erwan

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Uber's new shuttle service sounds a lot like a bus route

Just because it's not a completely new concept doesn't mean it's stupid.

It can bring value even if it's a small iterative innovation over existing buses.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand

The population in rural areas is so low that no matter how you induce demand, it won't work.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in RIP Twitter Dot Com: Elon Musk Moves Social Network to X Web Address

Let's call people who grow up with X the "X gen".

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in RIP Twitter Dot Com: Elon Musk Moves Social Network to X Web Address

Yes, I mean how many companies get their brand turned into a verb?

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in "I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded

We kinda started already, Mars is inhabited by robots already.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in "I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded

OK, generative AI isn't machine learning.

But to get back to what AI is, the definition has been moving forever as AI becomes "just software" when it becomes ubiquitous. People were shocked that machines could calculate, then that they can play chess better than humans, then that they can read handwriting...

The first mistake have been to invent the term to start with, as it implies thinking machine but they're not.

Or as Dijkstra puts it: "asking whether a machine can think is as dumb as asking if a submarine can swim".

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand

Obviously if the pods take 2h to arrive it's not worth it

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand

OK, it's 2pm. With this system, you call a pod and ride it. With a rural train, you check the schedule and see that the next train is at 5pm. And you have to plan your trip back as well. Great, time to take your car.

And you might say "let's have trains run at least once per hour then". That means running empty trains all day, not sure it's the best way to spend public money.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand

Trains suck if you don't have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in “Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups

It's weird that backups got deleted immediately. I would imagine they get marked for deletion but really deleted something like a month later to prevent this kind of issue.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Opinion | Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype?

It might not be fake but companies built on top of the OpenAI API don't bring significant value and won't last.

If you already have a solid product and want to add some AI capabilities, the the OpenAI API is great. If it's your only value proposition, not so much.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in How Airbnb accidentally screwed the US housing market and made $100 billion

It started this way tho, people renting a room or a couch in their home. Pretty quickly it became either full units or rooms in a share appartement with other AirBnB guests.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in iPad Pro with M4 chip boasts impressive performance jump compared to just-released M3 MacBook Air

The performances is not inherent to ARM, x86 can definitely catch up to this.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Or simply squish them like they were rubber instead of destroying them.

erwan , 1 month ago to Technology in This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn | TechCrunch

That's the crux of the problem: they'll make it so you can't (as for any other celebrity) but there is a high risk that the safeguards can be circumvented.