Honestly, I feel like the criticism is missing some key points. Sam and the other founders are creators who've put a ton of work and resources into Nebula. They've made awesome original content like Jetlag and have invested heavily to support other creators on the platform. Nebula gives budgets for creators to produce their own shows, and they get a share of the revenue from subscribers they bring in—I wouldn't be surprised if they earn from views too. So saying it's misleading doesn't sit right with me. Creators on Nebula definitely get a bigger piece of the pie compared to other platforms. It might not be a perfect co-op, but it's way more creator-friendly than most out there.
It /is/ misleading to say or imply that it is a co-op, though. It isn’t. It may be a progressive company which provides very favourable terms to creators, but it isn’t a co-op.
Yeah, I see your point—it might be misleading to label Nebula as a co-op since it technically isn't one. But I think what's important is how much Nebula does to empower creators compared to other platforms. The founders are creators who've invested a lot to make it a place where content makers get more support and a bigger share of the revenue. Even if it's not a co-op, it still feels like a step in the right direction for giving creators more control and benefits than they'd get elsewhere.
Fully agree that it’s a step in the right direction. The thing that gives me pause is essentially ‘if they want to be a co-op, why aren’t they just a co-op’?
I appreciate that in a full co-op dilution is a concern if they need external investors (e.g., Curiosity Stream) but you could have a structure with 50% co-op ownership and 50% capital ownership, so dilution as the platform expands would only affect the other co-operative owners.
None of what you say is being debated. What is being debated is the fact that they market themselves as a creator-owned co-op (which is incorrect and borderline fraudulent).
This is great to see. Evals on voice are hard - we only have evals on text based prompting, but it doesn't fully capture everything. Excited to give this a try.
> Researchers inside the AI unit have told colleagues they’re proud of their advances on Gemini, such as its “context window,” the amount of information the system can analyze at once. This is particularly useful to a company whose enormous amount of data is one of its key competitive advantages.
what does a large context window have anything to do with google's data moat?
I suppose superficially, for retrieval augmented generation use cases, the more data you have (and the better you are at retrieval), the more useful extra space in the context window is because you put things from retrieval into the context of the model to do the generation. That said, literally everyone has more than enough data to completely dwarf the context window of any of the existing models so it seems true but irrelevant.
One thing about gemini that may be a benefit here is not just the size of the window, but the fact that the context window seems to be better utilised by the model. GPT-4 seems to have a characteristic where the start and end of the context window are much more important to the model than anything in the middle, meaning that if you stuff the window with retrieved data, things in the middle of the context get ignored by the model. Istr that is not the case with gemini, which takes more notice of things in the middle of the window. Maybe attention is all you need.[1]
Target has 250k SKUs total - why is their inventory system so complicated? Why the hybrid on-prem store + data center cloud model - isn’t it easier if there is one source of truth? Seems like it would reduce the need for even dealing with all this eventually consistence cache sycning and whatnot
I ofc don’t know what I dont know, but super curious if anyone has insight into why such a complex system is required
Also, if this microservice is used for brick and mortgage mortar, can’t imagine more than a couple hundred per second? ( 2000 stores, 5 registers a store - and humans manually scanning items ) - why did that overload the micro service (guessing it wasn’t an endless exponential backoff)
> I ofc don’t know what I dont know, but super curious if anyone has insight into why such a complex system is required
Because it's much more efficient, which allows them to use simpler tech that doesn't need to scale as well.
You are also underestimated the throughput the system needs to handle. 2000 stores * 10 registers per store * 1000 scans per register per hour = 5000 scans per second.
I’m not sure the throughput is that high - scans take quiet a bit of time, I would doubt that a register scans an item every 3.6 seconds - don’t have data on this but would easily triple that estimate as an average (so in the hundreds)
Also , I get the simpler tech, but complexity breeds failure - if you have a hybrid on prem / cloud model, especially with only 250k skus, at that point doesn’t it make sense to keep that exclusively in the cloud.
It’s a system that scans a barcode and returns an item at its core - this is still well under the limits of using an off the shelf system like Redis behind an endpoint
"I would doubt that a register scans an item every 3.6 seconds"
Indeed, that sounds WAY too slow for me - traffic like this is bursty. Ever try to scan five of the same thing at some self check out registers? On some it's instantaneous (an awesome customer experience) on others there are one second or more delays (horrible customer experience).
Latency = friction and friction is the ultimate deal killer.
Not being able to check out customers is a really bad customer experience. It's a double whammy of wasting their time and they don't even get what they needed so it's worth investing to make that less likely. Things are probably better now but when I worked at a Sears our network connection to HQ wasn't reliable enough to depend on completely for checkout operations.
Just had to call out a nuance here - Disorder is an extremely strong word. People living with ASD are not "weird" or "abnormal" in anyway whatsoever, they are just different. As a society, we accept people's genetically predetermined sexual orientation, regardless of whether it represents the majority. ASD is no different, lets avoid calling it a disorder.
Disorder is a medical term that means an illness that disrupts normal physical or mental functions. This describes autism but not homosexuality (which, I was not aware, has now been declared to be of entirely genetic basis?)
Even if they were to both fit the definition, I’m not sure what the objection to the word is.
To slap down my lived experience: gay and on the spectrum.
And the spectrum part is definitely a disorder. It’s a deep-down and profound inability to connect. We are a fundamentally social species, to a fundamental inability to get socialization at a visceral level is pretty disordered.
