Turns out McKinsey is really bad at business and letting a McKinsey ghoul run your company is a good way to run it into the ground.
GOOG is up ~152% since Sundar took over...
Readit Newsjtgverde commented on Google to buy Wiz for $32B reuters.com/technology/cy... · Posted by u/uncertainrhymes
Dead Comment
Been thinking about this a lot [1]. Will this fundamentally change how people find and access information? How do you create an experience so compelling that it replaces the current paradigm?
The future promised in Star Trek and even Apple's Knowledge Navigator [2] from 1987 still feels distant. In those visions, users simply asked questions and received reliable answers - nobody had to fact-check the answers ever.
Combining two broken systems - compromised search engines and unreliable LLMs - seems unlikely to yield that vision. Legacy, ad-based search, has devolved into a wasteland of misaligned incentives, conflict of interest and prolifirated the web full of content farms optimized for ads and algos instead of humans.
Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what intermiediaries want them to see - which means a different business model in seach, where there are no intermediaries. I do not see a way around this. Advancing models without advancing search is like having a michelin star chef work with spoiled ingredients.
I am cautiously optimistic we will eventually get there, but boy, we will need a fundamentally different setup in terms of incentives involved in information consumption, both in tech and society.
Great find on the knowledge navigator, I had never seen it but I was a toddler when it was released haha.
It's interesting how prescient it was, but I'm more struck wondering--would anyone in 1987 have predicted it would take 40+ years to achieve this? Obviously this was speculative at the time but I know history is rife with examples of AI experts since the 60s proclaiming AGI was only a few years away
Is this time really different? There's certainly been a huge jump in capabilities in just a few years but given the long history of overoptimistic predictions I'm not confident
jtgverde commented on The real "Wolf of Wall Street" sales script jointhefollowup.com/p/the... · Posted by u/nicconley
Yeah, that was a startling admission to put in the post. If I were a shitty person who wanted to do scam people, I would probably just do it. It isn’t rocket science. But I have this weird quirk where I don’t like causing other people misery.
Yeah, basically saying "would you commit federal felonies defrauding gullible people for millions? hell yeah!"
Quite telling of the morals of a lot of "sales" people
jtgverde commented on Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019) newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
The splitting of the main character (who was a humble middle aged Chinese scientist) into 4 pointlessly racially diverse beautiful young people who somehow represent the apex of the scientific community (and a snack company for some reason).
The total butchering of interesting concepts, for example the usage of the sun as an amplifier which, while based on some hand-wavey fictional science, was quite fleshed out in the book, turned into an utterly ridiculous scene where characters literally wrote out an equation on a blackboard that amounted to "a + b = c" (I'm not exaggerating) and you could practically see the mathematical symbols floating around their heads like that Zach Galifianakis meme.
But most of all it is the shit dialog. I don't remember the books trying to force sciency sounding words into every fucking line of dialogue. This show is determined to make very stupid people think "wow this is smart".
It's interesting that your primary criticism is that the scientists are too diverse...truly a struggle for me to see why that's such an abhorrent error
Personally I thought they did a good job at adapting a book that I thought would be nearly impossible to transform into a "pop" sci fi series.
While better understanding is certainly useful, the framing does seem a little unfair to me. It's not like other treatments don't have their downsides. Most people will tell you they don't like seeing the dentist but few would say it's not worth it.
I've had bad trips on psychedelics and I actually think they tended to be some of the more beneficial ones for me in the long run.
Seems unfair to compare a "bad trip to the dentist" to a person experiencing severe psychological effects liking being unable to make human connections and feelings of loneliness for 30 years
Many of these experiences seem to have drastically impacted peoples lives in a very negative way. Much worse than a toothache!
jtgverde commented on Amazon HQ2 was supposed to add jobs last year. It shed them instead washingtonpost.com/dc-md-... · Posted by u/fckgw
These studies seem to focus primarily on the direct economic impact of moviemaking, but seem to not deal at all with tourism effects - and these can be significant, from benign tourism like with Star Wars [1] to outright madness like with the Breaking Bad house [2].
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/star-wars-destination...
[2] https://ew.com/tv/2017/10/13/breaking-bad-house-pizza-throwi...
Yea that's fair, but I would imagine the tourism effect, although real, happens for a tiny % of overall productions.
Much like incentives for NFL stadiums, it just doesn't seem like the public gets the benefit they are promised in all the glossy announcement spreads
And to be clear I support the government subsidizing the arts like film and I miss when my state had a subsidy and a lot of famous shows/movies were filmed in places I knew. I just haven't seen the data to back up the "impact" claimed.
jtgverde commented on Amazon HQ2 was supposed to add jobs last year. It shed them instead washingtonpost.com/dc-md-... · Posted by u/fckgw
I used to work in film, although not in the accountancy/deal-making aspect. Film tax breaks are direct discounts on money spent. If you make a film in Georgia, for example, you get a transferable tax credit (20-30%) on money spent in the state. It's a short term deal (productions usually only last a few months), and is immediate in effect. There's no "spend a billion of public money and maybe we'll hire some people" shenanigans like the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin.
I have friends who work in film and have heard about the way the productions play fast and loose with "local hires" that then get reported as jobs created.
But setting aside all of that research shows little to no impact https://www.nber.org/papers/w25963https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155407
The prestige of films being made in their state keep the subsidies rolling in but there are many great "bang for your buck" subsidies states could be making that just aren't sexy.