A pesar de los increíbles dispositivos que había en la exclusiva conferencia tecnológica MARS de Amazon, este microprocesador especializado en inteligencia artificial fue el que acaparó todas las miradas. Descubra por qué el hardware de este tipo está empezando a ser tan importante
Source: MIT
Hicieron falta casi 1.500 horas para imprimir todas las piezas que lucieron estas cinco estrellas en la cena del pasado lunes. El de la modelo Jourdan Dunn pesaba casi 14 kilos y costó más de 2.500 euros, lo que demuestra por qué seguimos sigue sin haber ropa impresa en 3D en nuestros armarios
Source: MIT
WIRED asked the agency’s former disguise chief to analyze the spy tactics on film and television. Here’s her critique.
Source: Wired
The company has launched new privacy settings, but the various toggles and dashboards require a lot of user interaction.
Source: Wired
The move could be seen as a big middle finger to Michigan lawmakers that have blocked Tesla’s efforts to sell cars in that state.
Source: CNET
HBO has been releasing little glimpses of its adaptation of the classic graphic novel “Watchmen,” but now we’ve got a full teaser trailer.
“Watchmen” has already been turned into a big-budget film by director Zack Snyder. While the movie wasn’t a complete disaster, the results were still disappointing, since the original graphic novel (written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons) routinely appears on lists of the best comics of all time.
One of the main problems with the movie, at least in my view, is that Moore and Gibbons’ story is so perfectly suited to the comics format that any adaptation is going to feel like a step down. Perhaps “Watchmen” TV creator Damon Lindelof felt something similar, since he said last year that the comics “will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted” on the show.
Instead, he suggested that the series would treat the comics as “our Old Testament” and tell new stories about what comes after.
While the teaser mostly sticks to cryptic, ominous imagery, that does seem to be approach here — depicting a world where costumed vigilantes have been part of American history for decades, and where the catastrophic events that ended “Watchmen” are just part of the backstory.
By the way, Lindelof’s involvement is what makes me excited for the show. While he’s best-known for co-creating “Lost,” his most recent project was “The Leftovers,” which I’d argue is itself a contender for greatest television show of all time. So even though I’m not convinced the world really needed another version of “Watchmen,” I’m very interested to see what Lindelof does.
Source: TechCrunch
One hundred and fifty years before John Nash received his Nobel prize, a train left Versailles for Paris. On board were two brothers returning home from visiting friends. Always a pleasant journey through the French countryside, this one was, unfortunately, in peril. The train crashed and one of the two brothers, Joseph, was severely injured with a broken bone and other fractures. Joseph Bertrand on that day was 20 years old and was already a professor of mathematics with a doctorate he received at the age of 17 for a thesis in thermodynamics.
Joseph later would challenge another French mathematician Antoine Augustin Cournot, reworking an economic situation in which two companies dominate a market, formally known as the Bertrand duopoly. He proposed that in a state of duopoly, whereby players offer a non-differentiated product and are not in cooperation, their customers buy from whichever one sells it for cheaper. The Bertrand duopoly is a harsh situation where prices eventually converge to costs making it economically impossible for its players to exist in the long run. It was a time when only profitable companies existed.
Bertrand’s work was one of the foundations upon which John Nash would later build. Where Bertrand defined a cutthroat competition, Nash recognized that competitors don’t always know what the other’s cost structure is or what they would do in response to one’s actions, therefore keep making tactical decisions in their businesses resulting in certain payoffs. He stated that there exists a profile of strategies such that each competitor’s strategy is an optimal response to the other’s, there is a point of balance in which neither competitor has anything to gain by changing strategies. That point is called the “Nash Equilibrium.”
John Nash shared the Nobel prize in 1994 with another brilliant mind: John Harsanyi. Harsanyi examined the uncertainty around each party’s knowledge and understanding of the other’s decisions and how beliefs can be embedded into a framework of game theory. These games are called games of incomplete information. Harsanyi said that the payoff structures are not always known and come with a certain probability distribution so one should take probability into account when making a tactical economic move and calculating the results.
From Bertrand to Nash to Harsanyi, many companies have struggled with competition, conditions of duopoly, price pressures and survival. Some survived, some did not. Others reached a profitable state of Nash equilibrium and still exist to this day.
Fast-forward to today… here comes Uber and Lyft.
Consider a hypothetical situation where Lyft runs a promo in a specific market. Doing so will impact Lyft’s market share, total revenue, and overall profits. It will also impact Uber’s market share and total revenue in that market, but not profit per ride because they have not yet responded to the move by adjusting their price. The same situation applies to Lyft if Uber runs a promo. They will choose to respond or not respond based on their beliefs of the payoff they will receive. They will keep playing this game until they conclude there’s nothing to gain by offering more promos at which point, they will have reached Nash equilibrium.
Harsanyi’s work is quite relevant here because the two companies have a reasonably good idea about the outcome of each action and each other’s costs but do not precisely know what they were, and they compete with a certain level of belief about each other’s preferences and payoffs. Based on their beliefs, each company will have to assign a certain level of probability to the outcomes of their actions and the responses of their competitor.
We must also note that in the very beginning, competitors know less about each other, but the longer they play the game, the more they will learn and make adjustments to their moves. Going public brings more transparency about each company so with that they will learn even more. The more each competitor will know about each other the more informed their decisions and responses will be so the rideshare game should ultimately reach Nash equilibrium.
So, which one will prevail? At this point, there are a number of questions one must ask as an investor. Are Uber and Lyft in Nash equilibrium today? If they are in Nash equilibrium, and we know that this state means they’re losing money every day, they will ultimately deplete all reserves. If not, what would that final state of equilibrium be? Would it be a profitable state for these companies and their investors? In a state of Nash equilibrium, what price would each company charge their customers in a given market?
Secondly, do Uber and Lyft exist in a Bertrand duopoly? Their products are identical. One driver can drive for both companies in the same car and they often do. Bertrand would be baffled at how fierce this competition is. In his mind, price wars would end when price equals cost leaving no profit for either party or no economic interest to continue their businesses. In this case, these companies convinced investors to raise massive levels of outside capital so that they can afford to charge prices below their cost, operating at deficits hoping they would beat the competition and at some point, reach profitability.
There are two things companies can do to escape Bertrand duopoly: either come up with a lower cost structure or differentiate the product. If one can come up with a lower cost structure, such asdriverless cars, and the other does not, that one wins. If one introduces a new product, such as bikes or scooters and breaks into a brand-new market, they escape Bertrand and gain an edge. But as long as the companies maintain a status of non-differentiated products, according to Bertrand, customers would go with the cheaper of the two, prices would go lower, drivers earn less, and economic benefits erode.
Bertrand assumed a very commoditized world and did not take into consideration the softer elements of competition. In the absence of cost-cutting solutions such as driverless cars, attributes such as “company culture” come into play. If two companies charge the same price, would consumers split 50-50 like Bertrand said, or would they pick the company they think is “nicer?” Or, what is the premium or discount attributable to “niceness” of companies?
In the war between Uber and Lyft, or in any other duopoly, the ability of companies to make calculated decisions at times of competition remains a vital piece of the puzzle. The strategy comes in two steps. First, all decisions must be made at optimal levels reaching a state of Nash equilibrium. At this point, there are no further decisions to make that’ll provide an additional economic benefit to either party. Once that’s done, then differentiation efforts begin so that the parties may escape Bertrand. And those happen on two fronts: cost and product differentiation. It’s certainly a complex task and both companies have smart teams in place to make the calculations. It will be exciting to watch the battles in the years to come.
(If you’re an investor, would it make sense to invest in both companies in a Bertrand duopoly? Perhaps that’s like betting on both black and red in a game of roulette. Remember, if the ball lands on zero, both bets lose!)
Disclaimer: Venture Science is a Lyft investor.
Source: TechCrunch
How will the island change after the volcano?
Source: CNET
Two years ago, Apple changed the way its app store ratings worked by allowing developers to decide whether or not their ratings would be reset with their latest app update — a feature that Apple suggests should be used sparingly. Today, Google announced it’s making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work, too. But instead of giving developers the choice of when ratings will reset, it will begin to weight app ratings to favor those from more recent releases.
“You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree,” said Milena Nikolic, an Engineering Director leading Google Play Console, who detailed the changes at the Google I/O Developer conference today.
She explained that, soon, the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play. Instead of a lifetime cumulative value, the app’s average rating will be recalculated to “give more weight” to the most recent users ratings.
With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app — meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating.
“It will better reflect all your hard work and improvements,” touted Nikolic, of the updated ratings.
On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps which have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline.
It’s unclear how much the change will more broadly impact Google Play Store SEO, where today app search results are returned based on a combination of factors, including app names, descriptions, keywords, downloads, reviews and ratings, among other factors.
The updated app ratings was one of numerous Google Play changes announced today, along with the public launch of dynamic delivery features, new APIs, refreshed Google Play Console data, custom listings, and even “suggested replies” — like those found in Gmail, but for responding to Play Store user reviews.
End users of the Google Play Store won’t see the new, recalculated rating until August, but developers can preview their new rating today in their Play Store Console.
Source: TechCrunch
Google tells app developers to make their requests for location information understandable to users.
Source: CNET