I mean the quotes contradict each other, is $1M HNWI threshold ↑6 or is it ↑7?
in this quote ↑6 describes the wealth level and ↑7 the number of people at that level. the author gives every number in log form.
Readit Newsffitch commented on Mag Wealth (2024) saul.pw/mag/wealth/... · Posted by u/andsoitis
ffitch commented on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement wsj.com/business/airlines... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
boeing will never die as long as the government wants to have a domestic passenger airline manufacturer. and they pretty clearly do want that.
it'll take more than financial losses to kill boeing.
seeing how much power shifted from legislative branch to executive, and how often executive branch changes its mind, I wouldn’t count on the unwavering government support
ffitch commented on Nano Banana image examples github.com/PicoTrex/Aweso... · Posted by u/SweetSoftPillow
Nano-Banana can produce some astonishing results. I maintain a comparison website for state-of-the-art image models with a very high focus on adherence across a wide variety of text-to-image prompts.
I recently finished putting together an Editing Comparison Showdown counterpart where the focus is still adherence but testing the ability to make localized edits of existing images using pure text prompts. It's currently comparing 6 multimodal models including Nano-Banana, Kontext Max, Qwen 20b, etc.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
Gemini Flash 2.5 leads with a score of 7 out of 12, but Kontext comes in at 5 out of 12 which is especially surprising considering you can run the Dev model of it locally.
great benchmark!
ffitch commented on E-paper display reaches the realm of LCD screens spectrum.ieee.org/e-paper... · Posted by u/rbanffy
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
ffitch commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki
I call it “move slow and fix things”.
Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining.
This has been my business for almost a decade. I love when I find other people with similar focus. My latest find is shottr.cc.
Hey, I’m the author of Shottr. It’s super gratifying to know that there are people who see the app that way : ) thank you for saying this!
Great analysis! a couple of comments:
1. the airfare inflation chart is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI which is calculated differently from the other metrics in the article; it does take into account routes popularity.
2. today’s average Economy ticket is different from the 1990s ticket: meals, seat pitch, seat selection, baggage. service changed to the point that 1990 Standard Economy is more similar to 2025 Premium Economy.
ffitch commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete
I wonder how modern models fair on NovelQA and FLenQA (benchmarks that test ability to understand long context beyond needle in a haystack retrieval). The only such test on a reasoning model that I found was done on o3-mini-high (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21318), it suggests that reasoning noticeably improves FLenQA performance, but this test only explored context up to 3,000 tokens.
ffitch commented on US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery theregister.com/2025/07/2... · Posted by u/rntn
I’m curious what the policy with the highest long-term benefit would be. The country needs external talent, but would skewing H-1B towards high skill be good? The economy seems to need unskilled labor for the jobs Americans are not interested in. Should the government try to curb hi-tech outsourcing instead, to create more jobs in the States, both for the citizens and the skilled immigrant workers? But that would be protectionism, and protectionism rarely play out well economically.
ffitch commented on Why is AI so slow to spread? economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
From where I stand, AI seems to enjoy lightning fast adoption. Personal computers became a viable technology in the eighties, slowly penetrated workplace in the nineties, and supposedly registered in labor productivity in the early 2000s. The large language models became practical less then three years ago, and already plenty of businesses boast how they will integrate AI and cut their workforce, while everyone else feel behind and obsolete.
ffitch commented on Why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461... · Posted by u/pseudolus
This is silly. If the universe is deterministic, any representation of matter can be locally simulated based on algorithmic calculation. This includes people, objects, everything. I don't need to simulate everything constantly because I know where it will be when I _need_ to simulate it.
So, any smart simulation would only be simulating a small very percentage of itself at any given time -- that part of itself being viewed or interacted with by observers. And we would have absolutely no idea how many of those observers actually reside in any given simulation. 10? 100? 1m? Who knows!
But we could take this even further and suggest that it is only the _experience_ of the universe by ourselves that is being simulated. In that case, we're not actually interacting with anything, we're only gaining the memory of having interacted with it (in 'real time'). In this case there's no physical reality at all! We're living in a large shared hallucination, that once again only 'exists' where and when we're interacting with it.
Finally, we have no idea of the time scale. The time scale in the simulation could be much slower than the outside universe. This would lower the energy required to simulate it even further.
So, no, it's totally possible we live in a simulation!
> So, any smart simulation would only be simulating a small very percentage of itself at any given time
does a falling tree make a sound if the simulation is not running? : )