natnat

9 ms·

1.
by natnat 1mo ago
> Marketers are addicted to bad data This article cites a random Statista page for the "36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker" stat.
2.
by natnat 3mo ago
What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.
3.
by natnat 6mo ago
It's the severance cost, mostly.
4.
by natnat 7mo ago
This really isn't true. You should use different parameters (specifically, you can reduce the random_page_cost to a little over 1) on a SSD but there isn't a really compelling reason to use a completely different DBMS for SSDs.
5.
by natnat 11mo ago
Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.
6.
by natnat 11mo ago
I think this has a lot to do with the mechanism of RoPE attention, where physical closeness in the code is a signal of relevance.
7.
by natnat 1y ago
This reminds me of the "Natural engagement pattern" sketch that Mark Zuckerberg made about facebook content back in 2018: https://www.facebook.com/notes/751449002072082/ Content gets more engagement as i
8.
by natnat 1y ago
I remember software working really badly in the early 2000s, when Microsoft had an unassailable monopoly over everything. Then there were a bunch of changes: Windows started getting better with Windows 7, Firefox and then Chrome started bei
9.
by natnat 2y ago
Can someone link to a real source for this? Like, a paper or something? This seems very interesting and important and I'd prefer to look at something less sketchy than venturebeat.com
10.
by natnat 2y ago
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this press
11.
by natnat 2y ago
You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-con
12.
by natnat 2y ago
Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.
13.
by natnat 2y ago
I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most of these systems are complex, but not as complex as e.g.
14.
by natnat 2y ago
Starlark is nice but Google also has GCL...
15.
by natnat 2y ago
Nuclear is really terrible at peak loads; it's a very reliable base load. It's basically impossible to quickly increase or decrease the output of a nuclear plant.
16.
by natnat 2y ago
The PISA scores are below average in 2022 but not significantly so. Most countries have had a pretty bad decline in test scores due to covid, but that's (hopefully) a one-time problem and future cohorts will do better. I'm not say
17.
by natnat 2y ago
I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just i
18.
by natnat 2y ago
In what world is the US education worse-than-third-world? The US has universal literacy, phenomenal higher education institutions, and primary and secondary schools that are comparable to peer countries on average. We spend lots of money on
19.
by natnat 3y ago
This is insane conspiratorial thinking? How would being the only host that happens to get DDOSed constantly be a good business proposition?
20.
by natnat 3y ago
We use a kind of funky BigQuery setup at my shop to reduce our spend, and I think it's based on a quirk in BigQuery pricing that Google doesn't explicitly recommend. BigQuery has two completely separate pricing models: on-demand,
21.
by natnat 3y ago
If you don't want to do very much, you can try adsense. If nothing else you'll get a good sense of what the floor is.
22.
by natnat 3y ago
PAPERCLIP
23.
by natnat 3y ago
There was a really good episode of the Odd Lots podcast where they discussed this. Arizona is a very favorable location for semiconductor fabs because there's a very low risk for natural disaster (no hurricanes or earthquakes), the tem
24.
by natnat 3y ago
As an xoogler, I don't agree at all. Google has a ton of problems, but a reluctance to think deeply about and fix tech debt isn't one of them. In fact, I think the eagerness to fix fundamentally broken abstractions is a big reas
25.
by natnat 3y ago
Completely! I'm not trying to disparage the progress that's being made. This is a great start, I just wanted to make it clear that there's a long way to go :)
26.
by natnat 3y ago
This is great, but keep in mind this is like a third derivative metric. North America is way behind China in number of batteries owned, batteries produced, and factories being built. This is just the growth rate of factories being built.
27.
by natnat 3y ago
This a really classically difficult political problem of concentrated benefits with diffuse costs. The complication of the tax code comes from a zillion little exceptions added over the years, and every little exception has a beneficiary wh
28.
by natnat 3y ago
It basically does show everyone the same results. There's some session-based reranking and ads are heavily personalized, but there's basically no personalization in regular search.
29.
by natnat 3y ago
Regardless of the merits of the case, this is a really funny exploration into how bad Google's chat products are.
30.
by natnat 12y ago
Also worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

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