spandrew (u/spandrew)

spandrew commented on They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose chronicle.com/article/the... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

lbhdc · 13 days ago

As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.

I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.

spandrew · 13 days ago

Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.

If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.

I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.

Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.

spandrew commented on Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome wsj.com/tech/perplexity-m... · Posted by u/eduction

sudenmorsian · 16 days ago

If there was any company that I would trust less with a web browser (and related user data) than an ad-tech company, it would be an AI company.

spandrew · 16 days ago

A social media ad company would be the least favourable. At least Google's central ad business is based off of search queries the user gives to them willingly for value.

spandrew commented on Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome wsj.com/tech/perplexity-m... · Posted by u/eduction

tuesdaynight · 16 days ago

These marketing stunts from Perplexity made me stop using their product. For me, it's an indicator that they don't believe in their product, so there's no reason for me to do it either.

spandrew · 16 days ago

Not me — Perplexity is so much better than Google. This troll bid made me laugh

spandrew commented on Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/LorenDB

spandrew · a month ago

I have to admit, everytime I hear the "Two guys hated x, so they built their own!" I see the XCKD cartoon https://xkcd.com/927/

It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys" end up.

spandrew commented on Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/wavelander

lucaspauker · a month ago

It is way better now though...

spandrew · a month ago

People pointing out NLP are missing the point — pulling and crafting rules to run effective NLP is time consuming and technical. With an LLM you can just ask it exactly what you want and it interprets. That's the value; and as this deal just proved it's worth the scaling costs.

spandrew commented on Japanese grandparents create life-size Totoro with bus stop for grandkids (2020) mymodernmet.com/totoro-sc... · Posted by u/NaOH

spandrew · a month ago

A future where Miyazaki prefecture become littered with grandparent-fueled Ghibli characters and quickly become overrun with tourists...

Or kids at this specific stop are treated to a moment of joy while waiting for their train to come...

Time will tell...

spandrew commented on Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough apnews.com/article/tidal-... · Posted by u/djoldman

asdff · 2 months ago

I assume corrosion is to blame? Crazy how much ocean facing stuff is still done with painted steel. You'd think aluminum and carbon fiber or even plastic would be making strides but it's still the iron age in many ways it seems.

spandrew · 2 months ago

Carbon fibres tend to crack under extreme torque.

spandrew commented on So you wanna build an aging company librariesforthefuture.bio... · Posted by u/apsec112

hinterlands · 2 months ago

I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right.

But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?

spandrew · 2 months ago

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?

spandrew commented on Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge businessinsider.com/anthr... · Posted by u/pyman

spandrew · 2 months ago

Amazon has been doing this since the 2000's. Fun fact: This is how AWS came about; for them to scale its "LOOK INSIDE!" feature for all the books it was hoovering in an attempt to kill the last benefit the bookstore had over them.

Ie. This is not a big deal. The only difference now is ppl are rapidly frothing to be outraged by the mere sniff of new tech on the horizon. Overton window in effect.

spandrew commented on Dyson, techno-centric design and social consumption 2earth.github.io/website/... · Posted by u/2earth

spandrew · 2 months ago

I dunno about this; that greenlight vacuum they brought to market a few years back is dope af. My first little orb Dyson is still kicking almost 15 years after I bought it.

I think their brand isn't just about tech itself, but the utility exploring novel tech can drive.