>>pinko+R82
>>41304337 My first use of Walmart.com and I won’t be going back.

>>ssl-3+Rq2
I used to work at Starbucks in their corporate office building in South Downtown Seattle. The building used to be a Sears warehouse ago [1]. The walls next to the elevator in the ground floor still had printed some sort of "Sears customer contract". It had clauses like "you can return the merchandise if you are not satisfied with no questions asked. We will refund you for any shipping charges when returning merchandise". Or "if you cannot find it in our warehouse you can have delivered from our catalog to your home". These slogans reminded me of Amazon and their customer obsession.

Sears could have been Amazon if they kept their customer obsession.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears,_Roebuck_%26_Company_Mai...

and

https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm4RCM_Sears_Tower_Seatt...

>>dh2022+Ct3
> Care to give some examples

In the 2010s they were the leader in NLP and the precursor of LLMs like GPT3/3.5/4/4o

Machine Translation with Human Parity (2018) - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05567

MT-DNN (2019) - https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11504

MASS (2019) - https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02450

VALL-E (2023) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.02111

VALL-E 2 (2024) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05370

While OpenAI was the first to monetize an LLM at scale via ChatGPT, it's still the early stages of this field, and there is a lot of innovation that can still be leveraged, especially in non-English language modeling, machine translation, text-to-speech, etc.

It's in this segment that Microsoft Research shines moreso than even Google Research let alone other organizations because of their strong NLP background in Chinese (Microsoft Research Asia), South Asian languages (Microsoft Research India), Arabic (Microsoft Research's older work during the Iraq War), etc.

>>alephn+BR2
I agree there's a lot interesting and great about phone chips.

And there has been some progress getting some phones running real Linuxes, with upstream kernels & more regular userspaces. There's some cheating too, using hybrid Android drivers bent to be Linux-y.

But man it is so irritating to me that there's such tight controls on these chips in every way. So many seem to only be available for large devices makers. There seems to be very narrow segmentation. Ideally one would hope a small SBC with say a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 (SM7675-A), with a single X4 core, would be so interesting as a low cost small board. But instead of the most popular chips on the planet - cellphone chips - being everywhere, there's a whole market of extra special extra old-core embedded chips - the Allwinner and Rockchips and Broadcoms - providing an alternate. One would hope removing display, touchscreen, battery, and case could lower costs, but it's just not done. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21316/qualcomm-intros-snapdra...

And phones, man, so many are locked locked locked down. Many of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops are locked down - laptops - which can by design install no OS but windows. Highly restricted use seems normal in the ARM world, makes these so much less able to be enjoyed.

The other major downside to phones is they have enormously limited io. A single USB 3 port isn't the worst, but it's still a very narrow straw for something like a modern flash drive to squeeze it's data through. Hopefully, again, USB4 improves this, but ideally I'd love some PCIe connectivity and especially multi-port designs (Lenovo has a couple gaming phones with >1 port in some markets, way cool).

I agree with the excitement for mobile. But it's also a dark segment, a pinnacle of consumerdom & regression to the mean versus that brief great amazing age of Personal Computer compatible, which has spawned systems both small and massive and mighty, that we have been able to extend & use however we might imagine. Phones returned us to an age of control, where our species is impotent at using the tech we have all around us, phones are infernal devices trapping us, are the spiritual foe of human spirit.