Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.
I don’t see why anyone should be obligated to direct traffic to Twitter. Let the author post on his own blog or digital garden. I don’t want to go on Twitter. Echoing the same as others, it’s good to bring any content from Twitter into the open web.
IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed).
Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.
The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.
The jump from TPS-L2/WM-1 to WM-2 was ENORMOUS. Like, WM-2 was TINY - 75% the size of TPS-L2/WM-1. They were almost done before they got started! I know I got one Xmas 1981 and it was stolen in 1984 but now I have 3x.
people buy physical games when its an option. take god of war ragnarok where more than 60% of copies sold were on disk. its a totally different situation from niche products with no existing supply chain.
sony numbers are distorted because most third party games are digital only, and the average players preference for physical is not so strong that they wouldnt buy the game at all. its also not counting sharing or second hand sales so the number of players on physical is even higher.
I have five PS5 discs from around launch. Gifts. It is such a pain finding them and putting them in only to download a patch anyway. I’d sell them but I don’t want to perpetuate them as a thing so I’ll likely just throw them away.
Does that mean capitalism is not an efficient system to meet the needs of well-informed consumers? Why am I being lumped in with an 8 year old who asks their parents to buy them an online game? There should be a market for physical media and devices with physical buttons if people exist who want them. These companies won’t work on anything that doesn’t bring them a gazillion dollars, so billion/million dollar ventures never get off the ground.
Rule of thumb: when a fanboy asserts that any person holding an alternative view is defective, you should immediately abandon the fanboy's position and adopt the alternative view. It's heuristically more likely to be correct, and it gets you out of an odious fan club.
Case in point: China proceeded through stages of development more efficiently than any western nation. Case in point: South Korea incubated its industry in a command economy.
Throw the USSR in there as well. Central planning allowed them to leap from an agrarian society to launching Sputnik and putting the first human in space, which spooked us into kickstarting the space race. It wasn’t market incentives that did that.
The USSR performed _somewhat_ well, but i wouldn't say it clearly outperformed the west given the whole "collapse" thing. I could argue the point, but only weakly.
It's more illuminating to pick the two exemplars, America and China, because they have many parallels
Take a breath, you’re having a total knee-jerk reaction. What statistic?
So out of thousands of years of human history, we somehow stumbled onto the absolute final, perfect economic system 250 years ago with zero room for upgrade? Makes total sense /s.
I’m sure there were those who said feudalism/mercantilism were the most efficient systems ever and we don’t need capitalism. Even Marx was a fan of capitalism, he viewed it as a revolutionary stepping stone towards a more efficient system and praised it for lifting feudal subjects out of poverty, and the massive productivity gains it produced. That’s not what’s being argued here.
> "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490...
People still use google translate? Most browsers now have translate built in, as do llm
LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations.
Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is.
Firefox didn't offer to translate this, so initially I wasn't aware that it could. But I could get it to translate via the menu. And Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.
Unless something changed recently (and things change all the time where LLMs are involved), deepl.com does the best translations. I have a sister who translates professionally; she said it's the only one where she can use the result and make some improvements instead of throwing it away and starting over.
Deepl's professional advantage is not in the translation itself (even though it has always been a notch above the rest), but in the UI. You can literally click any word on the translated text and (a) see a list of alternatives, and (b) pick one and then the following text adapts to your choice.
In technical terms it lets you stop the transformer at any token, sample alternatives from the probability distribution at that point, pick your desired next token and resume the generation.
This UI lets an expert guide and control the output of the tool, instead of having to fight it. I wish there was a frontend for large GPTs that worked like this instead of the ubiquitous-yet-useless chatbot.
I'm not sure if that is what she meant. In any case, it does sound very useful for code. The input becomes messy to represent as text, but prompts don't usually make it into version control, so not much is lost.
I'd bet this is what she meant because I've done professional translation in the past.
The input and output of a GPT it not a sequence of messages in turns: fundamentally the input is the entire context (both from the user and the model), and the output is a probability distribution for 1 single next token.
The chat is only one of many interaction patterns possible with that primitive: one where the "most likely" output token is concatenated to the previous input and this is repeated until a limit is reached or the model produces a special "end of sequence" token.
Representing a more complete interaction pattern as a chat is impossible because the chat abstraction is lossy and could never represent it. Sometimes the abstraction leaks, as with the concept of "temperature", that's not a parameter of the model but of the chat.