Your point is interesting because I see this across the home hardware industry. Cheap electronics were subsidized by data collection and I suppose that market was lucrative until it wasn't. It happened behind the scenes, we knew it was going on, but it was abstracted away enough that we did not think about it. Now what is happening is that the hardware providers are getting into the marketing game directly. Personally in the past year I've given up on two pieces of hardware Alexa and Roku because they have morphed into ad machines. The market is open for privacy, convenience, and quality. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be the only major player in that space right now and we are paying their premium.
Apple is already one of the largest ad companies in the world and they are clearly working very hard to get bigger($10.34 billion ad revenue in 2023).
Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them. Also fan boys, I'd be willing to bet if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise instead of being appalled.
> Sure, they're great at PR and marketing themselves as "private" but they're just as bad as the rest of them.
Apple's $10B of ad revenue primarily comes from promoting apps within its App Store, similar to how grocery stores charge for premium shelf space or end-of-aisle displays. This is an in-store, first-party system where data collected is used exclusively within Apple's ecosystem to personalize the user experience. These ads aim to increase app visibility within the App Store, maintaining a controlled and private "first party" environment.
In contrast, Google’s $300B advertising ecosystem extends far beyond its own platforms, surveilling and tracking user behavior across millions of websites and even physical locations. Google integrates with 85% of credit card transactions in the U.S., creating extensive user profiles that feed into a global ad tech and data brokering network with thousands of data brokers. This system supports highly targeted ads that follow users across the internet and beyond, typically sending users to third-party sites and services.
The difference lies in the scope and method of data collection and usage: Apple’s approach is about, and data remains within, its ecosystem, while Google’s extends to pervasive cross-platform tracking and profiling.
> if Apple launches a "private personalized ad platform", the fanboys will be singing its praise
This is indeed likely, since as an example, Apple spends extra time and energy to prevent even themselves from getting data, such as how they break up your Apple Maps trips directions requests into anonymized segments, to avoid letting themselves capture users' full trips. Apple deliberately makes their own data use more difficult, and in some cases makes certain uses impossible for themselves, to serve users' privacy. When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.
TL;DR:
For both ad platforms and privacy engineering, as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".
> When you look at Alphabet or Meta engineering, you see their schemes serve to give them the ad profile data, while making it inaccessible to competitors.
That's exactly what Apple did with their supposed "opt out" work a couple of years back - they take a lot more data than apps on their platform are allowed to.
Kinda crazy then, that advertising is a mandatory feature of the iPhone whereas it's something that Google lets you disable on the AOSP. You'd think that a company like Google is a pretty low bar, but even they get some stuff down better than Apple does on iOS. I'd never switch back to iPhone having seen what a clusterfuck cloud storage is on iOS...
> as the Gus Fring meme goes, these "are not the same".
Don't people mostly use this meme ironically to derisively compare two things that aren't distinguished by much of anything?
The realized value of LLMs is going to be output from a data to AI pipeline. From raw data to actions or insights. This is Microsoft's play to control the entire process. They are attempting to abstract away all the "tooling" needed to manage and process data.
It falls down because there is no discretion left to the consumer. Objectively, the computer is already processing all the data you are interacting with. Subjectively it is assumed its ephemeral. Computer forensics proves this wrong.
So I think to refine my opening statement, the realized value of LLMs is going to be the output from a "curated" data to AI pipeline. Which Microsoft is not providing with this solution.
Another interesting takeaway is that because you are taking a single line capture the pixel distance equates to time not to distance like a normal image.
What that means is that if you pick two points on the car, you can measure that distance in pixels and multiply by the frequency to get change in time.
Divide the actual physical distance of those two points by that result and you know how fast the car was traveling.
I can say that Acquired at least has done some of the most interesting storytelling on the founding of companies. It's like taking 5 different books on the same topic and abridging the best parts together with some commentary sprinkled in.
If it is simply a platform for them, I'm okay with it because of the quality of content.
I like how Acquired ventures beyond recent tech startups and discusses older and non-tech companies like Walmart [1] or Hermès [2]. Their interview with Charlie Munger [3] was a particular treat and ended up being one of his last interviews.
Wonder if there was consideration given to mechanically moving mirrors to facilitate the light positioning rather than moving the light source itself. It may lend to modularity as well if you need to switch out light sources (LED to Laser) and could allow for more complex configurations like notch filtering to remove unwanted reflective wavelengths. My first guess is it may have been cost as mirrors and filters are expensive.
You guessed right -- mirrors are expensive, and also heavy; plus it's yet another piece to align (in infrared, so you can't use unaided vision to align the optics; yes, you can use a coaxial visible beam to help with this but that's also expensive and hard for various reasons). If you're using an incoherent light source there's also the problem of collecting all that light and focusing it onto the sample, and each optical element incurs some loss of light.
In the end, the actual LEDs themselves are tiny; a PCB containing the LEDs + driver ICs is smaller, lighter, and brighter than any mirror/lens assembly I could easily source with the requisite coatings to operate efficiently in this frequency band.
For a laser source, a fiber optic source can make a lot of sense, but fiber optics optimized for this frequency of light turn out to be pretty expensive, and the termination of the fiber optic still needs a collimator lens. At the end of the day, the net weight and cost budget still works out in favor of mounting a laser diode directly on the microscope head, so long as the power requirement is under a watt. Beyond that, the weight of the heat sink starts to be a factor, and an off-board laser starts to make more sense.
There is a delicate balance though. The draw of the RPG is that you play a character who usually has an outsized impact on the world in comparison to most everyone else. If we expect the NPCs to operate as independent entities, how do we manage their ambition so that they don't individually, or in aggregate, impact the world more than you? Without that, your character becomes another cog in the machine; it's their world and you are simply living in it... Which I could see having a certain appeal and may be just another genre.
Some of the most hilarious and enjoyable parts of gaming is manipulating the environment in ways developers didn't anticipate. With more intelligent NPCs there will be opportunities to give them instructions, and let them go to get it done.
Crafting instructions that lead to NPC's working to achieve a goal that wasn't anticipated, and provides you with a resource that couldn't otherwise be had in the game, will be a whole new aspect to gaming, and inspire a desire to experiment and explore.
That sounds really cool, as a genre, actually. You would have to figure out what given NPCs actually want, and how you may be able to use that, to make them do what you want. And not based on some lame script, but complex world and character models. I'm sold!
closest thing ive gotten to that is eu4. How good the diplomacy model feels ebbs and flows, but I really do love the feeling of sitting there analysing alliance structures, friendships, rivalries, desires for specific bits of land etc until I finally figure out how to break up that bloc/pry out that country from their alliance group/get that large power to have reason to ally with me, a tiny dutchy
What makes cyberpunk 2077 such a great game is that the world doesn't revolve around you, it exists despite you, and you see this in all of the side-quest events that are happening in the background. The world being alive despite you, and not for you adds a whole new dimension to the universe.
Sandbox games are pretty big. Not my thing at all, but I’m sure there’d be a big market for believable open-world RPGs for example. They’d probably be more simulators than narrative-driven games.
For a detailed report on the mechanics behind the BOXX ETF, Bloomberg just published this article:
https://archive.is/8kq0G
It is not a perfect solution for everyone. You do need to take into account your income tax rate and your capital gains tax rate.
The archive owner wants takedown requests to be forced to be cross-border, so he wants to know where the request is coming from so he can serve from a server in a different country.
Cloudflare blocks the extension to DNS that allows that. If you don't care, you can set your DNS to bypass Cloudflare for those domains only.
I’ve known this for a while now but it never ceases to amaze me. This must be up there with “no copyright intended” in terms of misguided compliance strategies.
It's always appeared to be a matter of perspective, to me.
That being said, by "Cloudflare has issues with archive.is" I very literally meant that they have issues with the DNS records served to them by Archive.is. (i.e. They do not support EDNS.)
Can someone explain it a bit better? I am not quite sure why in addition to spx this fund buys options on Bookings? Also, where is the risk in this strategy, besides counter parties risk.
The Bookings options are explained in the Bloomberg article. They use offsetting bets so that one generates a large gain and the other generates a large loss (either way the stock moves). Then the gain is offloaded through an in-kind redemption (not a taxable event for an ETF) and the loss is kept on the books to offset any other taxable gains in the fund. I guess you could worry what happens if the stock doesn't move, but since they get to pick the timing, that seems unlikely to be an issue in practice.
I can think of at least a few risks that one would not have with T-bills besides counterparty risk. You have management risk: they have said what their strategy is and what they will do, but what if they don't? I would also ask who is on the other side of these trades and how big that market is or can be. Alpha Architect's own explainer implies that box spreads can also be used to borrow money and that this might be cheaper for the borrowers than margin loans, which makes some sense, but it seems like a pretty esoteric instrument to use for that. Most of their argument is an appeal to the efficiency of markets, which might be true until it isn't. Finally, there's regulatory risk. They think this works under the current rules, but a regulator might disagree with that. If someone does not like it a sufficient amount the rules could be changed, just like there's already an exception for "original issue discount" that makes zero-coupon bond income like Treasuries count as interest income, not capital gains, even though no interest payments are ever made.
I'm not in finance, though, I'm just some guy, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
I wish I could find the source, but I'll relay it less eloquently. Children have a remarkable ability to ask for things they know they can't have. Their innocence gives them the audacity to ask for the impossible.
This always stuck with me. I sometimes catch myself when I self-curate questions to eliminate what I "know" will be impossible.
It also has led me to sometimes just say "yes" when I get those questions, just to impart a bit of expanded possibility into their life.
I wonder if it's because the average parent is not a very sophisticated bureaucrat. We get tired and just say yes because we need to survive. As children get older and interface with more institutions that have teams of people to tell you no (or no process to even ask), we enter a learned helplessness: a no today is almost certainly a no tomorrow.
I would highly encourage anyone who has even thought about doing this; do it.
If you are thinking about how to get started, I recommend the StoryCorp app. It is easy to use they have a bunch of prebuilt questions or you can create your own. You record directly to your phone but if you are inclined, you can upload your interview to the Library of Congress.
https://storycorps.org/participate/storycorps-app/
I actually interviewed my mom about ... 15 years ago? About some topics. But the fucking recordings are locked up in a proprietary recorder that requires software running on windows95 to unlock it, and I don't even know if the software exists anymore.
I should make that my December project, to find a way to unlock those files.
With Coqui.ai shutting down it's studio and API it looks like they are reinvesting their efforts into their XTTS models and framework.
A recent update to their GitHub also has a no-code gradio ui to facilitate fine-tuning and inferencing locally. https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/releases/tag/v0.21.3
