I just got an email from Groq saying that distil-whisper-large-v3-en will be deprecated by August 23, 2025. Their suggested replacement model, whisper-large-v3-turbo, is quite capable, but is also about twice as expensive to run.
I love the idea of Waymo in theory, but unfortunately the only times I've seen them in the news are when things go horribly wrong (like the fact that they've gotten almost 600 parking tickets in SF last year). I will still prefer a human driver, as fallible as we humans are, until we get to avionics level of safety. I drive a lot, and I often forget that cars aren't consumable, fun toys, but rather two-ton hunks of metal that hurtle at inhuman speeds. I'm glad the cars are deferential to pedestrians, but I fear the time when these limits will be unlocked.
Honest question - do you not work in tech? I understand this sentiment from someone not in tech, but you're argument is laughably reductive that it feels silly
Would you rather have software written by Chevrolet than Tech Companies?
I don't think there's a dichotomy anymore, every car manufacturer is a tech company now. Tesla is a car company run like a tech company and I'll take Honda or Toyota over them every time. And it's not like the tech chops are lacking among traditional automakers, Mercedes launched (albeit limited) actually full self driving where you're not expected to take over and they take liability.
"Tech" isn't that generic. There's no reason to believe that a company that makes a search engine will do any better at self driving. I mean they bought Waymo after they were already promising.
So many “tech” companies aren’t really tech, they just apply fairly standard software principals to new industries.
Companies like salesforce, Uber, Airbnb are more marketing or market making apps. Eventually they do apply some more sophisticated software to scale their products, but their core business is not technical in nature. Even Facebook started out as an electronic blend of the school facebook (paperback) and hotornot.
I’m not in SV tech so perhaps my perception is wrong? But googles core competency was search algorithms, though their business is ads of course. So more of a tech company.
He said he objected to having it from a company with a surveillance business model. Are you assuming that all tech companies have a surveillance business model?
It’s ok for people in tech to not like or trust companies with a surveillance business model. Especially when Google has recently shown a renewed willingness to put profits far above what is best for their customers.
I’m in tech and have recently been disgusted by googles abuses of what they used to believe.
It's not surprising that you only hear about Waymo in the news when something goes wrong. That doesn't mean it hasn't been extremely successful, which it has by any objective measure, other than profitability at least in the short term. The tech works.
This speaks more to the news than to Waymo. If you want more viewpoints, look for cyclists speaking of their preference for encountering waymos instead of human drivers; look to reddit for videos of waymos avoiding red-light runners and balls and pedestrians in dangerous places.
Then again this very article was not about things going "horribly wrong" but about the growth in ridership: Waymo is in production mode and ramping up BECAUSE it's working well.
High speed red light runners, in the meantime, are highly present in San Francisco these days. Now THAT's dangerous. Not to mention (less frequent) people deliberately pointing their "two-ton" vehicles at pedestrians. I don't see Waymo doing that.
The PayPal debit card lets you choose a 5% cash back category every month. Gas, restaurants, and a few other I don't remember. It's a much better deal than most of the credit cards I carry.
I have never known a vendor that charges more based on credit card types.
The reason that companies are willing to pay higher credit card exchanges for Amex is because Amex users on average are bigger spenders.
But even Chase Visa cards that transfer to Hyatt hotels and you can get 3x back for groceries (by paying with grocery store app so it counts as “online groceries) you’ll get more than 5% cash back.
Then there is the whole r/awardtravel hacks of getting cheaper flights by transferring points to partner airlines like booking Delta domestic flights via AirFrance.
That’s because every vendor who chooses to accept American Express raises their base prices by 4-5% instead of 3-4%.
It has absolutely nothing to do with how much American Express cardholders spend and everything to do with what they charge vendors and some vendors or their payment processors accept Amex, or you don’t have a choice.
I know this because my firm accepts American Express and they are absolutely not our biggest spenders, but our downstream processors force us to raise prices.
As someone who lived in Russia for a while, I have personal experience with these mini-exchanges. They're the Internet equivalent of those currency exchange stands at airports, I wouldn't call them full crypto exchanges like Binance.
They're a pretty interesting phenomenon. Some do KYC, some don't. Some are fully automatic and just need to be "topped up" occasionally, some are fully manual. They usually provide an easy on/offramp to/from crypto, but they usually have high fees and minimum transaction requirements on top of an unfavorable exchange rate. Sites like bestchange exist to aggregate all the different rates and slice a cut from the affiliate revenue.
It's nice to see how they work (or don't) from the legal side. In my mind they've always existed in a grey legal area, since some mini-exchanges openly proclaim their registration in e.g. the UK and some just don't say where they're headquartered.
They do work, but they've always felt a bit shady, and I've felt anxious using their services. Centralized exchanges are way better in regards to support and have a better exchange rate to boot.
Yikes! If so, he could have saved a lotta money by purchasing 4090s instead of spot pricing. Last time I did the math, break even between buying and renting was only 3 months. I wonder if the search took a lot longer than he anticipated
Once physical hardware is involved, the problem gets a lot more complicated.
If you're talking about $2M worth of 4090s you have to concern yourself not only with putting them in hosts, but also with adequate space, power distribution, cooling, and networking. You have to figure out how to gracefully handle hardware failures. You have to install operating systems, or at least come up with some mechanism to deploy automatically. And you just straight up have to supply labor to get 1000+ of these things plugged in.
All that before you can get even get to the "fun part". If you're a multi-millionaire you might be willing to just pay the spot price premium.
Naw the dude had a year. It's not that hard to pay 1 contractor $30/hr to set up PXE boot, assemble machines and GPUs, air handling units, GPUs, and electrical sub panels. I've done a similar "jack of all trades" job for a weed company in Oakland way back before I became a software engineer. 1000 GPUs only takes 2 weeks to deploy.
"Green" hydrogen is anything but. Electrolysis is a fundamentally inefficient technique. Scale it all you want, but you will hit diminishing returns faster than with water desalination. Natural hydrogen is the way to go, and I hope hydrogen wells will become as ubiquitous as gas wells in 50 years' time.
> Electrolysis is a fundamentally inefficient technique
Yes, but if we’re seeing huge overproduction times on renewables that might not be a showstopper. Hydrogen is a poor choice for powering things like cars compared to the alternatives but if you have industrial processes which need a flame on the order of 2,000°C it could make sense to have peak capacity wind/solar splitting hydrogen & oxygen for those.
To add to that, there are already a number of energy intensive processes that already use hydrogen. Manufacturing fertilizers for example. Currently the hydrogen for these Processes is produced from natural gass but it's a matter of time before production using green energy becomes cheaper.
According to some reports, there are enormous amounts of "gold hydrogen," that is hydrogen in underground deposits, that's just waiting to be extracted:
How this enormous non-polluting energy source went unnoticed for decades is mystifying to me. That Toyota and other big auto manufacturers are investing in hydrogen fuel cell and even hydrogen combustion engines means that many people who know what they're doing are betting on this future. The math doesn't really work that well for a "green hydrogen" future, but it may work for a "gold hydrogen" future.
Always funny seeing SaaS companies pitch their own product in blog posts. I understand it's just how marketing works, but pitching your own product as a solution to a problem (that you yourself are introducing, perhaps the first time to a novice reader) never fails to amuse me.
