrite commit, just a normal buggy commit. You can tell, because it's from a umn.edu email address, which they did not use for hypocrite commits.
2) I don't actually care about the internal policies of UMN's IRB. Whether or not the study's approval was proper and whether they would get into trouble with their boss is not my problem. The point is that what they did is obviously not immoral or unethical.
The point of an IRB is to act as an outside reviewer of _ethics_. IRBs aren't some checklist thing admin put in to protect the University's reputation, they exist as a direct reaction to huge amounts of unethical human experimentation occurring last century.
The point of an IRB is to stop you from nonconsentually sterilizing people. As long as the system stops that from happening, I don't care about the paperwork. It's not my concern.
The "ethical" issues with this study do not rise to the level that I care, so the only objection is that they didn't get the IRB to rubber stamp it beforehand, which I also don't care about.
Honestly, I'm relieved...it's not really in their DNA and not pivotal to their success; why pivot the company into a U turn into a market that's vague defined and potentially algorithmically limited?
Leadership that signed off on it still there though.
In fact this NY Times article suggests long time head of software at Apple is also on the short list of candidates.
Anecdotally every tech company I have worked for run by a CEO with real world skills; like hardware engineering or in one case, a former surgeon; were great to work at.
Whenever my employer has leadership that only relates to the world entirely through abstraction; like MBAs, software engineers; those companies crashed and burned.
it seems quaint to dunk on Jobs now...he seems like a saint in comparison, in light of Mao Zedong-style mass-murder-by-policy from the current crop of tech industry CEOs.
> Musk has pushed back against guardrails for Grok [...] Musk has “been unhappy about over-censoring” on Grok “for a long time.” [...] At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator
...how are the shareholders not in revolt over this?
The stock seems completely disconnected from the antics of Musk. I would think that having a CEO who is clearly a heavy ketamine user and spends more time playing politician than actually running the company would have a negative impact on the stock, but tesla's stock has been divorced from reality for a long time.
having the power to destroy a government agency that provides aid and actually going through with it is not morally equal to not donating a few dollars of your income
1 - the moral calculus is different if you were already doing so and then suddenly shut it off
2 - i was happy with the arrangement of the government doing it on my behalf, and in doing so making the united states stronger and have allies around the world
3 - elon musk did this illegally
4 - elon musk also caused additional deaths by virtue of supporting trump, rfk, and these other lunatics which he was definitely affirmatively a part of doing
While the quantification isn't inherently reliable, the reality of many dead at the hands at Elon Mush is a simple fact that's not up for dispute. The only question is how many he's killed so far. He cut off life saving meds to sick kids and food aid to the areas with food shortages, the deaths are known and reliably reported.
It is easy to prove, it is shown in the linked model. The model is simple. If I spend X amount of dollars feeding people, I can save Y lives. Since this model is obviously bunk, I'm sure you can easily articulate why this model is inaccurate, untrustworthy, or otherwise unhelpful.
Technically his department produced and advised on the data. It's just a government BI team. This is like blaming the BI team for the CEO's decision to fire people. Part of the process, sure. But this a decision made by the majority of Congress. Let's not forget who the bad guy is.
Absolutely true. But it's certainly not the bad guy with no power to do what parent accused him of that deserves blame. It's a logical impossibility. We still follow logic, I hope.
So the kids died as a result of the action taken (withdrawing meds from impoverished children), but the person who took the meds away from the sick kids who then died as a result is innocent? I feel like you might want to look at that word "sophistry" long and hard, and do a bit of soul searching.
African women dying of HIV did not contract it from Elon Musk. They got it from somewhere. I'm open to theories that do not involve blaming a pretentious billionaire who will inseminate anything except black women.
Subrogation could not be more central to the discussion if you're using blame to justify disbursement of money from parties with no obligation or responsibility to provide free healthcare to another continent.
USAID should never have been created; it serves no strategic purpose unless the purpose is exfiltration of wealth to NGO networks. Auditing government programs for efficacy is not a scam, it's accountability. Eliminating a program that benefits others at our expense is not homicide.
All of your arguments are made in bad faith. You don't really have one beyond emotional blackmail and ad hominems. Sophistry.
The argument is very simple, Elon Musk's decision led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and will result in millions more. Auditing government programs for efficacy is not a scam, but Elon Musk did not do that. He said he would do that but did not.
The USG spend is higher than it ever has been, most of the savings cited were fake, and thus he killed a lot of people for no reason.
Eliminating USAID led to deaths. Just because you don't like that it existed did not mean it was preventing deaths. Pulling the plug on someone is killing them, even if you didn't give them the disease and paying for their healthcare was expensive for you.
Your comment makes me interested in the hypothetical of how Jobs would have positioned Apple under the current administration.
I haven't read much about Tim Cook being anywhere near the level of sycophant, or raising the curtain to show the ugliness behind, as much as some of the others.
mostly because of the destruction of American science, public health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a professionally trained RD to write it up.
Didn’t those professionals give us the original food pyramid that told us to stuff our faces with bread? Weren’t they the same people that told us not to eat eggs because of cholesterol? And tell us to limit our fish consumption?
Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.
Coal burning and incidental industrial releases drastically increased the amount of mercury in surface waters over the past century. The released mercury gets transformed by bacteria into organomercury compounds which are lipophilic and concentrate up the food chain, meaning that predator fish like tuna and swordfish can contain orders of magnitude more mercury than the water they live in.
There are plenty of fish with much lower mercury levels (like salmon, trout, and sardines):
Your first link recommends limiting fish for children to 2 servings per week, even from the “best choices” list. By contrast it recommends kids 1-5 have two servings a day of other meat and poultry: https://www.parkchildcare.ie/food-pyramid-for-1-5-year-old-c...
Thats tantamount to a recommendation that fish should comprise a minority of your protein, which is backwards. It’s almost certainly healthier overall for fish to be your primary protein source and to eat red meat, chicken, and pork sparingly. How many servings a week of fish do you think Japanese kids eat?
This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"
Who was lobbied? The lobbyists can’t publish things in the Federal Register. How it works is they try to influence the experts at the agencies to support their position. That’s what lobbying is. It’s all laundered through experts both in the private sector and the government.
>How it works is they try to influence the experts at the agencies to support their position
The real winning move if you can afford it to pay for a bunch of academic labs who won't at the margin publish stuff that's bad for their sugardaddy. This way the lawmakers, the bureaucrats and the public discourse is all built upon numbers and information that is favorable to you. So then when those officials you bought make the "right" decisions they can do so in comfort knowing that their decisions are backed by the numbers.
> The real winning move if you can afford it to pay for a bunch of academic labs who won't at the margin publish stuff that's bad for their sugardaddy.
Are you talking about "professionally trained nutritionists"?
Those people are worse than Astrologers.
At least astrologers stick to their fantasy, while, since I remember being old enough to count, I already lost track of how many times they've told us that "eggs are bad" and then "eggs are good" again, and then bad, and good, and... I've lost track.
Then they told us to eat cereal at breakfast, and that bread and potatoes are the basis of a good diet, then that fat is the killer and then that we should replace butter with plant based alternatives and the list goes on.
Nutritionists aren't scientists. They aren't even good at basic logic and coherence. So, no, I don't want them in charge of dictating policies.
"The professionals" produced 2.5-3 laughably bad food pyramids depending on how you count. Of all the things this administration has done to "run around" the system on this or that issue, this is not gonna be one I'm gonna get pissed off about.
Is the department of agriculture not "the professionals"?
And even if they weren't not a day goes by that government doesn't do things based on research/influence/numbers from academia that was produced with funding from a) the government b) the industry. So it's not like anything other option for deriving a food pyramid is free of questionable influence either.
mirroring, come to think of it, the movement to un-democratize of modern governments...
(I would be happier if the news behind Nvidia's strength was sales of good, reasonably priced consumer GPU cards...but it's clearly not. I can walk down the street and buy anything from Tim Cook, but 9 out of 10 times, I cannot buy a 5080/5090 FE card from Jenson Huang).
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