Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy.
AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans.
Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-person will be the only reliable way to convey a message from human to human.
I'm long on travel and in-person meetings, short on VR and telecoms.
When I'm on a company video call, the people I'm meeting with are logged into their company accounts, through the fancy company authentication system. Large warnings are displayed if there are any external participants, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to disable the ability to even have guests. Third-party video conference software is banned and blocked from installation on work computers.
I am not in the finance department, but in software engineering and operations, two-party controls are everywhere. I can't check in code without reviews. I can't access production systems or make changes without approval from another team member. I would think that similar processes could be put into place for transferring tens of millions of dollars.
In other words, there are ways to deal with this that don't come down to "mistrust all technology and revert to face-to-face meetings and handing cash to each other".
If I was the attacker, I'd use credential-stuffing or something to get access to some random employee's account. Doesn't have to be anyone important.
Then I'd set up a short-notice multi-way meeting between the target, the CEO and the hacked account. The deepfake 'CEO' then turns up with no alarms raised, except one wrong name - easily dismissed as a glitch, or an assistant having booked the meeting.
Almost everywhere I've worked disallows external participants on Teams by default. We add exceptions when needed. I don't know if this is standard, but has been at the larger companies I've worked at.
Isn't it also possible to scam people in in person meetings by pretending to be someone you aren't? The new thing with deepfakes is that you can pretend to be someone that the victim knows.
What you said only applies to communication that requires authenticating a party. Most cases that doesn't matter. Voice or video communication used to be inherently unfakeable, now that it is fakeable, we'll just treat it like text comms, relying on secure channels, signing etc.
Human written text has been indistinguishable from machine written text for a very long time. We've still managed to maintain chains of trust to discern legitimate messages with decent success rates.
> making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans.
That's a false dichotomy. "computer-generated chatter and images" ARE messages sent by humans. There are no cases of computers having agency known to me yet. The root of the problem is humans who lie and mislead. Now they merely have more avenues to do so. In the same vein, you could blame the electronic engineers for allowing people to lie quickly and over vast distances.
We need new ident protocol just for AI. I think that's part of Altman doing that orb thingy with iris scanner. It's creepy though and I'll never touch that things.
Nobody is anti-public-key crypto per se any more, the US government export control war ended long ago. It's just too much of a hassle to do the key management.
PKI is a pretty old idea. People were trying to deploy it in the 90s. It turns out that managing the issuing and authentication of keys, as well as keeping them secure and if necessary revoking them, is such a huge headache that few organizations have managed to do it properly. It might be possible to do better now with TPMs in laptops and phones; essentially this is why Apple Pay is now slightly more trusted than plastic cards.
And that most people have no idea how to verify any ID, so they need a system that turns any given form of ID into a nice and simple "yes" or "no".
I'm not at all clear what kind of ID is going to be genuinely useful for video calls, given we should only be trusting existing contacts anyway? But those things are why "private key" isn't sufficient in isolation.
Why couldn't a mobile app that everyone uses work for this. The person who wants to verify who they are uses the app, does digital signing and the other person gets notificatiom and the certification.
I mean - we have authentication for bank accounts, why wouldn't that be demanded for transactions like this? Without proper authentication of the authorities there's no way that a transaction like this should be put through.
The whole point of Replicants is that they look exactly like humans in person. Even if we assume AI and robotics advance 100 times or more in the next 10 years to allow the technical part of this, we are not even close to any makeup and prosthetics tech that could make a robot even slightly resemble a human in-person.
And I have to mention, Tesla robots are way behind the competition, it's not even clear if their robot does anything really on its own, given how much they fake their videos of it with "creative" editing.
I know it's a meme and all, but doesn't blockchain solve this? Ok, Mr. Guy who looks like my boss on Video Call, I can send those funds, just sign the transaction with your private key and it'll all be done.
Blockchain does not authenticate the receiver, so there are all sorts of attacks involving substituting the payment address, from dumb (stickers over QR codes) to sophisticated.
That’s a completely different thing though. The problem here is deepfakes where someone pretending to have the authority to send money tells you to send money.
You can't compare running a clinical trial for a drug targeting a communicable disease in the developing world to trials for treatments of complex diseases in rich countries where you need serology, histopathology and radiological endpoints.
Worth noting as well that J&J have shut down their entire division in communicable diseases because it was so unprofitable for them.
Was it 'unprofitable' as in 'losing money', or 'unprofitable' as in 'not worth the time'? If it's the latter, I don't have enough information about the rest of J&J to draw any conclusions.
I guess all doctors should be cosmetic surgeons then?
Seriously, the argument is that drug companies should only do the most profitable thing? If that's the case, they deserve to have all subsidies removed, and be regulated into oblivion, because they will serve no purpose, but profit.
Just see what happened with the opioid epidemic. If you're only looking at next quarters profits and destroy public trust, while skirting the legal boundaries you'll make bank until you're not.
>Seriously, the argument is that drug companies should only do the most profitable thing?
You're the first one to make any kind of suggestion for what they should do, so I'm not sure why you're jumping to that conclusion
>If that's the case, they deserve to have all subsidies removed, and be regulated into oblivion, because they will serve no purpose, but profit.
The purpose that they serve is to save your life with drugs. If that doesn't mean anything to you and isn't worth any money then I don't think we will find much common ground.
In your analogy, drug companies are the doctors. They want to make money for saving your life. Why would you want to regulate them out of existence?
>Was it 'unprofitable' as in 'losing money', or 'unprofitable' as in 'not worth
the time'?
was:
>If you can make more money by not doing X, than doing X, it doesnt matter.
It's confusing, because you certainly seem to imply only doing the most profitable things.
>The purpose that they serve is to save your life with drugs. If that doesn't mean anything to you and isn't worth any money then I don't think we will find much common ground.
My point was that if their purpose is only to do the things that make marginally more money (while killing significant numbers of people or allowing them to die) such as the Sacklers and Purdue with Oxy, they deserve to be regulated into oblivion. If you think the heavy marketing and distribution of known addictive drugs into disadvantaged areas of the country is in the public interest, then I don't think we will find much common ground.
Frankly, most doctors, biochemists, and pharma-chemists I know have little difficulty seeing this. It is about helping people not just making money, and doing otherwise while selling it as the former, is unethical.
>It's confusing, because you certainly seem to imply only doing the most profitable things.
I thought I was clear, but I will try again. The financial calculus is the same between "losing money" and "not worth it". It doesnt matter if the J&J division of communicable disease is running a positive or negative balance if J&J (or its owners) can more doing something entirely different. The question is do we want to be losing money on this. That is not to say they can't or shouldnt keep doing it as a public service or out of altruism, but the question is the same.
>My point was that if their purpose is only to do the things that make marginally more money.
I dont think that is a valid assumption to make about the industry. 99.9% of the time, the way to make more money is to make a product that saves or cures more people. If your product saves fewer people, People would by the old thing instead of the new thing for 2x the price.
Now, everyone is free to say they dont like the price, which is fair. However, the price is high because rich American customers dont care about the price. IF they did, they could always buy the cheap old thing.
It is like someone who is angry at the butcher for the price of filet minion, but keeps paying ever higher prices, and refuses to buy the tri-tip.
Europeans prices are half the US simply because they stop buying filet minion and get tri-tip when the price gets too high. US prices are twice that because we pay it!
It is crazy to blame the butcher for raising the price when you willingly keep throwing more money at ever higher prices!
No industry anywhere in the world expects the seller to keep prices low when customers keep throwing money at them.
The fundamental problem with US healthcare costs is that not one party in the system is willing to control spending. Nobody will say no to a treatment 1% better for 200% the cost.
Patients will pay anything for the latest drug because they want it, and the costs get spread over everyone's premium. Insurance is happy to see medical costs balloon because their profit is capped as a % of healthcare costs. manufacturers are happy to see costs go up, because that's what they are selling.
> Now, everyone is free to say they dont like the price, which is fair. However, the price is high because rich American customers dont care about the price. IF they did, they could always buy the cheap old thing.
I'm sure Americans that were rationing out their insulin would love to hear more about how they "don't care about the price" and you comparing their need for life-saving drugs to simply choosing to keep buying filet minion over cheaper beef cuts.
That simply isn't the typical American experience. 92% of Americans have health insurance. Even without insurance, Walmart and Amazon sell basic insulin for $25 and $30 for a months supply.
Everyone in America who makes <138% the poverty level qualifies for free insurance.
> Everyone in America who makes <138% the poverty level qualifies for free insurance.
qualifies is kind of a weasel word though, "in theory they qualify, in practice ..."
I'm guessing this is the US Medicaid system that recently
dropped enrollment by more than 11 million people in the past year, including 4.8 million children, the vast majority of whom were kicked off their healthcare for surprise procedural issues.
Indeed, I read the article which was utterly uninformative about what is going on.
Can you explain it?
As I understand it, Medicaid has waived all ongoing requirements for coverage due the pandemic, and people are now required to verify they still qualify. People who make too much will and do not qualify for Medicaid now need to purchase subsidized insurance on one of the markets.
Of course the article does noting to explain what "surprise procedural issues" means. IT seems that the word surprise is an entirely editorial insertion.
Based on KFF reporting, it seems that it just means anyone who didnt complete the renewal processes. This includes those that no longer qualify and therefore did not complete complete the renewal process. Of course there is valid concern that some of these people may still qualify and did not complete the paperwork, but it completely unclear how many that is. It could be 0.1% of the 11 million or 99%.
I'm both in and from Australia and no expert on the US public health system.
My only point of reference is ~4 decades of usenet and web forums routinely having mention of people (in the USofA) being bankrupted by medical incidents (heart attacks, car accidents, sporting injuries, non elective surgeries, etc) that here and in the UK are relatively mundane affairs.
I struggle to fathom a country where there is a need to "renew" health coverage .. here we have 'adequate' and 'private' and essentially everybody has adequate as a fallback with no need to tie basic health coverage to an employment package that is lost when someone fires|quits.
Each to their own, here the ideals of good health and sufficient basic wage have been tied in to social contract since Federation.
To be clear, I'm not a defender of the US system. I vehemently hate it. Im just explaining why costs are so high.
It is high because of the system structure and the fact that most people are willing to tolerate.
I'm pushing back on the moronic idea that prices are high because drug companies are too “greedy“ in the US, but the same exact company is mysteriously less greedy in the EU or AUS. The difference is that insurance in those places negotiate a lower price, so they get one!
Insurance companies in the US operate on a cost plus basis, so they want prices as high as possible.
Medical bankruptcies do happen in the US, at a rate of about 1 per 1,000 people per year.
There seems to be a big problem with the systems not having the capacity to complete the renewal process.
There was no checking for a while thus little need for resources needed for checking (there was still some because people still came into the system.) Now there's a big demand for renewal checking and it's working on a basis of dropping people if they don't complete it even if the problem is on the state's end. And, yes, it's completely unclear how many--because the red states want these failures, they're not keeping track.
It's the usual garbage of putting roadblocks in the way of benefits to keep down the amount paid out.
No, a lot of it is individuals responding and their responses not being processed. They have to prove they are eligible, if that proof isn't processed they are dropped.
Look at the reports of huge backlogs with the IRS. What would happen if they automatically started prosecuting you for failure to file as of June 1st?
Did I say that? Putting words in people's mouths is a juvenile debate tactic.
I do think that newer more expensive products provide worse patient outcomes at rates significantly higher than 1 / 1000 times.
However, the comment I objected is discussing "ways to make money" as a pharmacutical company. Which is a generalization that is laughably naive at best. We have plenty of examples of drug companies trying to make money in ways that harm patients from how they fostered the opiod epidemic.
I don't think it is naive, and it matches my experience. It is very rare for a company to try to develop an inferior product for many reasons, but most of all it is impractical.
Without superiority, it you will struggle with investors, trials, approval,and then convincing doctors to to switch to it.
Everyone can come up with an example, and point to per due, but the FDA processes 10s of thousands of device and drug submissions per year. Most are in cutthroat markets with competitors.
If we are talking about individual company actions or statements, and not products, then the numbers are even worse. There are literally millions of actions associated with a product, and I would again argue that >99.9 are made in the favor of patient interest.
Making a inferior product and scamming your way to profit is an exceedingly rare strategy because it is both extremely difficult execute successfully.
I think it is clear that new product development doesn't prioritize optimal patient benefit, but that is a different topic. It needs to be good enough to sell, then it becomes a question of how good vs how much money.
> 99.9% of the time, the way to make more money is to make a product that saves or cures more people. If your product saves fewer people, People would by the old thing instead of the new thing for 2x the price.
This is a naive statement.
Viagra made a ton of money, while only benefitting a slice of a slice of humanity. It doesn't save lives, it helps some people get erections.
Compare and contrast to real, widespread diseases that affect millions, and are risk factors for billions, but require public research dollars because the pharmaceutical industry doesn't see enough profit compared to a new erectile dysfunction or baldness treatment.
That's not an industry working to the public's benefit. That's an industry working to old white men's benefit. It's helping itself and to hell with anyone else.
With that said, Viagra was initially developed for high blood pressure and chest pain. Testing didn’t pan out but it worked wonders for erections so it was rebranded. It is also used in pulmonary hypertension.
Not to speak for the other poster, but because it's too damn expensive for the average person now. And when the average person can't do things like "eat", "pay rent", or "get live-saving or misery-ending medical treatment", that person bands together with their ilk and tears society apart.
Doctors, I'll let slide, because they do actual labor and spent decades in school (often going nearly-broke doing so) to get where they are. Most doctors are well-paid but they're not financier or c-suite level rich, and that's who today's drug prices serve. That and a bunch of ambiguous "shareholders" who more often than not had more ambition for their retirements than the economy they spent the last 50 years operating can support, despite decades of warnings.
Why is it so expensive? because the vast majority of Americans can and will pay it instead of opting for slightly cheaper options. It is a tragedy of the commons with consumers driving up price
m8 when we've got people rationing their insulin because they can't afford it, it's time to stop blaming "the commons".
The truth is, you absolutely can provide a life-sustaining level of care to most people without bankrupting them. In fact, we used to, and many countries do. We just don't want to do what's necessary (punish excessive executive compensation, reduce the importance of equities as a store of value, make unhealthy foods more expensive than healthy, etc.) in order to make that happen, because somehow, the laws of human behavior in western nations just don't apply in the United States.
When exactly in us history did people get free insulin and robot hearts?
But this is really all besides the point. The point is that prices are high because the system is fucked up.
Prices aren't twice as high as Europe because the companies more greedy here. It is the same companies! The difference is the system. Different laws and institutions
I'm not saying they got free insulin and robot hearts; I'm saying they got standard-of-care medicine in many cases without exposing themselves to medical bankruptcy.
>But this is really all besides the point. The point is that prices are high because the system is fucked up. Prices aren't twice as high as Europe because the companies more greedy here. It is the same companies! The difference is the system. Different laws and institutions
And who, pray tell, lobbies against changing laws and institutions in the United States re: drug pricing? The industry itself: both drug manufacturers and the insurance companies that pay for them. Ultimately a switch to a system like that found in, say, Europe, reduces the pool of money that gets spent on medicines every year in the United States. That's bad for their bottom lines.
I dont think that there was ever free standard of care medicine in the USA, as a matter of history. Today is the most progressive and subsidized the US medical system has ever been.
I do think that the US policy has pretty bogus incentive on both sides. If you think it is just the lobbying, I think you are fooling yourself. Most Americans hate the idea of a fully social system, and both parties reject common sense hybrid options like in the best European systems. They are too radical for the right, and not radical enough for the left. As a result, we get the worst of all worlds. We spend more public funds on healthcare than most european countries, but dont have universal coverage, and we pay extreme private costs on top of that.
There are lots of better options the US could pick, but wont .
> I dont think that there was ever free standard of care medicine in the USA, as a matter of history. Today is the most progressive and subsidized the US medical system has ever been.
I didn't say "free", I said not being exposed to medical bankruptcy.
I believe the argument is not that it's negative profit... It's just less profit than other pharmaceuticals.
And without knowing the specifics, there can be a lot of value from continuing to produce those sorts of things, if it's within reason. I mean shit they probably spend more on ads saying how great they are than it would cost to actually be great (by saving lives with cheaper meds)
Right, from a private capital perspective, it's a misallocation of resources.
If a company can make X% return on capital (researchers, equipment, marketing, regulatory engagement, office space etc) working on communicable diseases, but Y% >> X% doing something else, a responsible steward of somebody else's pile of money is supposed to direct the capital towards Y.
Less profit than anything theoretically, and in practice, less than the US treasury bond rate.
If the company is spending $1B/yr for a 1% return in that division, but the return on bonds is 5%, the financial answer is to liquidate, and put the cash in bonds.
This happens to some degree. Residency spots are limited by specialty. Over time, different specialties have come and gone as being extremely competitive.
Plastic surgery is among the medical specialties with the highest job satisfaction and lowest burnout rate. It pays well, and for cosmetic procedures they don't have to deal with insurance billing hassles. Most procedures can be scheduled in advance which allows for a decent lifestyle without frequent on-call interruptions.
I think you’re conflating plastics with aesthetics/cosmo. Only a small minority of plastic surgeons practice primarily aesthetics.
Majority will have a micro, breast or hand practice and have a side hustle in aesthetics so the overall satisfaction stat you’re citing is not reflective.
There are different hassles in cosmetics like increased overhead, patient expectations (which are much higher in cosmetics) and advertising/patient recruitment. Call can be worse as the patient paying $50k for a rhinoplasty expects the surgeon to answer the phone for every whim.
A company where revenue is 90% of expenses is in big trouble.
Another company that could make 120%, but is only making 110%, is doing fine.
More directly: If every division is profitable, there's not a great need to cut the less-profitable divisions. And if that division was doing something useful, it can be negative for the public if it's shut down entirely, so it's worth wondering how we could save these still-profitable endeavors.
I assume those other companies are paying more money in this hypothetical?
If so, that's the problem, not the amount of profit.
Increase pay to match, making the profit 105% of expenses, is there still an issue? If there are other negative consequences I need you to explain them.
(Side note, if you say everyone else is making 135%, but our company could only make 120% if we switched focus, are you sure it's not us that's paying higher salaries?)
you imagined a scenario in which a company was not maximizing profitability of their drug production and development and asked what would be the problem with that, I provided an example problem that might exist if that were the case and your response is ok let's make a different starting assumption?
My assumption though is if we switched focus we could make 135%.
>Increase pay to match, making the profit 105% of expenses,
at some point in this imagined scenario it ends up profit of 99% of expenses, which it seems from your previous example is not ok. The company with higher profit margins has more room to maneuver, can offer better perks to employees, can offer higher salaries, assuming only some of the employee pool is self-interested that still means you have less ability to get them one way or another.
Assuming also at the top level that wages are not a percentage but rather negotiated, oh well rich pig pharmaceuticals said they would pay 195 per year, that's 40 more than you're offering - can you match? At some point not being as rich as the other players starts to affect your game.
> I provided an example problem that might exist if that were the case and your response is ok let's make a different starting assumption?
Oh, I didn't realize your example was supposed to be different from my example. I thought you were adding on to it. If your example is different, then you left out several important numbers.
> at some point in this imagined scenario it ends up profit of 99% of expenses, which it seems from your previous example is not ok. The company with higher profit margins has more room to maneuver, can offer better perks to employees, can offer higher salaries
It can, but will it? How many industries do you see dumping all their revenue into extreme wages?
If that happens, fuck it, that's basically a utopia, maybe I should join those businesses.
But most of the time extra profit goes to the shareholders, not the employees. The money doesn't end up improving the company's hiring game.
To J&J it doesn't matter, but it's a useful number to understand the industry as a whole.
When a pharmaceutical leader says that developing new drugs "isn't profitable," it would be nice to know if that meant "clinical trials don't make as much money as cosmetic drugs" or "clinical trials actively lose us money."
Individuals can and do make non-financially motivated decisions. But in larger groups, especially a large corporation like J&J, you can apply the law of large numbers and determine that decisions are a result of incentives (primarily money).
Just to build on this, many drug and device companies specifically run early trials in the developing world or eastern Europes specifically because the costs are so much lower.
Part of the costs are labor and materials, the majority is regulatory burden. It is a well established financial de-risking activity before spending the hundreds of millions more for a US/EU trial.
Edit for visibility:
The drugs in this trial are all previously developed and approved by other companies, some as early as the 1950s. They ran the trials in Kazakhstan, India, and similar developing countries.
They have no manufacturing and supply chain, because they buy commercially available generics off the shelf for pennies.
There is a lot to say about pricing, but the guardian is shamelessly engaging in disinformation.
I have heard from the same Industry people you work in that the pricing of the drug generally has nothing to do with the cost of the research or trials for that particular drug but instead just what the market will be willing to pay for it. There’s a reason humira has till ozempic been the most profitable drug - not because it was cheap to research but it was in the perfect niche where it can be charged an insane amount and a large population could pay for it.
Thanks for putting the disclaimer. But your argument is still not convincing that pharma industry has no fundamental moral backbone (a reason I left it after my PhD).
> I have heard from the same Industry people you work in that the pricing of the drug generally has nothing to do with the cost of the research or trials for that particular drug but instead just what the market will be willing to pay for it.
If people are not willing to pay at least as much as research costs, the drug certainly won't get created.
Basic research is well-subsidized by the public (and IMO should get paid royalties if there was a good way to track attribution), but the vast majority of a drug’s cost is in its development, specifically the clinical trials.
All other things being equal, an expansion of housing stock which tracked population growth would keep prices steady.
The big shift is immigration expanding the pool of working-age people, and longer lifespans increasing the time it takes for family homes to be released back onto the market. People having fewer kids now self-evidently does not affect housing demand (except perhaps to reduce square footage needed per working person)
Environmental activists are almost entirely responsible for the killing of nuclear energy in the 1970s. Much of the blame for climate change lays at their feet.
I would bet most of these protests were funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chances of this many people organically being anti-nuclear are near 0%.
It’s also funny how it was the environmental activists who were the ones who were powerful/influential enough to be “entirely responsible” for killing nuclear energy as opposed to be the poor old fossil fuel industry.
They were able to kill the nuclear energy industry because the economic cost of killing it was low. The alternative to cheap, reliable nuclear was cheap, reliable coal.
They're struggling to kill off the fossil fuel industry because the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas is expensive (when accounting for energy storage + backup energy production capacity), less reliable renewables.
Ironically, they'd have a much easier if the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas was cheap, reliable nuclear energy!
> Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.
It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power.
A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart.
The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.
Climate activists are to blame for much of climate change because they advocated against using one risky form of energy production?
There were other options and the option of reducing energy usage (and standard of living).
So I agree that activists might be responsible for nuclear energy decline in the west, but not that they are to blame for climate change because of that.
Not defending the practice, but this guy writes the modern equivalent of pulp fiction. I doubt his readers care much, and he has no publisher to tick off. So what it comes down to is whether or not the people he stole from have a strong case to sue him for copyright infringement.
“The modern equivalent of pulp fiction…” is pulp fiction. It isn’t some antique term connoting a dross sui generis (as that’s an oxymoron). Pablum is literacy’s unalterable, insuperable attendant.
Pulp fiction was fiction written for the popular pulp magazines of the 1900s through roughly the 1960s. Those magazines don't really exist anymore. The "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- which is to say, the modern equivalent of writing for the pulps, writing to earn a quick buck -- is self-publishing low-effort fare on Kindle Unlimited or something similar. So the guy you were responding to made an apt comparison, IMO.
Interestingly, the pulps that are still hanging on -- like Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and like various other fiction magazines -- are today characterized by a very high standard of literary quality. On average, miles better than the self-published Kindle Unlimited stuff that rates highly (for some reason) on Amazon.
I realize well how pedantic I am being, but let's say there are two ways to interpret the term "pulp fiction." (1) As a reference to the pulp stories on newsstand racks in the early-mid 20th century; (2) as you note, as a stand-in for low-quality mass-produced fiction.
As such there should be absolutely no issue with somebody saying "modern equivalent of pulp fiction" -- because they're using the first definition. And it so happens that there is a perfect modern equivalent, which is essentially the author in OP's publishing style.
Must be very niche as lasers operate typically below 10% efficiency. And one speck of dust or defect on a component and you're setting fire to something.
That's the efficiency of the device, not the laser. This device does not include a laser.
That said, I don't know of any diode lasers that are that bad. Lasers for this fiber are probably 50%+ efficient and even the high frequency laser diodes are still 30%+
> Maybe that's why it's so expensive compared to other modules which can get away with lower efficiencies?
It's expensive, because most people don't need that, because they just use a wire to power their device.
This has some very niche uses in high voltage insulation (where you need the power on the other side, but really really don't want high voltage to travel back down the line and destroy your device.
I'm sure Byzantine HR processes are constantly being bungled, but you almost never hear about it. These processes only exist because every hiring decision needs a paper trail to show compliance with a myriad of employment and discrimination law. Next time you wonder why orgs seem to have a high concentration of talent when small, and then get diluted with deadweight as they grow, know that this is one of the reasons why.
A few years ago I had a strange experience of sitting through a gig in an East London pub while a hipster "sang" a spoken word song about Deptford (where he had moved to) and how the pre-existing community there has been ravaged by an influx of hipsters pricing locals out and replacing their community hubs with coffee shops. Notable in this lament was that he included himself as part of the problem. It was a paean of self-hatred which of course elevated him above the rest of the people in his category - he saw himself as implicitly superior since he was the one calling himself out.
The mainly young, white, middle class, female audience was wrapt in his performance. I couldn't stand more than a few minutes of it and left soon after arriving. I hadn't given it a second thought until seeing this shameless post-modern PR campaign on Hacker News.
It's surprising that ATC works in such a human-driven manual way. Compare to train signalling, where tracks are divided into signalled sections, and a train cannot enter the next section until the section ahead is clear, with automated braking if a red signal is run. This system
was developed over many tragic accidents. Even the Victorians came up with ways to minimise human error (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling) )
Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy.
AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans.
Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-person will be the only reliable way to convey a message from human to human.
I'm long on travel and in-person meetings, short on VR and telecoms.