Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.
Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.
Read the linked issue. The bot did not find anything interesting. The issue has the solution spelled out and is intended only as a first issue for new contributors.
Pretty terrible for SpaceX. Of course they paid a crazy inflated price for xAI in an attempt to cash in on the IPO. This just devalues SpaceX and exposes the investors to all the AI bubble risk.
What an empty threat. Apple has 1/3 of the mobile market share in Europe and people here are not locked into the ecosystem, with 3P messaging apps like WhatsApp dominating communication. And they are trying to pull this BS at a time that they are facing ever stronger competition from foldable phones and their inability to do anything useful in AI.
I don't think that's misleading. There are a lot of people out there who aren't aware that free software exists that provides a lot of the functionality of software that costs $999. They clearly say "alternatives to".
I was trying to make a point about how funny the parent post was, saying it isn't misleading while misunderstanding it and thinking that it means "paid-for software that would have cost $5,000". But perhapes I didn't understand the comment itself.
I personally think the messaging is fine, but the above comment was a clear example that some people could get it wrong.
But gimp doesn't provide the functionality of software that costs $999. That's why it's misleading. It's probably more like Affinity Photo which is £68.
Whole Affinity pack is 10% of Photoshop while providing more functionality (just Affinity Designer handles vectors like Illustrator while edits pixels as well).
Gimp finally has non-destructive editing, so is almost in same category as those two. And Krita is good for pixels as well.
He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.
Just a guess, but I'd bet that Johnny Ive isn't exactly hurting for money. Still, the funny thing about paper money is if you have enough of it, and you're well connected (which, again, just guessing, but Johnny Ive might be) you can just borrow against it without having to make a sale or have liquid buyers. Just hope there's no margin call.
Your right it's all funny money until they are publicly traded but if they are successful it is still a ton of money. Johnny needs to feed a GulfStream - that isn't cheap;)
I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?
I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?
Worse than projecting one's values onto a rationalization of the new tariffs is to simply take the administration's rhetoric at face value. That other countries are "taking advantage of us" is just a talking point. We have to look at how the tariffs fit historical conservative programs. Republicans have long wished to replace our progressive income taxation with a flat tax system, but that's simply not achievable, even for Trump. Further decreasing tax rates from high earners and replacing revenue with tariffs to avoid the ballooning of the government debt, for which Trump was heavily criticized during the first term, may be the closest he can get to approximating flat taxation.
It’s even better, I was introduced to the term “narrative shopping” today.
> The second order effects are a much more fertile territory for narrative creation. That’s because, as with any other policy, the second order effects of tariffs don’t lend themselves to the same kind of certainty as first order effects. They involve people and how they will respond and act. Any argument in favor of tariffs can only live in the world of second order effects.
I don't take their explanation at face value. I think you very well could be right in your analysis here.
It is more interesting to me that actual targeting is based on trade imbalance. They could easily have used the same rhetoric and targeted the tariffs based on something else. I think the way they are targeted is sufficient to rule out a lot of explanations I have seen proposed like I mentioned above. What you are mentioning seems super plausible to me I just can't be sure yet.
You hit the nail on the head with the targeting. Trump has a long held obsession with tariffs based on an inability to understand that trade isn't a competition where if you buy more stuff you lose.
It's arguments about tariffs as a revenue source replacing other taxes which are ancillary ones thrown out to appeal to other vaguely Republican instincts. Obviously if the US actually wanted to use them as a revenue source they wouldn't set them at punitively high rates likely to simply eliminate trade, frame it as a battle to reduce import dependency or dangle the carrot of trade deals to anyone willing to bend the knee. Not to mention his rapid reverse ferret reframing it as focusing on China
That's my feeling too. The tariffs are just another variation for the plan to replace income tax with sales tax. You could argue tariffs are a little better because in theory they result in more jobs at home.
> You could argue tariffs are a little better because in theory they result in more jobs at home.
No serious person would argue this because it's ridiculous. Tariffs on components of finished items don't do anything to help manufacture those items. The only way to increase manufacturing with tariffs is to target them to very specific industries or segments of industries and use the proceeds to subsidize the industries you want to create.
Manufacturing just about anything at scale to make it affordable/desirable requires leveraging a deep efficient supply chain. Everything from raw material harvesting to manufacturing to warehousing to transport. It takes decades and a lot of investment and real estate.
Asinine tariffs won't do any of that. They're effectively just a regressive national sales tax.
Tariffs are also revenue. It just moves the revenue from income taxes, which can affect the rich if they have incompetent accountants, to consumption taxes, which affect predominantly the poors and middle class.
Tariffs are a tax levied on American consumers, not on foreign governments. Using them to decrease income taxes on the rich is something only an out-of-touch millionaire could dream up. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!
And the effect of consumption taxes is generally to reduce consumption. The economy is likely to shrink a bit as a result of these taxes. It's hard to see how that helps anything.
So, will Databricks deprioritize Delta Lake in favor or Iceberg, or will they try to derail Iceberg development now they they got the team that originally built it at Netflix?
Edit: from the Tabular CEO announcement
Databricks reached out to me and proposed a collaboration that could bring Iceberg and Delta closer together [...] I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Databricks and the broader Delta community to build better table formats together.
Doesn't it sound like they'll try and move the two formats closer together so that there isn't such a format war? IDK how it would benefit Databricks to ruin either format if they're now such huge stakeholders in them both.
Either way, I just want to know which format to pick. I've been chief data engineer at my current company for about a year and would like to be able to move off of plain parquet files in my lake but I'm not sure what table format to choose.
Hi, in case you did not find the answer yet. In my hamble opinion:
- choose Iceberg: If you have several computing/query engines other than Spark, like Presto, Flink. Iceberg has a great extraction and design for a engine-independent table format. But its learning cost is relative high
- choose Delta: If you only have Spark and would like to be deeply binded with Databricks
- choose Hudi: If you would like to use data lake out-of-the-box and it is quite easy to use.
- If your data is updated frequently, like streaming, check https://paimon.apache.org/ if you would like to be deeply binded with Flink
Thank you! Sounds like iceberg is the best then. I'm very allergic to lock-in. Currently we're very Spark heavy and our query engine is AWS Redshift Serverless. The recent AWS Glue Catalog support for Iceberg seems to make this promising.
At the Databricks Summit keynote this morning they pitched it as a way of trying to standardize and bridge across the two more easily, with neither going away.
