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They could always satisfy that with an iPad or tablet? Also, I think it matters where your rear pillars are on if you need a backup camera or not, older cars have much bigger back windows but are more likely to kill you in a roll over.

“a small experiment on select Shorts, using traditional machine learning to clarify, reduce noise and improve overall video clarity—similar to what modern smartphones do when shooting video.”

It looks like quality cleanup, but I can’t imagine many creators aren’t using decent camera tech and editing software for shorts.


Well yes, that's what I mean, quality cleanup is not what I'd call a compression algorithm.

And as you say, arbitrarily applying quality cleanup is making assumptions of the quality and creative intent of the submitted videos. It would be one thing if creators were uploading raw camera frames to YouTube (which is what smartphone camera apps are receiving as input when shooting video), but applying that to videos that have already been edited/processed and vetted for release is stepping over a line to me. At the very least it should be opt-in (ideally with creators having the ability to preview the output before accepting to publish it).


I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.

They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.

To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.


they’ve been partnering with nvidia to build large ML training clusters iirc last time i was in their building at a meetup a few weeks ago

AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?

I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.

I can’t tell if he is just good at self promotion or he is just good. But that’s always the case at bigcorp.

Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance

> This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs.

Most human beings, if they see a dog that has 5 legs, will quickly think they are hallucinating and the dog really only has 4 legs, unless the fifth leg is really really obvious. It is weird how humans are biased like that:

1. You can look directly at something and not see it because your attention is focused elsewhere (on the expected four legs).

2. Our pre-existing knowledge (dogs have four legs) influences how we interpret visual information from the bottom-up.

3. Our brain actively filters out "unimportant" details that don't align with our expectations or the main "figure" of the dog.

Attention should fix this however, like if you ask the AI to count the number of legs the dog has specifically, it shouldn't go nuts.

A straight up "dumber" computer algorithm that isn't trained extensively on real and realistic image data is going to get this right more often than a transformer that was.


> It is weird how humans are biased like that.

We're all just pattern matching machines and we humans are very good at it.

So much so that we have the sayings - you can't teach an old dog... and a specialist in their field only sees hammer => nails.

Evolution anyone?


Yes, its all evolution. 5 legged dogs aren't very common, so we don't specifically look for them. Like we aren't looking for humans with six fingers.

I get it, the litmus test of parent is to show that the AI is smarter than a human, not as smart as a human. Can the AI recognize details that are difficult for normal people to see even though the AI has been trained on normal data like the humans have been.


> It is weird how humans are biased like that.

We are able to cleanly separate facts from non-facts (for the most part). This is what LLM are trying to replicate now.


I think the LLM is just trying to be useful, not omniscient. Binary thinkers are probably not going to be able to appreciate the difference, however.

If you want the AI to identify a dog, we are done. If you want the AI to identify subtle differences from reality, then you are going to have to use a different technique.


A lot of debt also arises because of savings needs. If everyone is saving for retirement, for example, that savings has to be debt marked somewhere else. Examples:

* Social security used to have a huge surplus, that was savings that had to go somewhere (even if it was just a savings account in a bank, the bank would then be able to lend it out). They instead buy treasuries and that savings becomes debt to the USG.

* China likewise needs to save dollars because it doesn't want them sloshing around in their economy leading to inflation, so instead of using it to buy things they buy treasuries, and their savings becomes debt to the USG (not always a great deal for China if interest rates are below inflation).

The dollar has been so useful in the past as a currency of trade because you could save large amounts of it easily by buying US treasuries. One reason China doesn't want the RMB to be used so heavily for trade is that they don't want to do the same yet.


China is focusing heavily on AI applications. They have basically decided already to deal with their coming demographic bust with robuts/AI rather than immigration. Its not even about military applications, the US is just afraid that China will shoot so far ahead of us economically that they won't have any leverage over it in the future at all.

There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.

Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.)

I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something.

But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?

This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S.

Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now?

Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.


> I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China

What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.


> contain statistics on how that implementation is going

Are those statistics reliable?

In the US there are often good alternative sources for data: the discussions about unemployment numbers have been interesting (e.g. after private ADP numbers released). https://seekingalpha.com/article/4850656-jobs-data-from-alte...

The lies in the Soviet 5 year production stats were relentlessly mocked in 1984.


They’re the most reliable source we’re going to get without being party insiders. There’s still Soviet-style inflation of figures to meet quotas but China has been cracking down on that for the last few decades because they want accurate data for the five year plans. I think it’s more of a problem with outer provinces, less so for the major manufacturing hubs.

Alternative sources to verify are a bit harder to find without knowing the languages (lots of the NRDC and NBS stats are available in English).


> Are those statistics reliable?

Yes, people also compare some of these statistics with export/import data and with data from other countries on the other side of these transactions, and the numbers match.


You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source. But yes, they have energy, no they don't have oil, yes they have lots of agriculture land, no they messed up some of their environment and that will take time to heal, yes they are working on it.

> But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?

China wants to be a rich country even if their population stabilizes at only 900 million people or so. Mostly they want to avoid the middle income trap, which would have been a problem regardless of their demographics falling off a cliff. Automation is the best way to get around it, and they have enough tech, production know how and capacity, and smart people to pull that off.

China is going to continue doing what is best for it, and they haven't gone stupid like the USA has. Embracing AI for productive uses rather than just fixating on the slop produced is one place where they are racing past the west.


There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.

I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did.

Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.


> There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.

Isn't this simply the answer?

That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to?

This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology.

When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...


I never considered buying a BMW before they put out an EV (the i4, not the i3). One of the reasons is maintenance, the EV still needs some, but much less than an ICE.

I'm about to change the transmission fluid in my i3.

It's at 100k miles and there's no user-facing documentation for the procedure, as the oil lasts "for the lifetime of the vehicle".

Turns out, this particular procedure is simple.

(Other common wear items, like the suspension damper boots, or the engine mount, or the AC compressor, or a set of tires every 12000 miles ... it adds up.

The i3 was a cheap acquisition. Doesn't drive like a BMW, but apparently it wears like one.)


I heard that the i3 has some horror stories if you got the hybrid (basically a diesel engine that can produce electricity to charge your battery) or your battery had issues out of warranty. Not really sure though, everyone I've met who owns one really likes it still in 2025.

I had the i3 with the upgraded headlights. Left blinker stopped working one day. Well, turns out before the upgraded headlights that would have been a quick easy bulb change. After it require replacing the entire headlight unit, a $800 part plus labor.

I decided to wait and see if I could find some other way, and in the meantime the car got hit while I was driving in a round-about. Moved the car several meters, but hardly any visible marks. The repair company wanted to fix the paint and get a new rim for the rear tire, but when I told them the car had been thrown a few meters they had a closer look and found a crack in the carbon fiber frame. And with that the car was totalled.

On the bright side, glad I hadn't just forked out the $1200 or so for a new headlight unit...


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