I guess Atlas is a good name for a web browser. But I'm surprised their first release is Mac only. Does it indicate they are targeting some kind of power user (programmers, creatives etc) or is it just the first platform they could ship by the deadline?
Will they be able to take any significant marketshare from Chrome? I suppose only time will tell but it will be a pretty hard slog especially since Chrome is pretty much synonymous with "browser" in most of the world. Still, I don't think anyone at Google is breathing easy.
The review does not mention Deandra (played by Regina Hall) at all, among other black characters who weren't negative representations per se. Deandra is very prominent in the second act of the movie and her responsibility and dedication to the mission is quite apparent.
It's implied that me and all the people who identify with that review watched the movie, watched her portrayal, and didn't find it to override the issues present.
But if you want to throw the old "there's some good ones", go ahead.
Well there are no "good" characters in this film so how would one add a positive portrayal of blacks? Maybe "Pat" could have also been black but he's an ex-bomber turned paranoid junkie.
I think the character traits were what they were because the story doesn't work otherwise. I don't think it was PTA's express intention to showcase negative black stereotypes.
You're more intent defending PTA than trying to speak to the actual review's sentiment, so I assume there's some personal hangup there.
You're not a bad person for liking flawed media, but making flawed arguments to try and blank Black people and their reception crosses into it for sure.
Reviews are very hit or miss nowadays (mostly miss for me), but the verdict for One Battle After Another is absolutely correct.
For those of you who are on the fence wrt watching this movie, the politics and the revolutionaries simply form the backdrop for the story. The movie is ultimately a chase-thriller and the cinematic pleasure on screen is just incredible. If you are a fan of superbly shot and staged set-pieces, this movie is for you.
Claude and Gemini have been very useful in helping me come up to speed on a code base written in Go (a language I have used before but not for many years). Figuring out where the business logic lies, how the dependency injection is done, how the tests are written, what overall design pattern is being etc.
Of course, I could have done all this without LLMs but it would have taken several weeks/months longer. Letting the LLM handle the boilerplate and framework jargon lets me focus on the business logic and the design patterns, and helps me contribute much faster. But LLMs do often make mistakes so it's not like I blindly trust the output. They don't replace your colleagues in terms of being the ultimate source of truth. But it has speeded up the learning process, no doubt.
Also, when writing code I provide the style guide to the LLM as context and have it review the code.
Gemini is apparently doing pretty well. 400 monthly active users on their app and they recently increased the prices for their API.
Sundar Pichai has taken a lot of heat in the past couple years (and for good reason) but distribution is one of his main strengths. Now that they are back to being SOTA on the models, they can fallback on their bread and butter.
I think ChatGPT is still going to be a major player considering the amount of mindshare they have but I tend to fall on the side that thinks there's room for multiple players in the AI game.
I actually didn't know that 400 million number. Substantial obviously even without knowing exactly how they're defining active and how "unique" that number is (installs of the app? Does it come stock on Android somehow?). And I would've been one of the folks (glibly?) criticizing Sundar's leadership, a big part of which was because they seemed to be caught flat-footed when OpenAI took off even though they had the SOTA tech even before ChatGPT was released.
That said, it does seem like they're somehow managing through this pretty well with this earnings call being the first clear indication of it. Will they be able to continue to do that? I guess that's partially up to them maintaining parity, or better, with the competition (not that folks are going to jump overnight from one provider to another without some earth-shattering advancement).
Definitely agree and I guess hope that there will be room for multiple players in this.
My Carnatic Raga classifier is progressing very well. I am now training a classifier to identify 142 ragas.
A bit of background: I have been working on a Raga classifier since November of last year - I started with just 2 ragas and a couple megabytes of audio. After experimenting with a lot of different ideas and Neural Net Architectures, I finally landed on one that could scale. I increases to 4 ragas, then 12, then 25 and then to 65.
All the training is done locally on my desktop (RTX4080, AMD 7950X, 64G RAM). My goal is to make an app for fast inferencing (preferably CPU) and to get this app in the hands of enthusiasts so that I can get some real data on its efficacy. If that goal is hit, then my plan is to iterate and keep increasing the raga count on the model and eventually release to the public. As long as I can get the model to either run locally or for very cheap on server, I hope to not charge for this.
It has been an amazing learning experience. The first time I got a carnatic singer to sing and the model nailed almost all ragas was the highest high I've felt in a while.
Or humans with their consciousness uploaded to a silicon or other substrate.
Of course, this is in the realm of science fiction but so is interstellar travel.
Greg Egan's Diaspora has a fantastic treatment of interstellar travel - it involves sending copies of your consciousness to different spaceships traveling to different destinations. On arrival, a preset program will verify if the planel/galaxy is worth waking up to. If not, the clone is terminated.
If more than 1 clone wakes up in a hospitable environment, then you have a problem of two copies of yourself separated by light years.
In Diaspora that wasn’t considered to be a problem. Merging two individuals was almost automatic once you’d both decided to do it, and everyone participating in the Diaspora had decided ahead of time whether they wanted to sync back up at the end of it and merge. Also, it was fun that different individuals chose different conditions for waking up, and some stayed awake for the whole trip, or even all of them. Good book.
A similar idea appears in a more recent short story, How It Unfolds (2023) by James S.A. Corey. The premise is using a technology called “slow light,” which can clone people and objects using “enriched light.” The National Space Agency scans a group of 200 people (not only their physical forms, but also their consciousness, memories, and feelings) and transmits several thousand copies of this data package across the galaxy. The hope is that, on arrival, each package can "unfold" into a fully reconstructed version of the original team and habitat on some distant alien world.
Greg Egan's work has its share of humans but also some extremely imaginative aliens. I am not sure who can relate to the aliens in Wang's Carpets.
Greg Egan is a very good example of a novelist who is a GOAT but will be dismissed by most critics of lit-fic because "his characters don't have arcs" or some such.
Reading the description of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I realize the animation series "Scavengers Reign" has a very similar setting (human colonists crash land on a planet that seems to be sentient).
I'll use this opportunity to encourage people to watch this show. If you are a fan of sci-fi (think Greg Egan, Vernor Vinge), you will love this. If you are not, I think you should still give it a try. It is that good.
Probably a corollary of the fact that most usecases can be served by an RDBMS running on a decently specced machine, or on different machines by sharding intelligently. The number of usecases for actual distributed DBs and transactions is probably not that high.
Will they be able to take any significant marketshare from Chrome? I suppose only time will tell but it will be a pretty hard slog especially since Chrome is pretty much synonymous with "browser" in most of the world. Still, I don't think anyone at Google is breathing easy.
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