Bertrand Schmitt

@Jasonch14221644 @XPlaneOfficial 100%, performance is the biggest issue at this stage for X-Plane, specially for those of us in VR

@XPlaneOfficial At present, I feel that the biggest problem with Xp is frame rate optimization. My current graphics card is 4080S, but many airports cannot even reach a frame rate of 30. I hope the official can consider optimizing the frame rate in the future, such as supporting DLSS.

It’s roadmap time! With 12.2.0 nearly ready to wrap up, we're going to reveal the next 2 releases! Thank you all for the positive reception to 12.2.0, it seems you all enjoy the new cloud rendering! (And yes, there will be more updates on weather in future) The next update will be 12.2.1 - The Gateway Scenery Update. This will be a really short and minor update, and will include ✅ New scenery assets to use in WED ✅ A new heliport After that, will be 12.3.0 - The Weather Update. This will be our next major update and will include. ✅ Weather Radar ✅ WX/WXR API ✅ G1000 Synthetic Vision ✅ A330 Improvements ✅ ExVis Device Improvements ✅ A new enhanced airport Stay tuned for more info! Let's kickstart Summer off with some great flights! 🌞

@AndreasSteno Interesting reply on this exact topic x.com/NickTimiraos/s…

I am not sure that this has received enough attention yet. In case this happens, you don't own enough debasement-bets yet

@XPlaneOfficial Excellent, I remember there was a plan for performance improvements, is it still coming? Triple screen 4K (without 3 computers) and VR still get still very poor framerates, even on the most highend hardware you can get today...

It's out! X-Plane 12.2.0 beta is here, a major graphics-based update packed full with new features. Let's GO!!! 😎 ✅ Dark-cockpit fix ✅ All new cloud rendering/scattering ✅ New tone mapping ✅ Enhanced atmospheric rendering ✅ Stability updates. ✅ Enhancements to brakes, parking brakes & new chocks. ✅ ATC fixes ✅ Airport-specific ground texture enhancements ✅ New gateway cut. Blog post: x-plane.com/2025/04/whats-… Version Notes: x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-12-…

@XPlaneOfficial Please performance improvements for triple screens and VR!

It’s roadmap time! We’re loving the the positive reception to 12.1.4, and the 12.1.X updates – glad to see that everyone is enjoying them. The next update will be 12.2.0. This is a big one – we can’t wait to show what we’ve been cooking up. Some of the features that we’re targeting: ✅ Dark Cockpits will be addressed in this update ✅ Broad Lighting Improvements ✅ Cloud Improvements ✅ Stability Improvements Stay tuned! 🥳

@markankcorn @dhh Framework Desktop has to USB4 ports, compliant with Thunderbolt 4, so can go to 40gbps

@dhh The M4 Ultra will have 4x the memory bandwidth. This tops out at ~200gb/s and the two year old M2 Ultra is already 800gb/s. Cluster will be even more painful since the Macs use Thunderbolt 5 at 120 gbps while this new box stops at 5 gbps

Found my new PC 😍. Specs on the AMD Max+ 395 chip is insane. CPU is a close match for a M4 Pro (3K/20K Geekbench 6), but it can be configured with an insane 128GB of shared RAM for less than $2,000?! That would cost $4,800 and require a Mac Studio. Will be a beast for local AI!

@neilcybart @waitbutwhy My primary reason for not using much my AVP is the lack of comfort. Even 30 min is painful. Let alone 2 hours. In comparison, my Varjo VR4 is way more comfortable, and I will use it longer.

The solution for long-duration Apple Vision Pro usage won’t be that Edward scissorshands contraception on your head. Instead, it’s a smaller and lighter headset. The tech isn’t there yet, hence Apple’s focus on easy to wear hand bands good for up to 2 hours of usage or so at a time.

Allow me to explain this absurd thing on my head (made by a 3D printer, not Apple). I am possibly the only person on Earth who uses the Apple Vision Pro 20+ hours a week. As a writer, it's just such a MASSIVE upgrade to go from sitting in an office looking at a 32-inch monitor to sitting on a mountaintop, totally immersed and undistracted, looking at a 50-foot screen. There's just one problem: the idiotic way Apple designed their headset, all the weight sits your face. This is uncomfortable and was on the way to making me look 80 years old. My friend @jcoon1800, also appalled by Apple, designed a solution: a headset that redistributes the weight from the face to the top and back of the head. The headset is now not touching my face at all—it hovers a millimeter off the skin. This is WORLD'S more comfortable, causes no skin damage, and can be worn for hours with no issue—way better than even the lightest headsets I've worn. This isn't an ad and the headset isn't for sale. I just needed to say: The fact that one dude managed to figure this out and Apple somehow did not boggles my mind. @apple please talk to Jonathan and get your shit together. VR, even with a big heavy headset, does not have to be uncomfortable! It's all in the design. (@mkbhd get in touch, you need to try this.)

Glad to see the complexity of OpenAI offering is going to disappear

@yishan Great analogy!

I think the Deepseek moment is not really the Sputnik moment, but more like the Google moment. If anyone was around in ~2004, you'll know what I mean, but more on that later. I think everyone is over-rotated on this because Deepseek came out of China. Let me try to un-rotate you. Deepseek could have come out of some lab in the US Midwest. Like say some CS lab couldn't afford the latest nVidia chips and had to use older hardware, but they had a great algo and systems department, and they found a bunch of optimizations and trained a model for a few million dollars and lo, the model is roughly on par with o1. Look everyone, we found a new training method and we optimized a bunch of algorithms! Everyone is like OH WOW and starts trying the same thing. Great week for AI advancement! No need for US markets to lose a trillion in market cap. The tech world (and apparently Wall Street) is massively over-rotated on this because it came out of CHINA. I get it. After everyone has been sensitized over the H1BLM uproar, we are conditioned to think of OMG Immigrants China as some kind of Alien Other. As though the Alien-Other Chinese Researchers are doing something special that's out of reach and now China The Empire is somehow uniquely in possession of Super Efficient AI Power and the US companies can't compete. The subtext of "A New Fearsome Power Now Under The Command of the CCP" is what's driving the current sentiment, and it's not really valid. Like, no. These are guys basically working on the same problems we are in the US, and not only that, they wrote a paper about it and open-sourced their model! It is not actually some sort of tectonic geopolitical shift, it is just Some Nerds Over There saying "Hey we figured out some cool shit, here's how we did it, maybe you would like to check it out?" Sputnik showed that the Soviets could do something the US couldn't ("a new fearsome power"). They didn't subsequently publish all the technical details and half the blueprints. They only showed that it could be done. With Deepseek, if I recall correctly, a lab in Berkeley read their paper and duplicated the claimed results on a small scale within a day. That's why I say it's like the Google moment in 2004. Google filed its S-1 in 2004, and revealed to the world that they had built the largest supercomputer cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance-per-dollar point on the cost curve. This was in contrast to every other tech company, who at that time just bought what were essentially larger and larger mainframes, always at the most expensive leading edge of the cost curve. (To the young people reading this, this will sound incredible to you) I worked at PayPal at the time, and in order to keep pace with the rising transaction volume, the company was forced to buy bigger and bigger database servers from Oracle. We were totally Oracle's bitch. At one point when we ran into scalability issues, the Oracle reps told us we were their biggest installation so they had no other reference point on how to help us overcome our scalability issues. We literally resorted to flipping random config switches and rebooting it. (This heavily influenced me when I was a young manager later at Facebook. I deliberately torpedoed an Oracle salesman's pitch to try and get us to switch from open source MySQL databases to an Oracle contract: of course we had scalability problems, but at least when we had them, we could open up the hood and figure out how to fix it ... assuming we had good enough engineers, and we did. When it's closed-source infra, you're at the mercy of the vendor's support engineers) Back to Google - in their S-1, they described how they were able to leapfrog the scalability limits of mainframes and had been (for years!) running a far more massive networked supercomputer comprised of thousands of commodity machines at the optimal performance-per-dollar price point - i.e. not the more expensive leading edge - all knit together by fault-tolerant distributed algorithms written in-house. Some time later, Google published their MapReduce and BigTable papers, describing the algorithms they'd used to manage and control this massively more cost-effective and powerful supercomputer. Deepseek is MUCH more like the Google moment, because Google essentially described what it did and told everyone else how they could do it too. In Google's case, a fair bit of time elapsed between when they revealed to the world what they were doing and when they published a papers showing everyone how to do it. Deepseek, in contrast, published their paper alongside the model release. Now, I've also written about how I think this is also a demonstration of Deepseek's trajectory, but that's also no different from Google in ~2004 revealing what it was capable of. Competitors will still need to gear up and DO the thing, but they've moved the field forward. But it's not like Sputnik where the Soviets have developed technology unreachable to the US, it's more like Google saying, "Hey, we did this cool thing, here's how we did it." There is no reason to think nVidia and OAI and Meta and Microsoft and Google et al are dead. Sure, Deepseek is a new and formidable upstart, but doesn't that happen every week in the world of AI? I am sure that Sam and Zuck, backed by the power of Satya, can figure something out. Everyone is going to duplicate this feat in a few months and everything just got cheaper. The only real consequence is that AI utopia/doom is now closer than ever. ==== Bonus: This is also a little similar the Ethereum PoS moment, when AI finally has a counterpoint to the environmentalists who say AI uses so much electricity. We just brought down the cost of inference by 97%!

@sc_cath Also deepseek breakthrough optimizations benefit all AI Semiconductor companies, not just Nvidia

I'd love to see a proper IO analysis of the deepseek shock on Nvidia. What we learned, is that you can do much more with an Nvidia GPU than we thought. But it’s not immediately obvious that this is bad news for Nvidia. Imagine Nvidia had just announced that its next-generation chip would be 10 times more powerful and efficient than the previous one—would that be seen as bad news for the stock? Yes, achieving a given computational goal now requires fewer GPUs, but that perspective feels shortsighted. Lower costs—both in price and energy consumption—effectively expand the range of feasible applications, which should, in turn, increase demand. So why the sharp drop in Nvidia’s stock price? One key difference between a sudden leap in next-generation chip performance and the DeepSeek shock is that the latter retroactively upgrades the existing installed base of Nvidia GPUs, making them far more efficient than expected. In a sense, Nvidia is now competing against its own previously sold GPUs. The realization that these existing chips can deliver significantly greater output can be viewed as a massive positive supply shock—one coming from an unexpected "competitor." So maybe the overall effect on the company's value is ambiguous. Afterall, Nvidia, like any monopoly, must ration quantities to maximize profits.

Pretty good list!

Good to bring some realism to what it means to bring manufacturing back anywhere... these are some of the starting points to start to have a chance to compete against China in manufacturing. Anything less, and competing is delusional...

There are banking regulations and then there are banking "regulations". We live under the latter. An unconstitutional conjoining of state and private power. And, I believe, prosecutable. Conspiracy to deny rights with no due process.

Great read as usual from Benedict Evans

Sad truth about the state of Europe, and where it might end up if it keeps doing more of the same... the need for reform is dire

What Polymarket got Right that the Experts Got Wrong As the dust settles on the election, there’s a story that the WSJ and NYT didn’t tell you. While the mainstream news was busy with their TV pageantry and hedging on calling key swing states, Polymarket, the world’s biggest prediction market, had already delivered its verdict by midnight EST, declaring Trump was 97% likely to win. This was before the media called even a single swing state. All throughout this election, Polymarket was always one step ahead. I want to explain why this is, because judging from the Twitter responses I was getting last night, most people deeply misunderstand this. There are two fundamental things that Polymarket did better than the media. 1. Polymarket was more accurate on the forecast going into the election. Let’s take the pollsters and analysts. Election poll-based models claimed the race was a dead-even 50/50. Polymarket meanwhile was priced Trump with a distinct edge—going into the election, he was priced around 62% to win. If you remember, the mainstream media derided Polymarket for this difference. Polymarket should be the same as the modelers, they said! Obviously it means you can’t trust Polymarket. It’s priced differently because it’s a bunch of Trump-loving crypto bros. It’s invested by Peter Thiel. Only foreigners trade on it. It's unregulated, so it must be being manipulated. There's a whale pushing up the price of Trump. And on and on. Implicit in this dismissal is a deep distrust of markets. As though markets cannot be trusted unless affirmatively proven otherwise. And of course, if you actually trusted the markets, you might not trust the media anymore. And their whole business model is predicated on you distrusting anyone but them—why else would you continue to click on their never-ending stream of clickbait? But anyone with experience with markets knows: it doesn’t fucking matter if a market is composed of Republicans, or Democrats, or foreigners, or whatever. In reality, we know that JP Morgan was using Polymarket, as were some of the largest hedge funds in the world (most have non-US subsidiaries). It was integrated into Bloomberg Terminal, it was being quoted on CNN. And yet the media spoke of Polymarket as though it was 4chan. Understand, Polymarket traded $3.6 BILLION dollars on the presidential election. This was the largest election betting market by volume IN HISTORY and AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more than any other election market ever. There was more riding on this than any single modelers’ career prospects. Understand—markets work because of how much is riding on getting the answer right. These supposed biases—being Trump-aligned crypto-pilled non-Americans—didn’t skew the market’s accuracy. (It seems obvious in retrospect that being non-American might improve your ability to dispassionately predict an election.) But the identities of the bettors didn't matter. Prediction markets distill input from many diverse actors to produce prices that transcend biases. Markets don't care about ideology, they only care about being right. And as it turns out, Polymarket was more right than any pollster or modeler. Now, I want to be clear what I’m not saying: the difference between 60/40 and 50/50 sounds big, but it’s not. Elections are noisy. High school statistics will tell you that if you want to tell if a coin is rigged to be 60/40 rather than 50/50, you would need over 100 coin flips to have 90% certainty. The outcome of “Trump won this election” does not tell you whether the coin was 60/40 or 50/50. My point is not that Polymarket was right and the models were wrong. They actually didn't disagree with each other by much. I'm making a more subtle point: the market was consistently pricing Trump’s odds higher than the polls. Remember, the market knows what the polls and analysts are saying. Markets incorporate all existing information—but Polymarket disagreed with with the pollsters. The only explanation that analysts could come up with for this was: Polymarket is biased. They didn’t have the humility to imagine, maybe, just maybe, Polymarket knew something that was not being captured by the polls. Polling sucks. This is all well established now. In the pre-Internet era, polling was much more accurate. Landline poll response rates were often above 60%. Today, poll response rates are around 5%. This means pollsters are getting massive sampling biases, and there is no possible way to correct these biases without baking in clumsy statistical corrections. (Plus pollsters—who are ultimately selling a product and have reputations to keep up—frequently herd their estimates together to avoid being an outlier, which fucks up poll aggregation.) Plus, Trump is special. He is uniquely divisive in American politics. So for three elections in a row, we have seen massive polling errors that underestimated his support—the so called “Shy Trump Voter” effect. Polymarket presumably believed that the polls were missing this. The pollsters said, no: we’ve updated our models and corrected for it. Polymarket said: I don't buy it. Polymarket was right. Now, again! Polymarket did not say the election was 90% for Trump to win. 62% is not a sure thing, and elections are genuinely uncertain. But what irks me is that there was not even a tinge of curiosity from the media about the delta. Maybe Polymarket knows something we don’t? Maybe there’s information we’re missing that’s not being captured in the polls? Remember, Trump massively outperformed his polls all across the country, in both red states and blue ones. He sweeped every single swing state, and even won the popular vote—something most people thought impossible. Are you really so confident that there was no way to detect this—the sentiment of tens of millions of Americans—that didn’t involve the same old pollsters running the same old Internet surveys? This is what being a student of the markets teaches you. Markets are smart. But they don’t explain themselves—they just show you the outcome. That brings us to the second way that Polymarket outperformed the media. 2. Polymarket called the election in real-time, way before the media did. The inscrutability of markets came in full force on election night. Polymarket moved quickly and violently before a single swing state was ever called. According to Polymarket, the election was over by midnight, while the mainstream media was milking the drama until the election was officially called at 6AM the next morning. Why was this? First, Polymarket saw an important correlation that the mainstream media was not willing to explain to their viewers. You see, polling errors are seldom random; they are usually correlated across states. So when traders saw that Trump was massively outperforming his polls in states that were not themselves competitive—picking up huge vote share in NYC (cleanly blue) or Florida (cleanly red), this meant that there must be a massive polling miss across the country. Polymarket immediately picked up on this and realized that the swing states could not possibly be competitive anymore. Polymarket priced Trump to win Pennsylvania at 90% by 11:30PM, when only a small portion of the Pennsylvania vote had been counted. Prediction markets don’t wait for pageantry or pundits. It doesn’t care if it invalidates the sacred ritual of waiting for the votes to be counted. Remember in 2020 when Fox News called Arizona early (which turned out to be correct), viewers were outraged. Trump vowed to boycott the network over it. This reinforced the lesson—the networks must sit there and dutifully count up the votes. Don’t be too clever. But markets don’t care about drama. They only care about outcomes. Obviously, it would be incredibly difficult to explain to a CNN viewer that the election is over, the polling error in non-competitive states is too big, Kamala is doomed and you should go to sleep and not bother to wait for swing states. It goes against the narrative that the media has been reinforcing for months. The public wants simple, explainable stories, and everyone knows how the narrative is supposed to go—you wait for the swing states and until one of the little colored bars crosses the 270 line. At 12:51AM, the NYT was still showing this dramatic chart and headline. By then Polymarket already had Trump priced at 98% to win. So election watchers dutifully stayed up through the night so the media could complete its empty ritual of filling up the bars. Polymarket’s traders have no loyalty to narrative and no incentive to play up the drama for ratings—they just call it straight. @shayne_coplan, Polymarket’s founder, said that Trump’s campaign team was reading Polymarket to try to understand how to actually interpret the odds. The media even had the gall to complain that Trump was declaring victory when his electoral count was at 267—at that point, the Polymarket odds were so low that they registered as 100%. The beauty of markets is they respond instantly to new information. The fastest trader who incorporates the information gets a prize—profit. This is something traditional media fundamentally is not set up to do. They have to filter events through layers of interpretation, narrative making, and internal politics (recall Murdoch’s intercession into the 2020 Arizona call). The decentralized nature of Polymarket bypasses all this bullshit. It lets information flow without any interference. There is a lot to reflect on from last night. This election was a resounding reprimand of the Democratic party, a rejection of the expert class, and an immune response against an arrogant media. But for Polymarket, it was a night of pure vindication. For me, the lesson is this: the next time something important is going on in the world, skip the op eds and check the Polymarket odds.

Sundar Pichai said on the earnings call today that more than 25% of all new code at Google is now generated by AI.

Great news that #AI is not going to get over-regulated, and captured by special interests. If approved, it would have had a dramatically negative impact on California, and US leadership at large.

Insanely bad venture capital metrics in China... the future of startups and innovation in China is probably very dark, unless a dramatic turnaround in policy happens

Very good recommendations to improve business conditions in EU from @levelsio

Read my new article in @palladiummag Since the dawn of industrial civilization, men have believed that humanity is on the brink of running out of food and resources, causing mass death and the collapse of society. For centuries, they have been wrong. 1/ palladiummag.com/2024/08/16/the…