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Human doctors are probabilistic systems.

With real consequences for mistakes, or at least a framework for accountability.

This type of naive response really is bothersome!

Humans are probabilistic systems?! You might want to inform the world's top neuroscientists and philosophers to down tools. They were STILL trying to figure this out but you've already solved it! Well done.


I run readlang.com as one person. I started it back in 2012 and it currently makes about 14K euros / month, with expenses of about 1.5K, so it's mostly profit.


Just use a VPN to pretend you're in the US and it works.


Same, along with the Tron soundtrack from Daft Punk.


Even if you don't feel like reading the whole article, do yourself a favor and skip down to the video of the final product at the very end. It's delightful and put a big smile on my face. The fact that all the modern technology is hidden inside leaving only the wooden structure visible makes it magical, like something from Harry Potter.


Insane! Bluetooth powered walking tables were admittedly not part of my 2024 bingo card. Love that thing.


In defense of your bingo skills, that table isn't exactly running on PoBT


Ha! I meant to write powered Bluetooth but I can’t edit it now


You mean Discworld!


Exactly! So reminiscent of "the luggage". Albeit with the legs facing sideways


> Even if you don't feel like reading the whole article, do yourself a favor and skip down to the video

No. Don't.

Read the whole damned article. It's _great!_


Here's the video link for those who want to see the final result up front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKDY4yWxfJM


I've got a bunch of scripts to handle my finances, both personal investments and to help with certain parts of my company tax reporting.

Among other things it uses ChatGPT to extract structured data from PDF invoices for reporting expenses.


I'm under the impression that this CPU is faster AND more efficient, so if you do equivalent tasks on the M4 vs an older processor, the M4 should be less power hungry, not more. Someone correct me if this is wrong!


It's more power efficient than the M3, sure, but surely it could've been even more power efficient if it had worse performance simply from having fewer transistors to switch? It would certainly be more environmentally friendly at the very least!


The most environmentally friendly thing to do is to keep your A12Z for as long as you can, ignoring the annual updates. And when the time comes that you must do a replacement, get the most up to date replacement that meets your needs. Change your mindset - you are not required to buy this one, or the next one.


Of course, I'm not buying this one or any other until something breaks. After all, my current A12Z is way too powerful for iPadOS. It just pains me to see amazing feats of hardware engineering like these iPads with M4 be completely squandered by a software stack which doesn't facilitate more demanding tasks than decoding video.

Millions of people will be buying these things regardless of what I'm doing.


Look at the efficiency cores. They are all you are looking for.


I agree!

So what are the performance cores doing there?


They are for those tasks, where you do need high performance. Where you would wait for your device instead. A few tasks require all cpu power you can get, so that is what the performance cores are for. But most of the time, it will consume a fraction of that power.


My whole point is that iPadOS is such that there's really nothing useful to do with that performance. No task an iPad can do requires CPU power (except for maybe playing games but that'll throttle the M4 to hell and back anyway).


Every time you perform complex computations on images or video, you need any bit of performance you can get.


No?


I'd been using 2 external displays with my macbook pro for the past few years. The most annoying thing for me was waking the mac from sleep and getting it to detect the two of them. Once they were both detected I honestly thought the experience was OK. But the dance I needed to do every time to detect was so frustrating that I recently replaced the two of them DELL's new 40 inch 5K ultra wide: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-40-curved-wu.... I'm very happy with it. For my (slightly aging) eyes the pixel density is great, there's lots of space, and the waking from sleep detection issue is finally gone.


Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.


Both of those examples started with laying off basically all of top management.

If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.

Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.


Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.


Maybe because most are on H-1B and thus have no other option than to sacrifice personal life to have a job and not be deported?


Twitter has lost 70% of its value since Elon took over.


Which it only had because Musk thrown out a number and people fought very very hard to make him stick to it. If he wasn't such a dumbass and forfeit due diligence, this wouldn't be the story.


Important business lessons from Twitter: try not to antagonize your biggest customers, because they might stop buying your products.

In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.


Another lesson: Don't ignore the users, as one of them may get angry enough to buy your company and fire you and most of your peers.


Another important lesson: do your DD when you buy a company


According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.


> According to rando analysts who don't have a stake.

Says another rando who doesn't have a stake.

It was starting to be sustainable: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

I don't know exactly what they did in 2020 to mess up their numbers, but 2017 - 2021 shows a company that was stabilizing at ok profit margins.


You state that as if your link does not substantiate what I said earlier. For the benefit of the people who don’t click on the link you cite, it simply proves as I said, that they never made an aggregate profit over their lifetime and you are linearly extrapolating the past (“starting to become…”) coming into the high interest rate environment where peers like $FB and $SNAP crashed and Twitter would surely have too.


> Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over.

Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.

> Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.

This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.


A very relatable story! Are you going to write follow-up posts with more details covering the rest of the journey with more of the ups and downs of running a tiny bootstrapped startup? I'd be interested in reading!


Yeah, a follow-up article is in the pipeline. I have had enough ups and downs to create multiple articles!


That would be a great series!


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