You should ask BigCo if they're only providing goods/services to their customers "for the money."

If they are not doing just for money. Surely you should be able to give very good discounts to customer. After all why are profits aka. money needed?

He did so well with Theranos

Have always been fascinated with Paul Ewald's arguments (as laid out in his books The New Germ Theory of Disease and Evolution of Infectious Disease) that most chronic illnesses are due to pathogens.

Interesting, I'm noticing this pattern too more and more. The classic case was of course stomach ulcers. Now cardiovascular. Wouldn't be surprised if at least some neuro-degnerative diseases are also possibly caused by infections

Now we're seeing more colon cancer in young people. All of the discussion is around factors that change slowly (diet, alcohol, exercise), no one I've heard has pointed out that a pathogen would explain a quick change.

This seems similar to the "let's just rebuild from scratch" impulse that has been tried so many times on very large complicated systems and often, although not always, fails.

Anyone have examples of companies that were in trouble and cut employees and spending heavily and that led them back to success?

My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.

Intel is absolutely in a death spiral. Not much else to say. They are cutting cost with no real plan on growth if they are saying they won't invest in the foundry anymore. Foundry was a solid play by Pat, really their only play. Instead Intel seems set to lose whatever remaining relevance they have to their Arm, TSM, Nvidia, and AMD competitors which have a lead in both design and manufacturing a decade in the making.

Apple but only because of Steve

Most big companies has done that at some point, why would it lead to a death spiral? Death spiral happens when you cut too late, so you are forced to cut but you are still running a deficit and just has to cut and cut and cut without thinking.

I'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral.

I'm arguing that if you're on a downward trajectory and your primary strategy is layoffs and cutting expenses, rather than investing, you're not going to recover.

The emphasis on PDFs for RAG seems like something out of the 1990s. Are there any good frameworks for using RAG if your company doesn't go around creating documents left and right?

After all, the documents/emails/presentations will cover the most common use cases. But we have databases that have all the questions the RAG might be asked, far more answers than that which live in documents.

That's because PDFs are the hard part. If you're starting with small pieces of text, RAG becomes much much easier.

My question is less about PDFs and more about the notion that all the facts needed for the RAG are in documents. In my experience just a fraction of the questions that might be useful exist in a document somewhere. There must be a variation of RAGs that are pulling not from documents, but from databases using some semantic model.

Sure, but the process for this is laughably easy: you render the text with a minimum amount of text to place it into context, and submit that to whatever your embedding-maker is to get the embedding. You could potentially store the embedding in the same DB row if you have a DB that's happy with vector searches.

How do you know you're actually getting what you bought?

Quantum entanglement

Police in my city go to pretty much every protest and take video and photos (with big zoom lens) from the roofs of nearby buildings. It's always surprising to me that more people don't notice.

I am pretty sure this would be a crime in my home country. There are court cases cementing that anything except superficial photography/filming by law enforcement lacks any kind of support in law. There are even laws restricting use of photography in situations when exercising any coercive measures ("tvångsåtgärd").

The USA is pretty behind in personal rights. Americans love to shout about freedom but don't realize how many rights we don't have that other countries do. Especially after 9-11 when we signed away a ton of rights.

I'd say we're not too far away from par for the course, Western nations-wise, when it comes to civil liberties. At least for now. There are still things that you can do in the US (particularly related to speech) that are very different in Europe, for better or worse. Actually here of late it's been worse more than it's been better, but alas.

It's the whole "freedom to fail only applying to the layperson" thing that we're behind on.

EDIT:

Western nations/Common Law countries, I should specify.

You're conflating outright fraud with a difference of scientific opinion?

To be fair, it looks like there was fraud in the Italy case - just of the builders not the scientists.

The issue isn't whether someone else had a contrary opinion: the issue is that (just going by the linked reports) Bernardo De Bernardinis came out from the meeting with the scientists and informed the public that there was "no danger". Now, either the scientists felt that this was a reasonable summary of what they had said, or they didn't: either of those is bad, in different ways.