This put a smile on my face. I have a random, vivid memory from college of being in a university IT cave trying and failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha.
If I remember correctly we installed Red Hat Linux ~5-6.0 on the DEC and used it for various shenanigans. In retrospect it would have been fun to get Tru64 running on it instead…
AFAICR, Linux was far easier to run stuff on by that point. Playing with different variants of Unix was certainly fun though! I remember being blown away by an Irix+OpenGL demo on “deprecated hardware” that a friend had access to in the late 90s. After growing up with a Borland compiler in dos and programming graphics in the most naive of manners possible, seeing accelerated graphics that outmoded any xscreensaver on my fancy 200Mhz Pentium Linux box opened my eyes a little more!
> failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha.
If you had seen the RC2 disks, it would have been obvious. RC2 had different disks for Intel and Alpha, RC3 only had Intel disk(s). NT4 had all archs on the same disk, so it would have made some sense to be confused.
Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.
I think we’re near the end of this trajectory, and the inevitable disruptive business model will be a young entrepreneur who “invents” the concept of the Human-Centric Firm.
I don’t want or need fast and “good enough” news and i’m gonna try and make a case that you don’t either.
Until very recently, all of modern civilization was built by people who got their news at most once a day. Reputable bureaus like Reuters took that day to get it right.
I’m not the national security advisor, so I don’t need a push notification that there was an earthquake in Nepal, or a bullshit rush-job briefing on Chinese AI distillation tactics.
The fast part isn’t for your benefit, primarily, and news media would love to go slower and have more time if they could, and still survive. The race to break news first - in order to be the one to tell their audience something “new”, something they hadn’t heard elsewhere - is real and it has been around for all of modern civilization, for hundreds if not thousands of years. A one day turnaround was a thing purely due to daily newspaper print runs being the fastest distribution, it wasn’t because it was long enough to get it right. The reason they had a day is because the competition couldn’t get something out faster than that. Then for a while there were twice daily print runs to be more competitive. Then the internet came along, and now the only way for a site to get attention and be talked about on Hacker News is to report it before any other sites do.
There are some news media that do go slower and take their time, but I think they’re struggling to stay alive. Reuters is still reputable, but they no longer necessarily take a day. The big question is how do we get humanity to prefer slow & correct over fast, and it is even possible? When you hear about an earthquake in Venezuela, how do we stop people from Googling it immediately, and get them to wait for the best most correct story rather than reading whatever’s available now? In the case of natural disasters, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, no matter what case you make. I’m not sure it’s possible with stories like AI distillation either, even if you can absolutely cement the case for slow news. The fact that it’s async/internet now and that first still counts means we (you and I) are still going to give traffic and attention to sites that have the first information on a breaking topic, statistically, despite having a preference for correctness over speed. The one thing we can do is vote with our dollars by subscribing to whatever news media that does a better job than others.
Fraudulent transactions will eventually cost the bank (when they would have to reverse/reimburse it and eat the loss). A denied transaction only results in an angry customer who will quickly forget after they complained - so the customer bears the brunt of the externalized cost.
Therefore, the bank's incentive is to err on the side of more caution, and deny transactions when finding false positives.
Spend retention is by far the highest priority. This is why they overnight fedex replacement cards.
The worst scenario for a credit card issuer is when a customer, for whatever reason, starts using another bank’s card in their wallet as their daily driver.
As an American, I’m embarrassed because it’s a thought-terminating cliché, but I hear great “modern marvels”-type stories about innovation like this and think, “we used to be a country…”
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