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Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans


Trying to work out what's going on, and what happens next. Mostly tech.

382002 followers  •  1033 follow  •    •   https://t.co/vp0xj1bPG0

@jburnmurdoch Sure - the point is the real impact of the US SUV trend.

RT @clancynewyork : The architect of Suffolk County clerk’s IT environment delayed a key security upgrade that could have blocked the ranso…

RT @mattyglesias : When low-end housing is outlawed, people will sleep in tents in the park and we’ll debate whether it’s inhumane to make t…

@jburnmurdoch I.e. those giant SUVs are not as heavy or inefficient as one would guess, relative to the overall US car industry and its history

Uber Advertising is now at a $500m run-rate. Nice simple targeting and attribution model. Obviously, if you banned ‘targeted advertising’ then all those local restaurants would buy ads in newspapers instead. 😶

Talking to an LLM is like those games you play with a small child where you pretend to take everything they say literally. “Daddy, play football with me!” OK, lie on the floor and roll up into a ball…

I mean, this is sort of what I asked for… “five vintage adding machines stacked on top of each other with a raincoat draped around them and a fedora hat on top, photograph, Kodak ektachrome, 1970s”

@cosmoene I think prompts often make it much much harder to use something. This is why ‘prompt engineering’ exists. You have to know what you can ask for and how to ask for it

@colinalewis Yes, I was amazed by that - Julia normally seems a lot more sensible

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“I run the innovation lab. It’s like we’re a startup, but inside a big company.”

Image: the Pixar render farm in 1995. Half of an iPhone.

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SVB depositors withdrew $42bn on Thursday. Blockchain solves bank runs because it would take years to handle $42bn of transfers.

The global SMS system does around 20bn messages a day. WhatsApp is now doing 42bn. With 57 engineers.

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Substack 2021 gross revenue: $100m Onlyfans 2021 gross revenue: $4.8bn

If you say “Digital Transformation!” three times, a partner from Accenture will appear in a puff of smoke.

WHAT DO WE WANT? Natural language processing! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? Sorry, when do we want what?

Yesterday I had a fascinating conversation with some very nice people who genuinely thought ‘big tech’ took down Parler because people were using it to argue about the election. They hadn’t see any of this, from AWS’s filing. This is why they took down Parler.

Apple/Google partner on automatic, anonymised bluetooth-based contact tracing. Very clever.

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