Although I liked the video of the artist working, I didn't appreciate that they took away the controls to pause, play, seek. Is there a workaround to get back the playback controls on websites that disable it?
I have a weird long-shot idea for GPT to make a new discovery in physics: Ask it to find a mathematical relationship between some combination of the fundamental physical constants[1]. If it finds (for example) a formula that relates electron mass, Bohr radius, and speed of light to a high degree of precision, that might indicate an area of physics to explore further if those constants were thought to be independent.
They literally cannot do this, they are not that much different than autocomplete that was in your email 10 years ago, with some transformer NN magic. Stop believing the hype.
The Bohr radius is the result of a simple classical physics calculation (a common exercise for undergraduates in their first year). It depends only on the electron mass and the fine structure constant which is the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. In the SI system, the speed of light has a fixed value which defines the unit of length.
There are known mathematical relationships between almost all fundamental physical constants? In particular, in your example, Bohr radius is calculated from electron mass and the speed of light in vacuum... I don't think this path is as promising as it sounds.
> if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher
But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?
Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:
Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem
Suppose you're saying that the link between the ISPmodem and the HomeModem is a bare unfiltered copper wire. In that case, I have a different question: Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).
> Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire
Yes, but you need the bare copper wire without signaling. We operated a local ISP in the 90's and did exactly that by ordering so-called "alarm circuits" from the telco (with no dial tone) and placed a copper T1 CSU on each end. We marketed it as "metro T1" and undercut traditional T1 pricing by a huge margin with great success to the surrounding downtown area.
Yes, the actual bandwidth of the last-mile analog line was much, much higher. Hence why we eventually got 8mbit ADSL or 24mbit ADSL 2.0+ running across it. Or even 50-300mbit with VDSL in really ideal conditions.
Though the actual available bandwidth was very dependent on distance. People would lease dedicated pairs for high bandwidth across town (or according to a random guy I talked to at a cafe: just pirate an unused pair that happened to run between their two buildings). But once we start talking between towns, the 32kbit you could get from the digital trunk lines was almost always higher than what you could get on a raw analog line over the same distance.
Traditionally both the ISP and you pay for analog phone lines from the telco. The telco uses digital internally (remember you and your ISP probably aren't at the same exchange), which puts a hard limit on data rate - there is no trick you can do to get more bits through than the bits used in the digital part of the call.
If you (as the ISP) buy enough lines you can get them delivered in digital format. A T1 is designed to carry 24 simultaneous phone calls, acting virtually as a bundle of 24 analog phone cables. So the obvious next stage was to have a modem that can handle 24 simultaneous connections on one cable.
Now you have ISP\_modem←Ax24→ISP\_muxer←Dx24→Telco←→Telco←A→User
The ISP's modem generates analog signals for up to 24 simultaneous incoming calls, and they pass into a multiplexer that connects 24 analog lines to a T1 line and they go through the telco digitally to users. The maximum bandwidth is still as before - the modem has to generate an analog signal that will still be receivable at the other end after A2D and D2A conversion. Even though the digital bandwidth for the digital part is 56kbps, the maximum achievable bandwidth through this digital-bottlenecked analog call was found to be 33.6kbps.
But the industry had an idea: by convincing the telco to install the modems into the user's exchange, the analog portion would only be between the telco and the user, without a digital segment in the middle of it, and therefore wouldn't be bottlenecked the same way. The same digital backhaul from the ISP through the telco was used, but instead of transmitting a digitised analog modem signal and therefore causing degradation of quality, it transmitted your actual internet traffic bits, up to 56kbps. The analog signal was made at the user's side of the telco and didn't have to fit within 56kbps when digitised.
Pedantically, the digital circuits are 64kbps but one bit in some bytes is used for call status signaling, which is okay for voice, but the ISP equipment can't predict which bytes have a bit overwritten (and it could be multiple if there are several hops) so it just used 7 bits in each byte.
No, it’s more like HomeModem ←A→ Exchange1 ←D→ Exchange2 ←A→ ISPModem. The digital parts were all inside the telco’s networks that connect the exchanges to each other.
> Couldn't you send data at megabits per seconds over a mile long copper wire without using modems at all (using just UARTs?).
No. The exchange is sampling the analog signal coming in over your phone line at 8kHz and 8 bits per sample. They just designed modems that sent digital data over that analog link, in a way that would line up exactly with the way the exchange will sample it.
The Costco one uses household current (as can be seen in one of the photos that shows a cord and a plug) and the AliExpress uses USB. I doubt that USB can supply enough power to do more than a trivial amount of heating. USB 3.1 has a max of 15W, and I can't imagine that a $25 blanket is going to use the more sophisticated USB Power Delivery connections where even the cable & charger can cost more than $25.
While trying to find the actual power consumption of the Costco model, I found this very useful comment on the Costco site: "The power consumption is not listed anywhere - product packaging, website, or included manual. I went ahead and made the purchase and hooked it up to my battery unit once I got home. I can confirm, the blanket uses an average 99W regardless of which mode it's in. I left it in each mode for about 5 minutes. There's no difference to the touch of the blanket and there's no difference with the power consumption. In other words this blanket has one heat setting and it's not very warm."
> But oh what a difference it makes in the accounting! In the first case, where Autodesk sold the copy of AutoCAD to the dealer, that was the whole transaction; whatever happened to the copy of AutoCAD after the dealer paid for it has no effect on Autodesk’s books. Autodesk sells, dealer pays, end of story. But in the second case, when Autodesk sells to Spacely Sprockets, that appears on Autodesk’s ledger as a sale of AutoCAD for $1000. The instant the $1000 shows up, however, we immediately cut a check for the commission, $500, and mail it to the representative, leaving the same $500 we’d get from the dealer. Same difference, right? Not if you’re an accountant! In the first case, Autodesk made a sale for $500 and ended up, after expenses and taxes, with $125, and therefore is operating with a 25% margin (125/500). In the Spacely sale, however, the books show we sold the product for $1000, yet wound up only with the same $125. So now our margins are a mere 12.5% (125/1000).
I'd like to know how an accountant would respond to the above. Based on his two examples, it seems like accounting rules really distort the financial picture of a company.
I think the accountant would retort that it's way better to get $125 of profit from $500 of revenue than from $1000 of revenue, overall. In the former case, you have a lot of padding for conditions to change, and in the latter case you don't.
And, if there's some outside dealer that can make a profit taking their $500 cut, but you need to pay all of the $500 out-- it seems like your sales function is less efficient-- less efficient than the rest of Autodesk and less efficient than the outside dealer.
Margins aren't everything. Absent outside judgment, I think I'd rather make, say, $175 profit from $1k of revenue than $125 from $500. But I wouldn’t trade $125 on $500 for $126 on $1,000.
And, of course, there's always the strategic concerns. Control of accounts, opportunities to upsell or cross-sell, etc, etc. Financial reporting can't tell the whole story, because you can't boil down the whole story of a company to a few numbers. It's the triumph of GAAP that it's a pretty dang good start to understanding most companies.
Any investor with half a brain is not solely looking at one specific margin to analyze an investment. That is why you compare profit margin and operating margin and revenue and other measures to build a more accurate picture.
We have something similar with tariffs. We pass them through to the client, and they show up as revenue and expenses like this Autodesk example.. But, we immediately deduct the tariff expense from the tariff revenue above the gross revenue line, so Gross Revenue is not affected.
Profitability is all lies, you report what you want, the goal is to ensure whatever numbers you want to communicate raises nicely quarter over quarter.
> companies play with CAPEX, OPEX, what they call innovation, what they amortize etc.
True but most public companies reporting under GAAP tend to play roughly similar games to roughly similar degrees. So these metrics alone may not reflect much objective reality about a particular company at a given moment but can be useful in benchmarking the relative performance of similar types of companies against each other.
Exactly. That drives alot of the faddish nature of business. After Microsoft and Adobe started printing money with SaaS, suddenly everyone decided that selling software, one of the most lucrative businesses to ever be devised was a loser. Everyone wants $50/user/month now.
I realized it at a big enterprise. I couldn't figure out why one of my suppliers was flying out senior execs if I looked at the salesguy funny. We had a $2M account, and it turns out in the transition to SaaS, they value it like a financial product like insurance or a bond. So my stupid $2M spend may impact the market cap of the company 100x... which gets the Chief Revenue/Sales Dude a fat bonus.
There are revenue recognition rules that govern what Revenue is on the P&L. Same with costs/expenses. But I would say if anything, profits are easier to manipulate than revenue.
I recently found wordnet through an offline dictionary/thesaurus program and thought it was a pretty neat project. https://wordnet.princeton.edu/
For my use case I was more interested in the data than the application and so never installed it and am unable to comment on how usable it is, but will include a link if you want to look. https://sourceforge.net/projects/artha/
> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)
> the last link is also a lie
I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:
“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”
The business model of the S1 is just wild. It mimics the PC clone industry of the 1990s.
From the Wikipedia page:
This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.
Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.
I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.
There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.
i remember it very well, i bought a Sony at F.Y.E. at the mall. as a child, my mother insisted on Sony as it was reputable brand (thank god because they truly were better devices). But the non-Zune/Sony/iPod selections were all duplicates of the same garbage, this was ~2007.
It could be snaps[1]. Google for "denim jacket with snaps" to see examples that match the fasteners in the image. I too can't decide if it's a real photo or AI generated.
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