The entire article talks about “guessing” the bucket name as being the attack enabler, not the leaking of it. What does the landscape look like once you start doing the basics like hashing your bucket names? Is this still a problem worth engineering for?
This seems like a really poorly thought out article. You should take more care on making sure your understanding is correct before publishing in the future.
Taking the Amazon example in Part 2:
For e-books (simpler), Amazon gets 30% for running the store, doing advertising, etc. and then authors get 70% [1].
For print books, I'm a little less clear but it appears Amazon buys the books for roughly 50% of list[2] which for Hachette in 2025 is $26.50 so Amazon pays $13.25 to the publisher and then Amazon retails the book for $14.84. So for $100 of books sold on Amazon, $89 goes to the publisher and $11 goes to Amazon. It appears that the cost to produce these books is maybe $2/book (though I'm very unsure on this, this is a guesstimate from public data) and then the rest flows back to authors, advances, etc.
Amazon.com (not AWS) has a 7% profit margin in North America (FY25), so of that $11 they get in revenue they get $0.77 in operating profit.
Ok and this also annoyed me: you say $1.7T/y is $10.5k/worker, which is accurate. but then you say for the average household it's $26k/y. This is not true. There are 134m households in the US [3] so it's $12.6k/y for the average household. Maybe you meant something else like the median household but it seems more likely you just said ~2.6 people/household and multiplied the number of people/household by cost/worker. This is obviously wrong and you should have caught errors like that earlier.
I think Cosmo's refutations were mostly not very useful and based on misunderstandings of what I was trying to say. This is fine and we discussed it prior to their article being published.
The point I was trying to make with "RL is only necessary once" is that you can embark on a single self-play loop getting better and better, and this will get you to something close to the frontier. Once you're at the frontier, the frontier doesn't move very much, so you have quite a while (decade?) where it's totally fine to distill from the RL games.
On correction histories -- imo I correctly described what they do. Cosmo was annoyed by the word "adapt" but what I described was the adaptation.
On SPSA -- you don't have a gradient! you don't do backprop! this is what i was trying to get at.
Iceland is a tiny country with unusual amounts of energy. Not all renewable sources are the same -- hydropower is fairly reliable too, for example -- but Iceland is just not a useful example for the whole world. The largest geothermal plant in the world by far is in California, but it's a small portion of our total energy use so no one cares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
You can locate an aluminum plant pretty much anywhere you want, as the energy required to make aluminum is large compared to the cost of mining/shipping bauxite. This solves the main problem with geothermal, which is that it's in random locations around the world that don't necessarily have many people living there.
Any place with significant volcanic activity (e.g. Hawaii) could probably do geothermal power if they wanted to.
Hawaii did do geothermal, but in fact it's so geothermically active their main geothermal plant went offline for a while because lava got shot up their boreholes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture
I'm not really sure but my recollection from talking to them in 2019 was that it was quite difficult to get features shipped because of e.g. hacking risk.
It's certainly true that iOS's strict sandboxing and aggressive resource management probably made life harder for them, but that doesn't excuse the lack of deep integration for 1p automation. That's the kind of stuff AppleScript allowed two decades prior without any background runtime.
taking into account all the impacts on society, uber is a substantial improvement on what came before. sometimes laws are bad and it is good when you break them
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