I mean, to this point, my Logitech Brio sits atop my monitor, with a tightly cinched cable hanging down, plugging straight _into_ said monitor. It might not be the cleanest possible option, but it's not adding desk clutter.
Interestingly, we honeymooned on the Celebrity Infinity, and its "theme" at the time (and possibly still?) was the SS United States. They had several pieces of art related to it, and more interestingly, the original china pattern for their plateware in the fancy restaurants.
The way they work, you get a preferred price for various services at a substantial discount to list rate, but you commit to a guaranteed spend level for that period. The guaranteed spend is typically account-wide, but you have to pay a true-up at the end of the period if you fail to hit it.
It's a bit of calculus: will your growth increase enough such that, especially with the discount, you'll reach the minimum?
You can see these agreements littering 10-Qs, or similar, like when Snapchat filed their S-1 and revealed:
>When Snap originally filed for its IPO in 2017, it revealed a massive $2 billion commitment over five years ($400 million annually) with Google Cloud.
Star Trek: TNG uses one of those displays to great effect. Interactive mini-games, great 1-bit graphics, really clear instructions and directives. It makes for a great game.
India averages 20,000 deaths by train every year. About 16 deaths per 100,000 people.
Compare to 40,000 vehicle deaths in the US (and 960 train deaths, 2.8 deaths per 100,000 people), and 177,000 vehicle deaths in India.
But India only has 1 death per _4.1 billion passenger-miles_. The US is 1 death per 2.33 billion passenger-miles.
Anecdotally, there's a _lot_ of Indians-walking-near-trains-and-getting-hit-posting-them-doing-it videos on reddit.
In any event, the OP is way off target anyway. The poor kid was in a carriage with his mom, the horse got spooked, she fell out and he leapt out to try to save her but hit his head and died.
I guess "deaths per billion passenger-miles" is not a good metric if you want to compare the US and India, because travelling by rail is simply not that popular in the US (I assume the statistic does not include metro systems?). But if you get run over by a train, it doesn't really matter if it was a freight train or a passenger train (<5% of train casualties are actual train passengers).
A journalist with Reader's Digest famously visited 50 dentists in 50 states and received WILDLY different diagnoses for... the same mouth, ranging from essentially "you have a single cavity you should get filled" to "you need 21 crowns for $30,000", and this was back in 1997:
I remember in the 90's a Swedish TV consumer rights show did the same thing with the same conclusion. And there was no correlation with if the dentist was a public health or private dentist, it was just a variation in their judgement rather than a "we want to make money" type of scam.
How can you have this widely different amount of cavities based on judgement? How are they not snake oil salesmen, if judgement makes the diagnosis different by magnitudes?
A cavity is just a hole or groove of various depth. It's probably less that one dentist sees a cavity and the other sees nothing and more that one dentist sees a cavity worth addressing the the other sees the beginning of a cavity that they figure will need to be addressed eventually, but there's not a major reason to do it now rather than next year or the year after that.
Also, I imagine some dentists might decide for their patients benefit (as long as there's no pain reported) to let a couple develop to a level is there's a few in various stages of development, so they can do them all at once with a single procedure.
I don't know how likely or accurate those are, but those are some of the obvious ways that came to mind that dentists might be seeing the same thing and suggesting different actions that don't boil down to them wanting to fleece a customer.
My dentist shows me the xray they take once every 5 years. Then they walk me through what a cavity would look like. Then they show me that i have none.
I can understand that the external "poke at it" method requires some judgment, but an xray shouldn't have that much variance.
That's why I also go get a "poke around and look" checkup every year. The X-ray is to spot deeper things, but you can't do that every year without the x-rays becoming a risk factor themselves.
In the United States, it is routine to get your mouth X-Ray’ed every 6 months when you go in for a cleaning. Dental plans include these checkups at no extra charge.
That's what I was led to believe by my dentist when I asked. I just checked danish national guidance, and they say the dose of x-rays is so low the increased risk is incalculable. Instead they say the dentist should only ever use an x-ray if they find it medically necessary out of a principle of minimization.
So it sounds like it's the individual dentists judgment, and their organizing body says that they base it on the occurrence of dental problems in the population the clinics they oversee, with some adjustments based on patient age and risk factors.
So according to Danish authorities, you should be safe getting x-ray'ed every 6 months. They just don't recommend it, since it's a waste.
Yet you are probably in the 90% of developers who cannot estimate properly.
I would like to have a professional judgement closer to how it's done in statics, instead of developers, since you fuck up lives directly with one, and usually not with the other one.
If you ask software development companies, plumbers, builders or lawyers to give an estimate of what some work might cost you'll probably get similar variations?
But that's more a matter of pricing. Not the basic parameters of the job.
Building a wall of known size takes X bricks, Y windows, etc. Contractor 1 might have more markup or estimate different hours to complete the job vs contractor 2 but the parameters of the job are relatively fixed.
The dentist is seeing the same mouth (wall) and telling you there is vastly different numbers of cavities (bricks/windows). And not off by a small margin, but orders of magnitude.
At least software development and laywering has 100s of parameters that can influence some work, even when the requirements are well specified ahead (and those almost always change later, or meet some changed reality).
Tell me you haven't worked in the trades without saying you haven't worked in the trades.
The older the building, the higher the chances stuff will go seriously, sometimes catastrophically with no chance of recovery, wrong. Say for the plumber, according to the plans or the knowledge of the building owner, there should be no more lead pipes left in the building. Lo and behold, you open the wall, and find a lead pipe still under pressure, and next to it a tap to somewhere else that doesn't show up on any plan.
Endboss is if you find asbestos. That turns a jobsite worth a week of work instantly into a hazmat site plus immediate concerns for OSHA aspects.
Or for electricians, the plan was to rip out the entire electrical work in an apartment, and you suddenly find out that half the rooms of the neighbor next to you suddenly don't have lights any more because for some unknown reason half of his apartment actually runs via your client's apartment and no one ever noticed. (In this case it turns out that decades ago, this was one giant apartment that was split as part of a divorce proceeding and then sold off separately)
You're describing the same plumber/electrician changing their estimate after getting more information. That's nearly the opposite of the dentist situation, where it's different dentists giving different estimates with the same information.
> Tell me you haven't worked in the trades without saying you haven't worked in the trades.
Tell me you missed the point without telling me you've missed the point.
Plumbers can give widely different estimates for the SAME job, with the same knowledge (initial or after finding out about all the asbestors, strange piping, and other issues).
Some plan for random bullshit beforehand, some milk you for each and every problem or change request, and some just mark up a "make it worth my time", e.g. if your installation is many decades old and they actually don't want the job or at least get comped very well for their trouble.
> it was just a variation in their judgement rather than a "we want to make money" type of scam.
Sure. I mean, dentists, unlike every other human, are not interested in making money, and would not abuse their position to give incorrect information that is in their benefit. /s
I had a dentist who preferred to see patients each 12 months for a relatively cheap routine check while avoiding doing anything if something was discovered during the check if that could wait. She fixed a minor cavity for me like after 4 years of checks. At some point she stopped accepting new patients because she had too many of them.
That's why I mentioned there was no difference seen with public health dentists. They are on a salary paid by the government and have a huge backlog, they have zero incentive to do more treatment than absolutely necessary.
Parent already covered dentists who are not making money by the widely differing diagoses, because they work for a set salary for non-for-profit government health coverage, and yet still do that.
That sounds like a similar story of taking a car to various places (including the official dealer) and getting wildly different and massively overpriced estimates for totally unnecessary work.
I had my car at a dealer. It was there so I asked for an estimate on a muffler fix. $7000. To be fair they also recommended trying the repair place down the street for that one.
i've told this story on here before but a dear friend of mine is a dental hygenist and worked for a very prominent dentist in ketchum (maybe hailey?), idaho. the hygienists were on a rev-share agreement to push every 'product' imaginable.
Call me crazy, but it’s almost like incentives to make money rather than good patient outcomes may just lead to a whole bunch of unnecessary treatments.
As a European, I can assure you we have the same problem. Healthcare providers still get payed by the insurance for the work they do, so there’s both an incentive to bill them for as much as possible and also to upsell special premium services the insurance won’t cover for, like better filling materials, invisible aligners, these kinds of things. As a layman, of course you never know if what they are offering you is really the right way, and asking different doctors for their opinion can also lead to wildly different diagnoses.
Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.
Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.
While some of that might be true for some countries with publicly funded dental care, it’s certainly not true for regular healthcare. Doctors are paid fixed salaries, there’s no incentive for them to perform unnecessary procedures. Quite the opposite in fact, departments have strict budgets and so they have a strong pressure to ensure all procedures are medically justifiable, and cheaper / simpler / preventative options have been tried first.
Individual doctors working for a clinic are paid a flat salary, true - but the clinics themselves, or the small doctors running their own office are absolutely dependent on accurate billing to the insurances. They have an incentive to optimise their margins, even if patients are not paying directly, and that means both trying to spend as little on care as possible while getting back as much as possible from the insurance providers.
It sounds like you’re describing a country with a public-private hybrid system. Certainly in the UK and the Nordics, the systems I’m most familiar with, there is no “getting back as much as possible from the insurance providers”, as there are no insurance providers. The hospitals are run by the government, funded by regional governments, and have fixed yearly budgets, not treatment dependent billing. The only exception is some privately run GP clinics that may bill per service rendered.
People say 'Europe', speak as if their experience is the same across the continent, and anyone with a different experience is somehow not in the Europe they mean. It's very annoying.
European healthcare is run very differently across the continent. 'Insurance' can mean a [state] social insurance institute that the doctor must bill. Some countries would employ the doctor directly as part of a nationalised health system. Some places it might be the municipality or city that would then get some subsidy from central government. Some it is a mix of all of this. 'Free' healthcare might actually mean a few hundred Euros, or literally nothing.
This! We went to a pediatric dentist with my kid on Monday, with a referral from another dentist, both private. After small talk, their first proper question was: "Do you have insurance?". Before I could respond, my wife responded affirmatively. Insurance here in Ireland means private insurance. After an x-ray, we were presented with a menu of treatment options ranging from around €2k to €5k.
Later I requested the clinic to share the x-ray with me and consulted with another pediatric dentist from another EU country. His assessment was completely different, and recommended very minimal intervention.
My point was that for the specific critique raised here, the European (or the be exact, the German) healthcare system doesn’t really offer much of an improvement, but suffers from similar problems. The fact that you don’t pay yourself doesn’t change the incentives medical professionals have in terms of getting paid for their work.
The UK has the opposite problem. You don't get overtreated, but you may get undertreated - sometimes it is impossible to find a NHS dentist at all. Indeed, I went private because I literally couldn't find one after my old one sacked me. The private dentists probably have the same problems as described here. But I luckily found a small, nice, ethical one who was recommended by people in town I trust. Literal word-of-mouth still beats any algorithm I know for this kind of question.
Honestly, I think it can happen anywhere - I've had several fillings for very marginal cavities from an NHS dentist that probably weren't necessary.
Part of the reason is that fashions change... that dentist was trained at a time when minor cavities were always treated as soon as they were noticed, but the more recent recommendation is to monitor and treat only if it gets worse.
It's genuinely unthinkable... this sort of technology opens up a universe of bespoke micro-explainers and apps that meet you exactly where you are, for your exact, specific needs. I don't think we've ever seen a quantum leap in technological advancement that results in such a multiple orders of magnitude reduction in input effort related to volume and quality and type of output... ever. I mean, innovations like electric light, radio, television, the internet, and smart phones are huge transformative tools that similarly changed the fabric of what's possible. But this technology compresses work that would have taken pyramid-building effort and cost and condenses it down to... minutes of matrix multiplication for pennies worth of tokens. The mind boggles.
These are not explanations. They're visualizations. There's a huge gap between the two.
Explanations give you a mental model: when I move this parameter this the effect it has. This just shows you the obvious, make a thing bigger, it gets bigger on screen. That's not an explanation.
Models are quite horrible at explaining things. They produce local narrow views that don't take into account the mental model of the listener nor do they attempt to produce the kind of long-term knowledge gain that a teacher does. I taught for over a decade.
This is why models are extremely good for people who already know what they're doing. That narrow why is all you need, like, tell me the 3 sentences that describe the mechanism behind this paper, and I'll get the rest. But building the scaffolding onto which to hang a lot of knowledge?
Give it a try. Try to have a model teach you something new. Not like "how do I tie a knot" but like a new area of math where you're going to dedicate 3 months of your free time to learning it. The results are pretty horrible.
+100 I tried to get Claude and Gemini to build me a course on probabilistic ML from scratch. They both failed. This was a few months ago. The best they could do was design a course curriculum. My learning since then has been through asking the model to explain a very narrow topic from the curriculum. And then go through the agonizing back-and-forth questioning and answering to actually build an understanding. No doubt the models are great at this and my learning has never been so through with such solid foundations. But zero-shot it was not!
Thank you for calling this out. There are certainly a lot of legitimate gripes with LLM generated code, but also a lot of never-before-practical solutions to manage code as well.
FWIW, I haven't seen the Gemini 4 explainers, but Codex and (particularly) Claude have been pretty decent at this for a while.
I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC.
I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time.
Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor.
This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address.
Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac.
Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux.
Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, whole lines, etc. is just something I simply cannot get anywhere close to on a Mac and I die a tiny death every time I try.
I have _long_ said don't sleep on Google for precisely these reasons. They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital they can deploy, and attention and focus and phenomenal architects and engineers, and a pre-existing catalog of as much of the world's data as possible. Counting them out would be completely absurd.
It started to feel just a bit like they were potentially content staying in the effective-fast-cheap lane and ceding frontier models to frontier labs, but I don't think anyone seriously thought that Google was going to sit back and let this generational shift pass them by when they're so well positioned to remain on the top of the heap.
If anything, I thought that 4 was maybe coming up short or causing safety concerns that were forcing them to be a bit more cautious, but nothing packs a wallop like being able to launch ahead of everyone else's brand newest toys...
I agree on all except for your comment on attention and focus. They've seem to be very scattered in their deployment of AI for customers. Examples in point being the replacement of Google Assistant with Gemini, the AI Studio vs Vertex disconnect, and a crazy amount of coding tools and platforms (Duet, Firebase Studio, Studio Bot, etc).
Working through this as a consumer and enterprise customer has been a confusing experience, to say the least.
Strongly agree - their approach has been extremely scattered. But also, doesn't it seem like they're starting to consolidate? It kinda makes sense to approach things like this as a mega corp. Have internal teams try the same things in different ways and let the market pick a winner. Kinda like being a startup incubator.
A vertically integrated AI stack won't fix the misaligned incentives of google execs.
AI is strangling their other major business and they don't like that. Unless Google sacrifices that branch of income, they won't put their full force behind AI.
I'm curious -- in your view, what exactly is it strangling that could not be addressed by replacing google.com with a ChatGPT-like interface while integrating other Google free-by-ads tools nicely? Or is your point they wouldn't do that due to existing "siloed incentives"?
The ads in google search are ~55% of their revenue and ~70% of their profit. Will the LLM drive as much traffic to the ads as the current google search? Will it feel as organic to the users as the current solution, or will LLM hawking a product seem forced by the users?
I mean it sounds wise to not go all in on publishing expensive models when they can earn money with more efficient models while still not bleeding too many customers?
reply