skellera (u/skellera)

skellera commented on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir

tedivm · 7 months ago

Honestly once Jobs died most of what Ive did was ruin existing products, such as the butterfly keyboard and the removal of all of the useful ports from their laptops.

skellera · 7 months ago

He also ruined the Vision Pro on his way out. Engineers wanted to do wireless to a Mac mini-like hub (not standalone) so the hub could have more computing power. It’s a dev device that was supposed to be the very best experience for developing the future standalone AR/VR device. But Ives forced them to do full standalone. Increasing weight, decreasing power, wasting time re-engineering the device.

skellera commented on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen theverge.com/electric-car... · Posted by u/kwindla

le-mark · 8 months ago

Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.

skellera · 8 months ago

I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.

I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.

It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.

skellera commented on Feral pig meat transmits rare bacteria arstechnica.com/health/20... · Posted by u/abawany

petre · 9 months ago

I read about a guy getting iraquibacter from desert dust in Egypt and getting treated with phage therapy by his wife. Needless to say I'll avoid Egypt.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-...

skellera · 9 months ago

That’s an amazing story. The wife really gathered together all the right people to create a phage treatment to save her husband’s life. Great job on all the doctors and scientists that figured out how to make it so quickly.

skellera commented on Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead thechinaacademy.org/inter... · Posted by u/oli5679

falcor84 · 10 months ago

It's a great interview throughout, but I was thrown off by this strange question (which I found to be much more interesting than the answer):

> An Yong: What do you envision as the endgame for large AI models?

I don't know if it has a different meaning/connotation in Chinese, but reading this metaphor with a Chess connotation scared me. If there is a game, who are the players? what is the victory condition? will there be a static stalemate, or a definitive win? and most importantly, will there be an opportunity for future games after it, or is this the final game we get to play?

skellera · 10 months ago

It’s a pretty common phrase for “what’s the ultimate goal?”

I don’t think it’s meant to be taken as a chess metaphor.

skellera commented on Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa... · Posted by u/thm

arder · a year ago

That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods, the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order tide pods via the Alexa and before you know it Amazon is still doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods but they've got a $2Bn cost centre of overpaid enginers designing hardware that lets you order tide pods.

I wonder which way this splits for Amazon though, on the one hand lots of people already have Alexas and so you've got great brand recognition when you want to sell your Gen AI doodad. On the other hand, your Alexa brand is trash, everyone knows its basically only good for timers so maybe no one will take them seriously when the Gen AI version comes out.

skellera · a year ago

Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon.

People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others.

I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and try to compete with scale. Even then, it doesn’t work because no one working on that product actually cares about the problem so startups can easily outcompete with “customer obsession.”

skellera commented on Amazon Sold a Used Diaper. It Tanked a Mom-and-Pop Business bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/rurp

tgma · a year ago

Why bother - isn't the return policy enough? I'm assuming they are optimistic on new returns being new, but they are liberal on the return end to compensate.

skellera · a year ago

Amazon has started to refuse returns on many items. One of their core customer value mechanisms has been destroyed.

Online shopping requires returns. Removing that option significantly reduces trust and value.

skellera commented on Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement washingtonpost.com/politi... · Posted by u/datadrivenangel

jnovek · a year ago

You’re saying “created excess demand” like the people that you’re referring to weren’t chronic pain patients.

I know some of them were drug-seekers but we decided it was OK to throw chronic pain patients under the bus so we could eliminate those drug-seekers.

Now, in addition to dealing with pain every day, I also have to “prove” that I’m not an opioid seeker if I end up in the ER for overwhelming pain. Because saying that you’re hurting is clearly a sign that you’re actually an addict trying to get a fix.

This might sound cold-hearted, but as someone who deals with chronic pain I’m fine with some street ODs in exchange for people who are in pain being cared for. Now we just torture patients by doing nothing.

Recreational drugs are a choice. My pain was not. Why we punished for others’ bad choices?

skellera · a year ago

Even the chronic pain patients should not have had the amounts prescribed to them that they were. Doctors were incentivized to give as much as possible. Creating addicts in people who may otherwise would not have been.

I personally knew people getting more than a cancer patient should’ve been given for day to day chronic pain.

I’m sorry if you were personally affected by regulation but that doesn’t mean they didn’t cause the crisis.

skellera commented on Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement washingtonpost.com/politi... · Posted by u/datadrivenangel

addicted · a year ago

I’d argue it’s the opposite.

Look at what’s happened since Oxycontin was heavily regulated.

Opioid deaths in America have exploded by an order of magnitude.

There’s a direct correlation between higher regulation of OxyContin and opioid deaths in the U.S.

The Sacklers have done illegal stuff. Misrepresenting the addictiveness of their drugs (well, it was immoral and wrong…it’s not clear how illegal it was).

But it’s quite clear that America had a parallel opioid crisis going on. By making OxyContin easily available, ie, a slow acting opioid (it had to be crushed to be fast acting) that was produced legitimately and had a legitimate supply chain so people were able to get exactly what they wanted, Purdue Pharma helped keep the number of opioid deaths under control.

IOW, the U.S. has had an addiction crisis that is independent of prescription drugs whose cause is not clear yet because everyone has thrown the blame on Oxy instead of researching it. This is the same kind of drug crisis that hit inner cities in the 20th century but has hit rural areas in the 21st century. By providing easy access to regulated and legitimate opioids the Sacklers may have marginally worsened the addiction crisis, but they minimized the number of deaths and severe negative impacts.

The moment Oxy and the other opioids were made less easy to get, the underlying drug crisis hadn’t gone anywhere, so instead the people suffering from the crisis had to get their opioids from illicit sources as opposed to the pharmacy, exposing them to all sorts of unregulated drugs that had all sorts of nonsense like Fenranyl mixed in, which causes the actual negative impacts of the drug crisis to explode.

The funny thing is that when the entire country was just absolutely united at making the Sacklers the big bad evil, the actual people working on the ground trying to help those who were facing this drug crisis were predicting this exact situation and were asking authorities to not clamp down on Oxy. But they were all ignored and so we have a situation where opioid OD deaths have gone from a consistent 10-15,000/year (a rate which preceded Oxy) to about 50,000/yr now.

skellera · a year ago

Are you one of the lawyers?

None of that would’ve happened if they didn’t start the flood of opiates to begin with. It wasn’t a marginally increased issue, they flooded the market with it. People with minor pain were getting massive bottles of OxyContin and selling or using it. This led to pill mills and crooked doctors. You had normal people getting hooked on high dosages. These are not the people who were using opioids before that. Pills made it seem safer. Most users don’t start with heroin, they start with pills because of exactly that. “A doctor prescribed it, must be okay.”

This is some insane logic to absolve them of responsibility. I say this as someone who also saw the problem firsthand. Was regulation handled badly? Sure but there’s no way you can say they didn’t start the problem.

skellera commented on SpaceX to deliver vehicle to deorbit International Space Station nasa.gov/news-release/nas... · Posted by u/ironyman

bell-cot · a year ago

> NASA announced SpaceX has been selected to develop and [emphasis mine] deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle that will provide the capability to deorbit the space station and ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas.

> The single-award contract has a total potential value of $843 million. The launch service for the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle will be a future procurement.

So...with $843M, what could SpaceX come up with? In Gwynne's shoes, I'd be looking to develop a vehicle with far wider application than a 1-off LEO deorbit burn.

And, given the inability of most of SpaceX's competition to reliably delivery anything to orbit, I suspect that NASA has similar hopes.

skellera · a year ago

Maybe the extra cost is to look into bringing it down without destroying it. Would be good to study it for data on long term spacecraft.