Hacker News: crucifiction

New comment by crucifiction in "Cloud GPU Resources and Pricing"

crucifiction — Mon, 22 May 2023 04:34:55 +0000

Missing Oracle Cloud which has a massive GPU footprint - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/gpu/

New comment by crucifiction in "Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name"

crucifiction — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 02:57:43 +0000

AltriaBook

New comment by crucifiction in "Amazon has a quota for the number of employees it would be happy to see leave"

crucifiction — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 17:25:57 +0000

The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.

New comment by crucifiction in "Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus"

crucifiction — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:33:16 +0000

The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.

New comment by crucifiction in "McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs"

crucifiction — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 04:41:01 +0000

What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.

New comment by crucifiction in "Property managers bring in Alexa to manage tenants"

crucifiction — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 16:40:25 +0000

It is an ROI decision. Almost everyone on the planet now carries around an echo-equivalent in their pocket all day, that also happens to have video, GPS, text and call data, and as such is a far more significant personal privacy concern than a smart speaker in a kitchen. However, most people do so because the benefit outweighs the concern. Same with smart speakers. Whats the difference from having an Alexa and having your phone on the same counter from a privacy concern perspective? It is effectively 0.

New comment by crucifiction in "Property managers bring in Alexa to manage tenants"

crucifiction — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 16:33:39 +0000

There isn't though. This is just voice control of existing things people are already doing through Amazon. This is data they already have. Is data inherently evil? I don't understand how there is some significantly different privacy concern of using Amazon services (wish lists and purchasing things) via voice control than via their website or app.

There are many legitimate privacy concerns with ever-listening devices in your house, but having "data" from people directly using existing features of a company via voice instead of mouse clicks isn't really one of them.

New comment by crucifiction in "Amazon interested in buying Boost from T-Mobile, Sprint: sources"

crucifiction — Fri, 31 May 2019 05:41:55 +0000

I doubt they want to start a cell company, more likely it is to have favorable terms for embedding 4G into Echo devices, making car and portable echos possible. They have done this for years w/Kindle, which would also benefit.

New comment by crucifiction in "Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years"

crucifiction — Sat, 17 Nov 2018 04:37:48 +0000

I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.

New comment by crucifiction in "Transitioning Google Cloud leadership after three great years"

crucifiction — Sat, 17 Nov 2018 04:33:50 +0000

Google is the new 2005 Microsoft

New comment by crucifiction in "Translate Pictures of Food into Recipes with Deep Learning"

crucifiction — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 06:20:43 +0000

Hotdog or not hotdog

New comment by crucifiction in "Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation"

crucifiction — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 16:37:29 +0000

They acquired Android. Waymo and Tensorflow are cool r&d but not businesses.

New comment by crucifiction in "Why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository (2016)"

crucifiction — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 16:22:58 +0000

The real reason is why any large enterprise does something unusual: “it has always been like that”.

New comment by crucifiction in "Google Is Blocking YouTube on Amazon's Echo Show and Fire TV"

crucifiction — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 06:19:02 +0000

Amazon is not a monopoly, Google is. Retail is ENORMOUS and even in the area of online retail, which is still only a minor segment of all retail sales, Amazon still only has something like 30-50% marketshare depending on the type of good/week of the year. There is no "search" outside of the Web and google controls 90%+ of it.

New comment by crucifiction in "Bitcoin ‘Ought to Be Outlawed,’ Nobel Prize Winner Stiglitz Says"

crucifiction — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 04:35:27 +0000

gold is actually used to do things, outside of jewelry its used in various industrial applications (for example, the computer you are using right now). so there is a floor to the value of gold, because its a real commodity. there is no floor to a digital currency with little real world adoption/use.

New comment by crucifiction in "Alibaba hits nearly $18B in ‘Singles Day’ orders in 12 hours"

crucifiction — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 18:19:01 +0000

Your numbers on US online spending are way off. US online spending was about $400B in 2016. In 2017 Amazon alone has posted about 120B in revenue (low 100s minus AWS) year to date with guidance for 55-60B in Q4 alone.

New comment by crucifiction in "Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations"

crucifiction — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 03:39:57 +0000

The OP that I was replying to was insinuating that FB is collecting audio as training data to create AI models like the ones you are talking about. I was pointing out that raw audio is useless to train an AI model for recognizing words, the whole point of training data for AI is that you have an input and a known output (transcription) that you can use to train and test the model with, having just input is useless for training.

New comment by crucifiction in "Facebook denies 'listening' to conversations"

crucifiction — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 22:06:54 +0000

Its only useful to train if they also have the transcript by a human. Eavesdropping conversations and having armies of people transcribing them seems like a very expensive and illegal way to get that data when there are probably millions of available samples, TV shows, etc that have both voice and transcription available already off the shelf.

New comment by crucifiction in "Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo"

crucifiction — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 03:36:35 +0000

This is a ridiculous standard for an employer. He has at will employment, they can fire him and he can also leave if he dislikes their diversity programs. Regardless of his thesis, a private employer has no duty to support any/all speech from their employees to other employees during business hours and using their business resources (which all of this was). It is perfectly legitimate, 100% protected first amendment speech to tell your boss to go f-ck themselves at work, or to call a customer a piece of sh-t to their face, but don't expect your employer to support you for it.

New comment by crucifiction in "The man who helped Facebook beat Snapchat"

crucifiction — Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:20:00 +0000

Software has always been about copying features, since the very beginning of the industry. With a software product there is always only a short window of having something innovative before others add it to their same products.