JSON is one of the most succinct formats that you can use to express an arbitrary data shape of hashes, arrays, and primitives. It is highly useful and covers 99% of cases.
You really can't see the parallels? An aggressive, unilateral land invasion of an Eastern European country? Really, zero parallels there? OK! Doesn't seem like you're debating in good faith but that tends to be the case with Russia sympthasizers.
In any case you've seized upon this point so you could (weakly) invoke Godwin's law and failed to address any of the other points I made, which stand regardless of any comparison to WW2. But again, I prefer debating those who do so in good faith and at least take it as a premise of their arguments that 1) Western, liberal democracy, though imperfect, is better than other forms of government, and way better than the rule-by-mafia that exists in Russia 2) it is better for more countries to be liberal democracies than for fewer to be, and if Russia's invasion of Ukraine succeeds, fewer will be
It seems like you don't accept those points so there's very little for us to discuss
And that is a gigantic cop-out that indicates you can't defend your position. Surely there must be a corollary to Godwin's law for the inablity to defend yourself to comparisons with WW2 when it's the best example available?
I had a falling out with the primary account I cared about on Twitter and saw it as an opportunity to make a clean break from the platform. I have re-opened Threads and followed a significant chunk of the same people
I used to follow on Twitter. It took blocking a large number of the spam, marketing and porn accounts that were showing up, but now my Threads feed is clean and virtually indistinguishable from my former Twitter feed. Got to give props to Zuck - he may somehow end up acquiring Twitter’s user base for the low, low price of $0, or however much it took to build Threads. And without having to acquire Twitter.
Of course Russia doesn’t want NATO expansion! It makes us (NATO. Yes, "us.") stronger and them weaker. It is manifestly opposed to their stated interests of encroaching on territories they wrongly view as theirs. That's precisely why NATO needs to expand. So, naturally, we shouldn’t ever do what our adversary wants us to not do, right?
I would have loved to see the consequences if this kind of attitude had ultimately prevailed in WW2. Was the allied fortification of Britain a provocation too? If it was, was it not a necessary one?
It’s been my impression that Nintendo wouldn’t go for this unless coerced or without any better options to stay soluble. We are talking about two diametrically opposed visions of what video games should be, just like Apple and Microsoft had two diametrically opposed visions of what PCs should be. Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would be a lot like Microsoft acquiring Apple - a hell-frozen-over moment that, should it have happened, meant things had gone totally sideways for Nintendo.
This is nonsense. Companies may be saying that because it’s the official line but they simply don’t have the power to force the people they need back to the office. Workers aren’t going for it and companies who offer remote now have a competitive advantage in the labor market. Companies have been pushing for RTO but unwillling to let talented engineers who work remote go, because they are important and have a large reserve of domain knowledge. When those talented engineers begin looking for work again, what do you think they’ll prioritize? Flexibility and remote work. In-person work may have a resurgence for a little bit but over time it will erode and eventually remote work will be the norm.
Don’t pick ‘trending’ - pick something that’s been around for 30 years and growing the entire time. JS and Python check those boxes but also ‘boring’ languages like Java. The best thing about Java is that companies find it solid and predictable, making them more likely to
choose it for the long term - and it also connects you to an ecosystem of similar, ‘sexier’ languages that run on the JVM - like Kotlin
This is a common misunderstanding. The main mechanism for self-correction in science isn't about replicating or refuting findings. It's about which science survives to become the basis of other science. If a finding does not bear out, it simply will not become the basis for subsequent science. It's similar to natural selection.
The so-called "replication crisis" is overblown.
If LK-99 fails to be a useful material, it's interesting life will be over very shortly. If it is useful (and even if it's not the promised room-temperature superconductor, but useful in some other aspect), it will continue on in science, in technology - everywhere it might be useful for further investigation.
I think almost more offensively, is the concession that he did Nobel-level work but was ‘No Einstein.’ We are talking about the smallest fraction of individuals who are capable of insight in physics at that level, and I can’t help but think that it’s only chance that separates them.
Very good point - a huge chunk of the slowdown also comes from all the work around ensuring operational excellence. Monitoring, dashboards, testing, logging, CI. It's an incredible amount of labor to create production quality software on a continuous basis.
It often strikes me as difficult to fathom that it took only a couple engineers a few months to build the MVP of the company I work for - that has since grown to be a global, publicly traded corporation with many thousands of employees - but it somehow takes thousands of engineers multiple years to, in effect, build it again. In fact, it makes no sense whatsoever to me and can only be explained by how much time is thrown away, day after day, with all the busy work involved in prioritizing and coordinating their activity, and by the possibility that an awful lot of us are not contributing anything whatsoever. Is this incredibly wasteful utilization of labor really be the best way to do things? I cannot accept that it is. The coordination tax is simply too high. If people were just permitted to focus on something, anything, I feel the velocity of the entire organization would lift.
It seems like a lot of writing, including this, that might otherwise aspire to ‘solve the hard problem of consciousness’ instead attempts to explain why experience is needed, or how it came to be advantageous and evolve, and not how it is possible at all. It therefore sheds very little or no light at all on consciousness. Any attempt to ‘solve’ the hard problem of consciousness that doesn’t explain how conscious experience is possible at all is a failed attempt. And explaining how it is possible at all would need to refer to some mechanism by which matter (or some other thing) can experience anything and not just be experienced. Nobody in the physical sciences or philosophy has truly attempted this because the answer may in fact live at some epistemological boundary that we can't access in part due to our own subjectivity. I still hold hope that some future experiment (i.e. a discovery of a real and verifiable ability to transfer consciousness) can shed some light on this fundamental mystery, but it may very well be impossible. In the meantime, I am not sure that speculation of the kind that exists in this article is of any use at all.
When you say oversmart are you taking about people who believe they are very smart or people who are actually very smart?
Your ‘no experience’ comment makes it seem like the former. And if they are not actually smart, you can probably demonstrate their ineptitude through simple dialog and insightful problem-solving, assuming you are smarter than them.
Also I’m not sure I see a huge distinction between intelligence and experience in this industry. People who are ‘smart’ but don’t have experience tend to do really stupid things like trying to reinvent things that already exist in a better form, or design and code whole products built around a bad design, thus burying their teams in technical debt. And that’s not very smart - that’s stupid on a lot of different levels.
Why is this the top story? This is a major foot gun. Don’t write business logic in the database. You may think you are simplifying things but in fact you are making them more complex.
Instead adopt a solution for structuring your business logic in a sane way, such as using a workflow engine. Your code will become simpler and well organized that way without creating a tangled web of distributed rules, as well as exist all in one place.
What's easier - managing cloud costs or managing a datacenter or co-located physical hardware and setting up and maintaining all the functionality you need to do proper CI / deployments / monitor uptime / data analytics?
Love the idea that a bunch of managers who failed to control their cloud spend are now blaming the cloud for their failure to control costs. The problem isn't the cloud it's that they are just wantonly spending money without the proper controls / cost containment. In 5 years once they've figured out to do that properly they'll be migrating stuff back to the cloud, because all they are doing by migrating out of the cloud is converting the cloud spend costs into paying for more personnel to manage or develop features they would otherwise get for free in the cloud.
This has gotta be one of the dumbest, most self-negating arguments I’ve seen so far. ‘I asked Nature to request that Shi publish several SARS-related coronavirus sequences that had been reported in the journal. Within days, she provided them. The result: no smoking gun; they were all much more distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13.’ Let me get this straight - you are asking a scientist with the most to lose from this potential debacle to hand over evidence of her own central involvement and then using that to refute the lab leak? I’m just boggled by how naive some of these supposedly intelligent scientists are. If you are going to prove or disprove the lab leak hypothesis you cannot rely on evidence provided by the lab because the lab and the government that runs it have a massive conflict of interest with respect to this issue. They may well be telling the truth, but you have to find that out through evidence that wasn’t provided to you by them. Duh.
It’s like asking a suspect to hand over the murder weapon. Don’t be surprised when what they give you implicates someone else.
Either I'm confused or the article is. Article seems to keep relating higher complexity to higher organization. But higher complexity is tied to higher entropy and disorganization, not higher organization. Generally, more complexity equals more entropy and less organization. Outside of certain possible exceptions like life (which still obeys it through waste product), is this not true?
It certainly seems to be that way in code, anyway.
Doesn't just stopping using version ranges also help with this? I've never understood why people would allow a package manager to update a piece of their code for them automatically. Using specifiers like ^1.5.3, allowing package manager to go all the way up to version 1.999 automagically is just asking for trouble.
Find a set of versions that is self-compatible and works, and pin all your versions to those specific versions, with a hash if possible. Upgrade on your schedule, not someone else's. Thoughts?
should GPT be putting a signature into any text it produces, a kind of watermark or attestation? it could be even embedded in the characters themselves. Obviously not foolproof as you can simply remove it but for those who forget it would be an instant tell that some or all of a text came from AI. conversely human authors could put an attestation of human origin into any text. then text missing the attestation
becomes suspect.
I think it does the opposite of not inspiring confidence. A good leader knows when they’re facing a tough problem that they don’t have all the answers for and they need help solving it. Reaching out for that help rather than trying to muddle through on your own could be the difference between success and a disaster. Not sure Larry and Sergei are the ones to give it but it doesn’t hurt to have them involved.
starship is too whiz bang and not casual and cool enough.
i suspect once space travel is common and every day enough it will become mundane to talk about it and at that point an improper noun like ‘can’ will become commonplace. i figure this will happen 2 to 3 decades from now
George Hotz is exactly the kind of cowboy programmer that drives me up a wall. I encounter them in my company all the time. Due to some early success ( or even not ) a Self-absorbed, know-it-all who can produce gobs of code in the mold of a so-called ‘10x programmer’ and then move onto something else, leaving an unsupportable mess in their wake. It’s usually someone who likes to be seen programming rather than actually taking the time to build something for the long term. This is an attitude we should be actively trying to discourage.