> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com
This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:
> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous
This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.
AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.
I understand this, I just think that 'share the prompt' will never get a result. Either the prompt is total dogshit or you learn that it was written in a certain way to create a narrative. That's information the author will never reveal.
Like I say, slop is slop. It's easy to detect. This post and the OP's actual website is basically just a few AI blog posts. I would just treat it as spam and disengage.
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
in general, yes. but specifically studying exoplant A or exoplanet B? or understanding dark matter? or driving a little science robot on Mars? what's the immediate utility of that?
The same thing could have been asked of radio waves when they were first discovered. It was actually considered purely an academic curiosity with no practical application. You can't know ahead of time which discoveries will be the lynchpin for some as yet unimagined future advance. Much like VC you need to spread out your bets and expect that most won't make direct return, but that every now and then something with 10000x return will surface.
right, which is all the more reason to continue studying them in spite of the lack of immediate returns. our capitalist mode of quarter-driven roadmaps means we no longer care about the long horizon, it's all 'results this, metrics that, now now now' - meanwhile any student of history who's ever looked at the history of computing, or data science, or virtually any of our modern marvels knows how much purely abstract stone had to first be cut to get us to the results we have today
can you imagine chucking all of computer science away because Babbage's thinking machines and Lovelace's programming cards didn't really result in meaningful capital gains here in FY26Q3? or, a more realistic example - imagine biology and genetics today if Mendel's discoveries had been published in a more widely read journal, if he hadn't been outright dismissed for his mathematical approach. or Semmelweis' advocacy of antispetic procedures that flew in the face of the then humors-based understanding of medicine in the 1800s - how many lives would have been saved between then and when Germ Theory finally took off decades later?
it's ironic to me that it's often the same people who'll adopt the logic of banning reproductive rights on the off chance that someone very unprepared to have a child might birth someone who can cure cancer in spite of the probabilistic evidence of SES being highly correlated with educational attainment (eg that graph of the income bracket that the parents of all Nobel Prize winners start with). and yet when it comes to the actual nascent research and development required to pave the way for larger discoveries, that's seen as totally pointless and not worthy of funding. it's truly flabbergasting
Agreed. For a long time it felt like most governments/funders accepted that pure research is a necessary part of feeding the applied research machine. And now the funders seem particularly short-sighted.
In saying that, in the spirit of a good faith argument, is there value in temporarily deprioritising pure research in (current) times of funding drought?
Also it ignores the fact that the core of calculus and the idea of dealing with infinitesimal quantities was independently discovered for many centuries. eg. Archimedes use techniques that were eerily similar to integrals.
The work that Newton and Leibniz did was in formalizing it and coming up with the notation that would end up being more widely accepted and applicable. It's very likely that the techniques would have been developed later to solve a practical problem.
This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.
Many lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.
If there are no incentives for mathematicians to work on and share progress in tough problems because they will get scooped, then they will end up quitting and in net we will see less progress overall.
reddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
> your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc
I think this is starting to change a bit especially as companies crack down on password sharing. Once the dam breaks, there's gonna be a pretty drastic and unstoppable migration towards the "dumb" TV products + more open alternatives. I'm already seeing a lot of families start to move to DVDs and Blurays for kids who just watch the same 5 movies on repeat anyway.
This migration is already happening away from Windows. Gaming was the big moat that Windows had but now with Steam Proton and better Linux alternatives, a ton of people are starting to move away and while it's not a significant majority yet, I think the tides have already turned and there's not much Microsoft can do to turn it back.
This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:
> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous
This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.
AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.
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