Even your description sounds like a startup, to me.
There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons funding in wartime).
Recruiting the top talent.
Urgency (beat everybody else to the punch).
Outsourcing the building of infrastructure while you focus on the unique/hard part.
I'm not seeing how you can't see the parallels with startups.
In that case any high-priority military intelligence project is "like a startup". Why say that it's run like a startup as opposed to just saying it was run like a high-priority military-intelligence project?
The GP suggested that a reason for the success of the Manhattan project was that it was run like a startup, whereas it seems more illuminating to point out that it was a massively funded military project in wartime. I was curious if there was some more specific rationale for the startup comparison
In a startup—especially one that is heavily funded, like a government—roadblocks that can be resolved by eliminating paperwork, cutting through bureaucracy, or simply by paying money, tend to disappear.
No serious person can argue this being plausible today. Sam Altman will drop 10B at a blink of an eye if it means unblocking a major problem for OpenAI.
The government spends 10x that all of the time without anything impressive to speak of since the moon landing.
I'm baffled, I must be misreading your comment. Are you saying the government is like a startup or just that's heavily funded startups are like the government because the government is also heavily funded?
It's also really odd to me that you claim Sam Altman can do more impressive things with 10 billion than some government. I mean, have you seen a public transit system? A sewer system? A dam? Sam Altman could hand code a true AGI tomorrow and people would still need to flush their poop.
It's also worth noting that without the government there is no economic system that allows for startup investments, nor does the USD really have any value.
I've tried to explain this a couple of times, but I keep falling back on the calculations used to show the problem (that it's not the numbers themselves, but the pattern). This comment nailed it with simply "It's that they're all round numbers". I've always been terrible at rephrasing things to make stronger points in a more concise way. Thanks! :D
It's more that if you start with those clean, single decimal percentages and a total number of votes, you'd end up with decimals for number of votes, which isn't possible. So if you then remove the decimal from the votes, you get slightly different percentage values when taken to 7 decimal places, but the original decimals would still be the same.
The chances of those numbers occurring normally for all 3 vote counts together is just ridiculously tiny.
I think you are correct, but that's missing the point of the article's content. I'm just a programmer, not a math expert, but I believe these statements are accurate.
1. It's very easy to arrive at the provided values, if you make up some percentages that only go to a single decimal value (1/10th). Though doing so would result in vote counts that are decimal, as well. Then if you just remove the decimal from those values, the given percentages don't change enough to be incorrect, but even when taken to 7 decimal places, the new values are pretty clearly due to the rounding (44.2%: 44.1999989%, 4.6%: 4.6000039%).
2. While yes, the chance of these vote counts coming up in this kind of pattern is similar to the example you provided, even if you were using 0-9 for your example of 6 values, the total combinations is about an order of magnitude less than the total vote count provided here.
3. The finer point made is that there's a very small chance for one of the vote counts to show up as a number that so nicely fits the single decimal percentage, but in this case, all 3 vote counts fit this pattern. The calculations are shown for just 2 of the candidates (so not including the "other") resulting only a 1 in 100 million chance.
I hear what you're saying and somewhat agree, but as with everything, I really don't think "it's that simple".
First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).
Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.
For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.
They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.
You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.
Strongly agree that it's not simple. I just like to take the contrarian view here, with everyone in this thread dunking on ads.
It's a very complicated trade off, and I'm not sure humanity understands it well enough to act optimally. But the ad based model sure as hell isn't all bad, like people in this thread make it out to be.
"Probably shouldn't have used N95 though"... gee, ya think? :P I would like to think that it's clear to everybody that they absolutely should not have claimed that it's even "N95 Grade", which clearly indicates that it's an approved as N95, but is roughly similar.
The actual stats are that it reached, at maximum, with the fan running, 86.3% filtration. That's almost 3x the amount of crap getting through than an actual N95 certified mask (without needing a fan).
How does this erode your confidence in the FTC? Maybe you missed the FTC report where they stated the maximum filtration they were able to reach was 86% and that was the maximum, with most tests hitting much lower.
Even calling the mask "N95 Grade", which is an obvious statement that it didn't pass actual testing, is a major problem. It's vague enough that most will believe that it is equivalent to one that has actually passed testing. When it's supposed to catch 95% and catches 10% less, that's _triple_ the amount of crap passing through.
If you read through the FTC documents, you can see that they (Razer) knew it would not pass and so went with the strategy of getting people to believe that it was the same, without any proof.
The FTC could not prevent them from releasing the product or immediately cause them to remove it from market as Razer did not claim that it was N95 certified. Razer knew exactly what they were doing in getting around this and now they're paying the price for doing so, while the FTC sets an example for others that "if you even imply that your product is equivalent to being certified, we'll pin you for it."
Is this simply because the bookmark manager linked (Floccus) is not available for Safari?
Or better yet, can you elaborate on how any of the content up the chain from your comment that shows why Safari shouldn't be considered a user friendly browser?
