Hacker News: shmed

New comment by shmed in "MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside MDASH"

shmed — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:21:20 +0000

Phi was pretty revolutionary for its time. The accompanying paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644 has been pretty instrumental in pushing the idea of highly curated synthetic dataset to train model. The lead scientist behind Phi-1 is now VP at OpenAI and leading their own synthetic training dataset effort.

New comment by shmed in "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4"

shmed — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 22:35:53 +0000

You literally just proved it right

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030"

shmed — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 18:37:18 +0000

Microsoft is investing massive resources into the Sound Transit system. They just donated acres of land to the city (as well as a bunch of money) to add a train stop right next to their campus. Microsoft is one of the main reason the East Link Extension was funded (new train line connecting Seattle to Mercer Island to Bellevue to Redmond).

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030"

shmed — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 18:32:51 +0000

Microsoft has over a 100 massive data centers throughout the world. The carbon footprint of their head quarter is just a small fractions of the massive amount of energy needed to power the millions of machines Microsoft deployed across the globe.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract"

shmed — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:09:06 +0000

About 50 people signed some petition (most of them weren't even working on hololens). Not much out of the 120 000 people working at MSFT

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft’s Q4 earnings and 2020 expectations"

shmed — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 23:15:04 +0000

R&D is not just "research", it's also "development". All money spent on engineering work count toward that 16 billion.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft’s Q4 earnings and 2020 expectations"

shmed — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 23:10:53 +0000

Yeah that's not true... Amazon's net income for the last quarter (ending on May 31 2019) was 3.561B, while Walmart's net income for the last quarter (ending on April 31 2019) was $3.842B

New comment by shmed in "How I Got my $3500 Camera Kit Stolen on KitSplit"

shmed — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 22:11:32 +0000

People don't rent out empty apartments on Airbnb... There's plenty of stuff that could be stolen out of an Airbnb

New comment by shmed in "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet"

shmed — Wed, 22 May 2019 00:38:53 +0000

Cixin book covers those aspect pretty well. One of the main element behind his version of the Dark Forest theory is something he calls the "Chain of suspicion". He argues that in a world were communication is limited by the speed of light, there's no way to establish a coherent dialog during first contact between two civilizations that would allow you to completely trust the other party. If you cannot trust that the other party will not destroy you given the chance, then the only way for you to be guaranteed not to be destroyed is to destroy them first. Even if both parties want peace, there's no way for you to convince the other party that you want peace without also giving them the time to destroy you. It's basically a game theory situation where trying to go for peaceful communication is way too risky, and the stake in play are the survival of your civilization. It's also implied that civilization that played the "peace" card will simply get eliminated the moment they encounter someone playing the "destroy" card, making you much less likely to actually encounter a peaceful civilization.

New comment by shmed in "Sony and Microsoft set rivalry aside for cloud gaming alliance"

shmed — Fri, 17 May 2019 01:30:33 +0000

Some people don't care about hoarding game discs or cartridge. I have drawers full of Nintendo Cartdrige, playstation 1, 2 and 3 discs, a few older xbox games, that I can't play anymore because the required console died, or they are back in my childhood home where I grew up. To be honest, I don't even want to play any of those games anymore, but if for some nostalgia infused reason I wanted to, I'd much rather they just be automatically available to stream on my TV or my laptop than having to spend hours tracking down all the required hardware for me to play a game that I'll most likely get bored with within an hour or two.

The same thing happened with movies, with some people wanting to hoard boxes and boxes of dvd, vhs or blurays, thinking that they are somewhat smarter than people who just pay some subscription (or digital rental) to stream whatever movies they want to watch when they want it, on the device they want to watch it on.

New comment by shmed in "World Happiness Report, 2019"

shmed — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:53:32 +0000

Surprising that the US consider themselves to have better social support than Canada and many other european countries.

New comment by shmed in "Saudi Aramco Is World’s Most Profitable Company, Far Exceeding Apple"

shmed — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:40:54 +0000

I have a hard time believing IKEA is worth anywhere close to what the big tech giants are worth.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?"

shmed — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 22:28:06 +0000

Luckily for Microsoft, there's many developpers that don't work on mobile. There's millions of developpers working for banks, governement, or other large organization, and many of them are choosing Microsoft technologies for their stacks. Mobile app had its gold rush in the early 2010s, but now Microsoft is investing into capturing developpers to use their cloud platform, and they are obviously doing very well in that area.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?"

shmed — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 22:10:06 +0000

Really curious about where you got the data that Apple has 1 billion active user. I know they sold over a billion iphone overtime, but that's certainly not 1 billion different customers buying iphones. Also, I would assume a pretty big intersection of Mac or iPad users also own an iphone, so that wouldn't count as many customers either.

New comment by shmed in "DeepMind: First major AI patent filings revealed"

shmed — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 23:36:09 +0000

I am not saying people shouldn't be outraged, but please read the actual claims rather than just reading the patent titles. Titles are just a general description of the invention. Inventor don't patent titles, they patent a claim that is described in a long technical patent application. DeepMind is not patenting the general idea of a "recurrent neural network", they just have a claim that can be described as recurrent neural network. In the actual patent documents, they need an actual in depth technical description of a new process or invention that is not covered by any existing publication.

New comment by shmed in "DeepMind: First major AI patent filings revealed"

shmed — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 23:19:03 +0000

Did you actually read the patent? Or did you just read the title? The title of the patent is not the patent itself. The details of what they are patenting is described in (sometime very longs and numerous) pages of technical description. I'm an engineer at a big tech company and I'm an author on many patents that have pretty generic/vague names. The actual invention is described in depth in the patent application and that's what's important

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet"

shmed — Thu, 31 May 2018 22:25:52 +0000

You are right, and that's why diversity of revenue is a good thing. If tomorrow Office and Windows drop revenue by half, Microsoft as a whole wont drop revenue by half, and I guess that's the main point the pie chart is making.

But I also agree with you that the Pie Chart might not be completely accurate and might be oversimplifying the situation, but I think there's no denying Microsoft is one of the most diversified tech company out there in term of revenue.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet"

shmed — Thu, 31 May 2018 21:58:16 +0000

The main point from an investor perspective is that if anything happens to the "ads market" landscape, Google as a whole will be greatly affected. For example, new legislation surrounding targeted advertising or use of personal identifiable information for marketing purpose could have a major impact on Google. And those are not some far fetch and unlikely scenario. Some government are eager to put some rules and barriers to protect user privacy and to limit what can be done with it (specially in Europe), and many consumers agree and also care about "their" data. Legislation is not the only risk, even technological breakthrough could shake the ad industry. For example, smartphone became a big deal in the span of very few years. It took Google and Facebook a couple years to adapt to shifting advertising revenue from web browsing to mobile browsing. If you remember some of the early financial reports from Facebook back in 2012, most of them were disappointing due to the fact that many of their users shifted to mobile browsing, and Facebook had a really hard time find a way to display ads on mobile that would result in a click. Their whole business was impacted and it took them a couple years to start growing their ad business again.

The main point is, if you only make money by selling 1 thing (which is Ads, regardless of what medium they use to show their ads), then if something actually happens to that source of revenue, the effect is major. The more diversified your revenue source is, the less likely it is that a single event will affect your company in a major way. Again, not saying Google doesn't have many products, and obviously, having search ads, youtube ads, mobile ads, (and more) as different mediums help mitigate some of the risk that could affect those individual products, but they are still very much exposed to the risks of a changing market.

New comment by shmed in "Microsoft is now worth more than Alphabet"

shmed — Thu, 31 May 2018 21:10:04 +0000

yeah not sure why this was news worthy. Over the last couple of weeks, MSFT and GOOG have been trading places pretty often

New comment by shmed in "Introducing Surface Hub 2"

shmed — Tue, 15 May 2018 23:16:59 +0000

And they are not taking your Surface RT either. You can keep using it for ever, in the same state as it was when you purchased it, just don't expect new features.