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Opinionated and uneducated. A favorite pastime of the internet it's just a shame that we give so much attention to such blogposts.

You're wrong about how services that cost 9+ figures to run annually are budgeted. 1% CPU is absolutely massive and well measured and accounted for in these systems.

So you prematurely dump hardware you already own when you see CPU usage go down? I don't think so.

What you're missing is that for these massive systems there's never enough capacity. You can go look at datacenter buildouts YOY if you'd like. Any and all compute power that can be used is being used.

For individual services what that means is that for something like Google Search there will be dozens of projects in the hopper that aren't being worked on because there's just not enough hardware to supply the feature (for example something may have been tested already at small scale and found to be good SEO ranking wise but compute expensive). So a team that is able to save 1% CPU can directly repurpose that saved capacity and fund another project. There's whole systems in place for formally claiming CPU savings and clawing back those savings to fund new efforts.


I've never in my life (25 years in the business) seen a system that was so utilized things needed to be cut. Every single cluster/DC I've worked with has been at 50-85% utilization tops. I mean, they might hit 100% during a report generation period or something, but the 95% avg I've seen has never exceeded maybe 80%.

This is really just an example of survivorship bias and the power of Valve's good brand value. Big tech does in fact employ plenty of people working on the kernel to make 0.1% efficiency gains (for the reason you state), it's just not posted on HN. Someone would have found this eventually if not Valve.

And the people at FB who worked to integrate Valve's work into the backend and test it and measure the gains are the same people who go looking for these kernel perf improvements all day.


負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though. 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example. I don't really think native speakers still distinguish these.

Feel free to try listening yourself though:

頬, note that it has multiple pronunciations but we only care about hoo: https://forvo.com/word/%E9%A0%AC/#ja

https://forvo.com/word/%E6%96%B9%E3%80%80%EF%BC%88%E3%81%BB%...

In some cases though there is still a clear difference in pronunciation for most speakers, ex 塔 vs 遠


> 方 and 頬 (hou vs hoo) is a better example.

As a native Japanese speaker, this example is eye-opening. I hadn't even realized that the u in 方 is pronounced as /o:/ — I believe most Japanese people haven't either, despite unknowingly pronounce it that way.

Also, I have no idea how to Hepburn-romanize 方 vs 頬, 負う vs 王, and 塔 vs 遠. If I had to romanize, I would just write it as whatever the romaji input method understands correctly (hou/hoo, ou/ou, and tou/too, in this case).


Your comment is astonishing.

If you know the word 方, that it is /ho:/, and you know that it has a う in it when written out, how can you not know that う stands for making the o long? The only vowel is the long o.

Japanese kindergarten kids can recognize hiragana words with "おう", correctly identifying it as /o:/. By the time they learn the 方 kanji they would have seen it written in hiragana upmpteen times, like AよりBのほうがいい and whatnot.


Well, speaking for myself, I internalized how う is pronounced differently in different contexts when I was young, and by now I've almost forgotten there's a difference I need to be conscious of.

When I hear /ho:/ in a certain context, "ほう(方)" immediately comes to mind, without noticing that what I heard was a long o. To me it's just the う sound. And if someone pointed to their face while saying /ho:/, I'd think it's the お sound as in "ほお(頬)".


Because they're a native speaker. Native speakers are often utterly oblivious to the 'rules' of their own languages.

Every time I read a rule about my mother tongue (Mandarin) online I was like, lol what nonsense foreigners made up... And then I realize that rule does exist. I just have internalized it for so long.


A typical example for English is the adjective order.

Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be.

This. People act like it's a hyper-complicated rule that English speakers magically infer, when in reality, a) other languages do it, and b) it's a much simpler rule (that you've given) which someone overcomplicated.

As a counterexample (in line with your explanation), consider someone snarking on the WallStreetBets forum: "Come on, guys, this is supposed to be Wall Street bets, not Wall Street prudent hedges!" Adjective order changes because the intended significance changes. (Normally it would be "prudent Wall Street hedges".)

Side note: please don't nitpick about whether "Wall Street" is functionally an adjective here. The same thing would happen if the forum had been named "FinancialBets".


People "overcomplicate" the rule because they find counterexamples to the simple rule.

It's a fool's errand because the way human language works is that people happily accept odd exceptions by rote memory. So the rule simply says that there exist these exceptions. Also, there is something called euphony: speakers find utterances questionable if they are not in some canonical form they are used to hearing. For instance "black & white" is preferred over "white & black".

The rules boil down to "what people are used to hearing, regardless of the underlying grammar offering other possibilities".


Isn't this a bad example? There's only one adjective in "prudent hedges." Changing which noun "prudent" acts on isn't a matter of adjective order.

(I suppose Wall Street is a proper adjective, like "New York pizza," but you said no nitpicking)


In compound noun phrases, nouns serve as adjective-like modifiers.

By the way, modifying compounds generally must not be plurals, to the extent that even pluralia tantum words like scissors and pants get forced into a pseudo-singular form in order to serve as modifiers, giving us scissor lift and pant leg, which must not be scissors lift and pants leg.

An example of a noun phrase containing many modifying nouns is something like: law school entrance examination grading procedure workflow.

The order among modifying nouns is semantically critical and different from euphonic adjective order; examples in which modifying nouns are permuted, resulting in strange or nonsensical interpretations, or bad grammar, are not valid for demonstrating constraintsa mong the order of true adjectives which independently apply to their subject.

For instance, red, big house is strange and wants to be big, red house. The house is independently big and red.

This is not related to why entrance examination grading procedure cannot be changed to examination entrance grading procedure. The modifiers do not target the head, but each other. "entrance" applies to "examination", not to "procedure" or "grading".


Did you read the second sentence of that paragraph? The same thing would happen with a legit adjective, like if the forum had been named "FinancialBets": "Guys, this is financial bets, not financial prudent hedges."

Could you elaborate on the last sentence? Wiktionary claims they're pronounced the same modulo pitch accent, but Wiktionary's phonetic transcriptions are (mostly?) auto-generated AFAIK.

塔 can be pronounced as tou, too, or somewhere between the two. It depends on the speaker, speaking style, and possibly dialect. Either way, Japanese speakers rely more on context and pitch accent than actual pronunciation, so it communicates fine.

> 塔 can be pronounced as tou

No it can't, unless someone is spelling it out, or singing it in a song where it is given two notes, or just hyper-correcting their speech based on their knowledge of writing.

Annoyed speech and such can break words into their morae for empahsis, which breaks up dipthongs.

E.g. angry Japanese five-year-old:

ga kkō ni i ki ta ku nā i!!! (I don't wanna go to school!!!)

"nā i" is not the regular way of saying "nai". The idea that "nai" has that as an alternative pronunciation is a strawman.


You're right. I looked up 現代仮名遣いの告示 [0] for the first time, and it says 塔(とう) is officially pronounced as "too". I had it backwards - I thought that 塔 is "tou", but due to the varying sounds of う, people could (and often preferred to) pronounce it as "too" in everyday speech.

This kind of misconception seems not uncommon. There's an FAQ on NHK's website [1] that addresses the question of whether 言う(いう) is pronounced "iu" or "yuu". The answer is "yuu", and the article make it clear that: "It's not that [iu] is used for polite/careful speech and [yuu] for casual speech - there is no such distinction."

I think native speakers learn words by hearing them and seeing them written in hiragana, before learning the underlying rules, so they know "too" is written as とう, but might not realize that とう shouldn't be pronounced as "tou" or いう as "iu". These are at least less obvious than cases like は in こんにちは never being "ha".

Personally, if I heard someone say 塔 as "tou" or 言う as "iu", I probably wouldn't count it as incorrect, nor would I even notice the phonetic difference.

[0] https://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/sisaku/joho/joho/kiju...

[1] https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20160801_2.html


FWIW I think 言う is a different phenomenon entirely, because おう is pronounced as two vowels when it has grammatical meaning (in this case, as the verb ending), or between different words/morphemes. But my (non-native) understanding was that for nouns and such, or within the main morpheme of a verb (e.g. 葬る), “ou” is (usually) indistinguishable from “oo”.

> as tou, too, or somewhere between the two.

I see what you did there.


> 負う and 王 are both hepburn-romanized as ou though

No, it's ou vs ō.


Oh, I thought the added u and the bar were just two different ways to indicated that the o is stretched (the u looking like a workaround to avoid special characters).

Nope! Writing 王 as "ou" is "wāpuro rōmaji" or modified Hepburn. Proper Hepburn wants ō. Which cannot be used for 負う.

The interpretation is very off. You are way too focused on whether the first sentence is quote accurately. But

>Clearly, people did it for a long time, no problem.

In fact means Altman thinks the exact opposite of "he didn't know how anyone could raise a baby without using a chatbot" - what he means is that while it's not imaginable, people make do anyway, so clearly it very much is possible to raise kids without chatgpt.

What the gp did is the equivalent of someone saying "I don't believe this, but XYZ" and quoting them as simply saying they believe XYZ. People are eating it up though because it's a dig at someone they don't like.


I think what Altman defenders in this particular thread are failing to realise is that his real comment is already worthy of scrutiny and ridicule and it is dangerous.

Saying “no no, he didn’t mean everyone, he was only talking about himself” is not meaningfully better, he’s still encouraging everyone to do what he does and use ChatGPT to obsess about their newborn. It is enough of a representation of his own cluelessness (or greed, take your pick) to warrant criticism.


I agree I don't really think there's anything here besides compression algos being tested. At the very least, I'd need to see far far more evidence of filters being applied than what's been shared in the thread. But having worked at social media in the past I must correct you on one thing

>Automatically applying "flattery filters" to videos wouldn't significantly improve views, advertising revenue or cut costs.

You can't know this. Almost everything at YouTube is probably A/B tested heavily and many times you get very surprising results. Applying a filter could very well increase views and time spent on app enough to justify the cost.


Cloudflare and other cloud infra providers are only providing primitives to use, in this case WAF. They have target uptimes and it's never 100%. It's up to the people actually making end user services (like your medical devices) to judge whether that is enough and if not to design your service around it.

(and also, rolling your own version of WAF is probably not the right answer if you need better uptime. It's exceedingly unlikely a medical devices company will beat CF at this game.)


Besides the fact that this article is obviously AI generated (and not even well, why is there mismatches in british/american english? I can only assume that the few parts in british english are the human author's writing or edits), yes "overutilization" is not a real thing. There is a level of utilization at every price point. If something is "overutilizated" that actually means it's just being offered at a low price, which is good for consumers. It's a nice scare word though and there's endless appetite at the moment for ai-doomer articles.


Author here, I mix up American and British English all the time. It's pretty common for us Brits to do that imo.

See also how all (?) Brits pronounce Gen Z in the American way (ie zee, not zed).


Brit here… I say Gen Zed!


Sorry but it's highly suspect to be spelling the same word multiple different ways across paragraphs. You switch between using centre/center or utilization/utilisation? It is a very weird mistake to make for a human.


I mix British and American English all the time. Subconsciously I type in British English but since I work in American English, my spell checkers are usually configured for en-US and that usually means a weird mix of half and half by the time I've fixed the red squiggles I notice.


Yes exactly!


I dunno, I switch between grey and gray all the time; comes with having worked in so many different countries.


> why is there mismatches in british/american english

You sometimes see this with real live humans who have lived in multiple counties.


> You sometimes see this with real live humans who have lived in multiple counties.

Also very common with... most Canadians. We officially use an English closer to British English (Zed not zee, honour not honor) however geographically and culturally we're very close to the US.

At school you learn "X, Y, Zed". The toy you buy your toddler is made for the US and Canadian market and sings "X, Y, Zee" as does practically every show on TV. The dictionary says it's spelled "colour" but most of the books you read will spell it "color". Most people we communicate with are either from Canada or the US, so much of our personal communication is with US English.

But also there are a number of British shows that air here, so some particularly British phrases do sneak in to a lot of people's lexicon.

See a similar thing in the way we measure things.

We use celsius for temperature but most of our thermostats default to Fahrenheit and most cookbooks are primarily in imperial measures and units because they're from the US. The store sells everything in grams and kilograms, but most recipes are still in tablespoons/cups/etc.

Most things are sold in metric, but when you buy lumber it's sold in feet, and any construction site is going to be working primarily in feet and inches.

If anything I expect any AI-written content would be more consistent about this than I usually am.


For Canadian units I always like this handy flow chart: https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/d1hwpx/canad...


> multiple counties

Pay no attention to those fopheads from Kent. We speak proper British English here in Essex


I do this because I'm a non-native english speaker. My preference varies from word to word. I write color, but i also write aliminium.


> why is there mismatches in british/american english

Some people are not from usa or England.


One of my least favorite things to come from AI is labelling any writing someone doesn't like as "obviously AI generated". I've read 3 of these kinds of comments on HN just today.


As non native English speaker I mix British and American English all the time, and you should hear me speaking. I mix in some novel accent too. Anyway, the author answered in a sibling reply.


By this logic loss leaders to drive out competition are good gor the consumer, no?


To be honest it doesn't feel manually edited.

Bullet points hell, a table that feels it came straight out of grok.


They don't stream to your phone when taking a video or picture. The data is on device and transferred later. It also uses wifi direct not BLE. It seems many many people on HN have absolutely no clue how the meta glasses work lol, there's barely any accurate information in this thread.


Like I mentioned in the text, I haven't looked into Wi-Fi yet. The picture/video -> transfer through the app is correct, and why an alternative method for detecting actual recording is necessary, but I'd expect to see that most events like battery status updates would be over directed BLE, since the initial boot + battery status is broadcast. And likely BTC for streaming audio. I'm unfamiliar with Wi-Fi Direct specifically, are you familiar with the process of scanning for active Wi-Fi Direct services?


Sorry don't mean to demean your effort, I read the GH post and like the hacker spirit :D. It's the rest of the people in the HN comments with 0 clue.

I like my glasses and don't really agree with your goals (nor see the point of letting you know when someone's wearing them; in my city your device would be beeping constantly) so I'm not interested in helping unfortunately. But I do wish you luck, as I said I like the spirit.


It's truly astonishing to me that your account has existed since 2008 and you decided to pull this.

As a troll job for the lulz it is some amazing work. Hats off


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