Chinese population's 1.4B number has only been supported by the Chinese government. Many have suspected that it's now around 1.1B https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM57HhM8yV8, after covid deaths and overcounting by local governments. That's why the malls in Shanghai and Beijing are completely empty at this point.
NPR is funded by private donations too and doesn't do enough on-the-ground reporting. It would need significantly more funding to achieve this level of functionality.
> Humans are also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely that no one tries to figure out how the machines work across an entire population
Definitely agree with this. I do wonder if at some point, new technology will become sufficiently complex that the domain knowledge required to actually understand it end to end is too much for a human lifetime?
I'm curious - as someone who hasn't been paying super close attention to the space, what does it mean to be a full data platform? Is it just having all the different flavors of DB you might need all from one vendor, or is there also tighter integration than if you cobbled it together from multiple vendors?
Essentially, yes. Different DB’s, federated queries (aka delta sharing, zero copy), definition/semantic layer tools, data engineering/pipelines, model training and notebooks, governance, data lineage, row/column/whatever access control.
It’s basically a luxury minivan. It’s may not be the fastest or prettiest or cheapest, but it’s a safe way for a large family of “data and AI people” to traverse a large organisation.
More seriously, I like to call it an “analytics workbench” in a professional setting.
Rinse and repeat across hundreds of components and your team "pays for itself"
"We found $X cost savings" is the easiest path the promotion. It's measurable, cleanly attributable, and immediate, while the downsides are not. Maybe perform is bad bc they skimped on memory, or maybe it's because the software team sucks. Maybe it means future updates are hamstrung, but who cares the bonus checks cleared years ago. Besides, you probably got promoted to a bigger / better role by now, and who can remember who decided what when?
And with the help of software your get: this algorithm works well to recognize signs using 2 cameras. We can alter it a little to make it work with 1 camera (huge savings) and losing like 10% accuracy. With a cheaper camera we lose again some accuracy but even more savings.
Now you get a shitty feature for savings while the people who implemented it can go cry in a corner thinking about their good version.
The meaning of “antitrust” is very clearly defined. You’re allowed not to like it or to think that laws against it should be struck down, or whatever, but you can’t say it’s something it’s not.
Certainly, when a law that wasn’t applied begins to be applied again, I can see certain mental models taking issue with that. Regardless, the law and its historical application and consequences didn’t change, only a politically driven low enforcement period. That was the anomaly.
If you allow one company to achieve market dominance, it suffocates the ecosystem and stifles evolutionary growth pressures. It's concentrated malinvestment into a local maxima that salts the playing field so thoroughly that escape velocity is unattainable by anyone else.
There are models of this. And historical anecdotes and evidence.
Adding indexes to support a one off query seems like bad practice?
In general I prefer break out columns that I expect to have/use consistently, especially for something as stable as email headers. Maybe schema changes are a bit easier with a headers column, but imo its just trading the pain on write for pain on read (while leaving the door open to stuff failing silently).
What does this actually mean for customers? Is are we going to have to rebuild our Census syncs in Fivetran or will the product continue to run as-is? Will plans / pricing change?
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