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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • It coincides with their switch to more and more “AI” black box models. Whereas before they would use a hand-tuned heuristic model to describe whether you are turning, merging, or continuing on a road, they just use a less correct but automagic model where they still inevitably have to tune it a whole lot but it is “AI” so it has the approval of the petty lords of management.

    Incorrect entrances and closed roads are another example. They’re just using satellite and street level imagery and tossing it at some models that spit out things like “door 99% confidence” and “road 98% confidence” while neglecting the question of, “are you actually allowed/able to use this?”

    PS under basically every correct answer in this category is a team of poorly-paid “labelers” whose answers directly turn into the data in the map. Your door-that-is-not-an-entrance was marked entrance because someone making $8/hr only had 10 seconds to review before moving to the next question.


  • I… agree but isn’t then contradicting your previous point that innovation will come from large companies if they only try to secure monopolies rather than genuinely innovate?

    Nope.

    I don’t understand from that perspective who is left to innovate if it’s neither research

    Who said there’s no more research?

    not the large companies… and startups don’t get the funding either.

    Both are, on average, just doing boring work minorly translating research in the hope to become more monopolistic, just at different levels of the good chain. The former eats the latter.



  • Having seen and done this transition I can tell you that companies do very little for innovation compared to university researchers. Companies are exclusively focused on profit, they don’t do the five to ten year moonshot project unless they are already a massive corporation, not a startup, and even then the massive companies want the easiest thing to translate to a product and begin making money. At best they have engineers that make scaling up more practical, and while that is a fun and interesting thing, it is also very straightforward and is something a company has to avoid screwing up, not investing in massively to make it right.

    I’ve seen several companies that did literally nothing except swap a couple things on their production line and call it a day. The only transition from research to industry was an IP agreement and a few meetings.

    Large companies are not looking for innovation by buying startups, they are usually looking to secure monopolies. Sometimes they want the product and to work it into their own product offerings. This is often a way to vertically integrate more, not innovate. They bring in-house because they see a competitor emerging and want to hedge their bets or because they see a way to take over a market by just doing the same thing. Sometimes it is just a way to hire some employees that seem pretty competent and thereby deprive your competitors. Large companies operate with a monopoly mindset. This is also why Google kills every project that they declare won’t scale into a huge money-maker (they really mean take over a market).

    Small companies are often started with the plan of actually making and selling their product long-term but run headfirst into the fact that their industry is dominated by just 3 companies that will gladly do the one-two punch of threatening to bleed you legally with nonsense lawsuits while offering to buy you up. Or, on the flipside, just copying your work and changing it just enough that they know they could bleed you legally even though they have broken IP law. Usually, they would rather just buy you out at less than you are worth but enough to make the VCs happy.





  • The metrics here are those most relevant to finance, which is not synonymous with innovation. Startups are notorious money sinks that are only invested in due to a promise of monopoly profits later, basically a gamble. They usually fail, and dramatically. Finance is necessary for private capital investment and liquidity but when it grows too large it becomes parasitic and also tries to dictate policy. The real estate bubble that China is now dealing with is a direct result of financialization and an expectation that it would be “too big to fail” and that real estare finance would get bailed out by government.

    China is tackling this issue by limiting the impact of finance on its economy, changing its lending terms and what it guarantees, including not bailing out real estate finance. This has the direct effect of making startups and venture capital less common as they simply can’t make as much money from pure speculation. They don’t have a state-funded safety net for their worst gambles and interest rates are higher.

    Overall, this is a good development. China’s finance sector absolutely needed to be limited and it is good for the state to take on a greater role in running companies.


  • TheOubliette@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlTabasco on pizza: Yay or Nay?
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    18 days ago

    Italians are well-known for being sticklers about the right way to prepare their food, often implying it is ancient. Unless it is a low-oil focaccia or a salad (ancient Roman), it is surprisingly often the case that it is a dish that is 50-100 years old with a foreign influence.

    Naples has been making pizza for about 200 years as a basic flatbread with tomatoes, mozarella, and basil. If you eat pizza with a tomato sauce… that’s an American change. Pizza was not often eaten outside Naples [Edit:whoopsie] until around WWII. The most common variations around the world are all based on the American version.

    Carbonara was a WWII-era invention with tons of variations at first and an American origin. I’ve known Italians that get actually upset if you prepare carbonara with the “wrong” ingredients even though they were ingredients used on “original” carbonaras less than 50 years ago.

    If you go back just a bit farther, every dish that needs tomatoes or potatoes or peppers is from the Americas, not Europe. And Europeans were not big on tomatoes for a looong time. It’s only been in much use there for about 250 years.






  • If you own the copyright then yes this is 100% legal.

    There are already apps that are like this. They usually add a couple features to the paid release so that people feel like they are getting something extra for the money. The good ones will eventually move those features to the open release eventually. However, this incentivizes keeping part of the app closed source so that nobody can just rename and re-release the paid version.

    It is 100% up to you for how to handle these tradeoffs. Personally, I think so long as you are principled and ready for some criticism - and can handle it gracefully - getting paid for work that builds your open source app is a very good idea. We don’t all have the luxury of maintaining high quality unpaid side projects!