I think it's unfair to think that growing a small service or operating system to a billion users doesn't require innovation. The skills and requirements to grow a company from 1 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 are going to be different. It makes sense to me that there are companies who specialize in growing companies of a particular size. And innovating around the problems of doing so.
How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.
A lot of that innovation benefits only YouTube . Also these other innovations (recommendation system, translations etc) existed before YouTube.
There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.
In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.
The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.
Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.
When was the last time YouTube did anything innovative? Aren't they just an ossified bureaucracy now?
The Soviets, too, innovated. Sputnik shock and all that. But at some point the structures were just too rigid - just like they have become in Big Tech capitalism.
Much of the Soviet space programme was down to the personal brilliance of Sergei Korolev and other such figures, and large dollops of intelligence taken from the Germans and the Americans. Definitely the greatest Soviet achievement, but Korolev died prematurely due to his time in a prison camp and their manufacturing sector often let them down.
YouTube is quite innovative, by the way, just not in the way it should be. Its comments sections change on a frequent basis allowing for ever more complex shadow banning and censorship systems. Its search algorithms also tend to exclude certain channels and big up others.
I can't remember the titles offhand unfortunately. Bear in mind that a lot of details didn't come out until the 1990s due to Soviet censorship. The BBC did a great documentary on Korolev about thirty years ago when some details came out.
Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements. Some of the ones that people forget include first probe and first automated rover on the Moon, first space station, first probe on Mars, first rover and picture from Mars (albeit scrambled), also first pictures from the surface of another planet (Venus)
NASA tried to claim recently it had the first sound from another planet (Mars) and airborne probe (helicopter). The Soviets had already transmitted audio from Venus in the 1980s and had a balloon there.
Well, VP8 was only released as an open codec in 2010, and subject of patent lawsuits until late 2014.
In 2010 the majority of (YouTube and other) videos were still served as H.264, because no major browser supported it back then and the majority of video playback devices were already smartphones (without vp8 decoding capabilities)
iOS for example didn't support VP8 until iOS12 in 2019, Firefox and MS IE only added it in 2011. Even Google only added VP8 to Chrome in September 2010.
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them.
>they'd go to prison
That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
The problem with plastic straws was properly disposing them. For a piece of jewelry I doubt many people would throw it away on the side of the road. A ring that last for years is different than a disposal product that people may use for a couple of minutes.
This is why more and more organizations get away with only having social media pages where they don't have to worry about security or other technical issues.
Unfortunately, placing the information on a social media page burdens the people seeking it with either submitting to the social media site's policies and practices, or else not having access to it. This is not a good substitute.
It also contributes to the centralization of the web, placing more information under the control of large gatekeepers, and as a side effect, giving those gatekeepers even more influence.
Most social media are free and easy to sign up for taking under a minute to do and have user bases that can be measured in the billions. Most people in the world are willing to follow the rules.
Most people don't use social media via the web. They use it via dedicated apps. I think it's natural that people who don't want to deal with the tech side of things will outsource it to someone else. The idea that everyone will host their own tech is unrealistic.
For now, in some jurisdictions, social media is "free" for your customers in the sense that it's supported by advertising.
It's not free for you of course because advertising isn't free and from their point of view what you'd be getting is free advertising so they want you to pay them to put it in front of your customers.
>If I wanted to run a web search, I would have done so
While true, many times people don't want to do this because they are lazy. If they just instead opened up chatgpt they could have instantly gotten their answer. It results in a waste of everyone's time.
This begs the question. You are assuming they wanted an LLM generated response, but were to lazy to generate one. Isn't it more likely that the reason they didn't use an LLM is that they didn't want an LLM response, so giving them one is...sort of clueless?
If you asked someone how to make French fries and they replied with a map-pin-drop on the nearest McDonald's, would you feel satisfied with the answer?
It's more like someone asks if there are McDonald's in San Francisco, and then someone else searches "mcdonald's san francisco" on Google Maps and then replies with the result. It would have been faster for the person to just type their question elsewhere and get the result back immediately instead of someone else doing it for them.
Right. If someone asks "What does ChatGPT think about ...", I'd fully agree that they're being lazy. But if that's _not_ what they ask, we shouldn't assume that that's what they meant.
We should at least consider that maybe they asked how to make French fries because they actually want to learn how to make them themselves. I'll admit the XY problem is real, and people sometimes fail to ask for what they actually want, but we should, as a rule, give them the benefit of the doubt instead of just assuming that we're smarter than them.
I think a lot of times, people are here just to have a conversation. I wouldn't go so far as to say someone who is pontificating and could have done a web search to verify their thoughts and opinions is being lazy.
This might be a case of just different standards for communication here. One person might want the absolute facts and assumes everyone posting should do their due diligence to verify everything they say, but others are okay with just shooting the shit (to varying degrees).
I've seen this happen too. People will comment and say in the comment that they can't remember something when they could have easily refound that information with chatgpt or google.
You know how some people can hardly find the back of their own hands if they googled them?
And then there's people (like eg. experienced wikipedians doing research) who have google-fu and can find accurate information about the weirdest things in the amount of time it takes you to tie your shoes and get your hat on.
Now watch how someone like THAT uses chatgpt (or some better LLM) . It's very different from just prompting with a question. Often it involves delegating search tasks to the LLM (and opening 5 google tabs alongside besides) . And they get really interesting results!
Well put. There are two sides of the coin: the lazy questioner who expects others to do the work researching what they would not, and the lazy/indulgent answerer who basically LMGTFY's it.
Ideally we would require people who ask questions to say what they've researched so far, and where they got stuck. Then low-effort LLM or search engine result pages wouldn't be such a reasonable answer.
I haven't thought about LMGTFY since stackoverflow. Usually though I see responses with people thrusting forth AI answers that provide more reasoning, back then LMGTFY was more about rote conventions(e.g. "how do you split a string on ," and ai is used more for "what are ways that solar power will change grid dynamics")
On Windows this only has a resolution of ~0.5ms (down from ~15.6ms when this frame limiting code was written). It also is not synchronized to when frames need to be submitted which means that depending on when the timer is created it can result in the game having stutter.
The goal was definitely to impede the other researcher's work, and I can imagine a few possible reasons for that. In descending order of probability, interpersonal conflict (in my experience, graduate students in the same lab tend to either become best friends or hate each other, with little in-between), trying to beat the other student to the punch w.r.t publication, or good ol' schizophrenic delusions that the person's work needs to be stopped (mid 20's is a pretty standard age for onset in men).
> interpersonal conflict
low probability in this case because this guy seems a repeat offender but absolutely things can get that toxic and ugly
> trying to beat the other student to the punch w.r.t publication,
this is my highest suspicion. Why is anxiety. Deep anxiety. Anxiety about failing. Anxiety about the other guy beating you. Sabotaging other guys's computer alleviates the anxiety so thusly becomes a repeat pattern. Anxiety can be quite insidious and nasty and is more pervasive in more ways than many are aware.
> good ol' schizophrenic delusions that the person's work needs to be stopped
possible but more rare
How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.
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