Ostrogodsky

AWS

Yeah, 25th is the day to nurse the hangover

I am not being cynical either, but have you read this thread? Or any thread on books on this site? 90% are SF/fantasy or books about CS (90% written by American/British authors), most (not all) people in tech have very mediocre taste in literature and in non-fiction books outside of technology. You rarely would see here people recommending Orhan Pamuk,Javier Marias, Dino Buzzati,Amos Oz,WG Sebald or Naguib Mahfouz, just to give examples of very famous novelists totally ignored here. For every 100 mentions of total mediocrities like Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday or Simon Sinek you would be lucky to find 1 mention of people like Ha-Joon Chang,Leszek Kolakowski or Peter Sloterdijk.

Well, books do not have to have any meaning, just like paintings or songs, but in this case it helps a lot to be latin-american. Garcia Marquez used to say that the Caribbean is not a geographical region but a cultural one. It goes from the south of the US to the north of Brazil, with many cultural and historical elements in common.

This is a book about the Colombian Caribbean, but also the whole country and the region. At the end it is a book about life. I have always noticed that Anglo readers get too caught up on minor details (the number of Aurelianos, who did this or that) but that is missing the point, this is about the flow of life, the absurdity of human struggles, the magic and terror of being alive, love, senseless violence, hope, all of that expressed in a brilliant prose.

I could continue but this short youtube review has pretty animations and touches some other points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2zhLYz4pYo

> I have a sinking feeling that something horrible is going to hit China in, say, the next two-three decades.

Welcome to the club, have a seat: https://preview.redd.it/1fq4rrk5ih921.jpg?width=800&auto=web...

> , but I think the way they're structured once it starts to falter it's going to explode in a really unpleasant way. Like exceeding Mao-level deaths.

A wish is not an adecuate tool to forecast the future.

> The West is messier, in a lot of ways, but I think they're more fault-tolerant.

As shown by the COVID crisis

Great, high quality, intellectually estimulating conversation in this thread.

The brainwash the powerful social media companies have done to the masses in the last 10 years it is a thing of beauty. Criminal and immoral beauty.

Now supporting Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, behemoths which represent the excess of capitalism is considered hip, cool and progressive.

For me intelligent life should be from somewhat to very common across the universe.

Simplistically you would need:

A source of energy, aka a star, at the very least there are 10^22 of them

A rocky planet situated in the habitability zone of the star (and this is lacking the imagination for life in other kind of environments).These guys are common.

The creation of chemical self-replication with a stable set of compounds (The hardest part for me, but far from impossible)

The appearance of intelligence as an evolutionary trait (nature loves that explore/exploit game)

Time

We modern humans lived 99.7% of our 200k year history entirely unaware there were other people and land a mere "earth radius" away, we may as well repeat that story in a cosmic scale.

You raise good points but the following:

> It likely took billions of years for our planet to reach the right temperature and composition for life to form

.. is not true. As mentioned by Wikipedia below, life formed surprisingly "fast" and its earliest appearance is pushed back every year.

> The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years;[49][50][51] the earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago.[52][53][54] Some computer models suggest life began as early as 4.5 billion years ago.[4][5]

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms

This is the youtube generation. Entertainment, clicks and wow factor first (and money of course), facts a distant second.

Yes but that does not generate clicks,views and that sweet youtube money.Sorry but I cannot stand those kind of guys (he, Mark Robber and the likes). Khan academy is doing something 1000000 times more valuable.

step 138: npm run

Bummer. Long live his algebra.

Sad news. Weinberg was the kind of scientist I like the most: very important results in his career, deep love for what he did and an absolutely no non-sense attitude. It was pretty inspirational to see him always so lucid well into his 80s. Rest in peace professor.

Congrats! You are doing fantastic. Thousands of debbie downers here, pay absolutely no attention to them. Keep doing what you like, strengthen yourself physically and mentally and if you need to have a second job while you get your first break-away success so be it.

Just a small correction, "Yerba mate" is not the "coffee of south-america" Coffee is the coffee of south america,i.e. by far is a more popular drink. Mate is huge in Argentina/Uruguay and perhaps Paraguay , only regionally in Brazil and very niche everywhere else in the region. Coffee is as popular as it can be everywhere else in the world where the drink is liked.

Yes, I am old enough to remember how we were all sold the promise of the "information superhighway", a bright future of a fully open, inclusive network where people would share knowledge freely in an instant. Every passing year the Internet has become:

- More censored.

- More commercialized.

- Less open, more walled-gardened.

- More banal (For example, academics used to write long Usenet posts, then they started to write blogs, now they mostly bicker on twitter)

- Less sincere and personal, now people mostly use it as just another PR tool.If you dont conform, you will be cancelled, downvoted,banned, etc.

Now, before someone comes to accuse me of "Old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds syndrome", I fully accept that in absolute terms we have more good things now, but the signal/noise ratio is also a very important thing, or as papa Stalin used to say: "Quantity has a quality on its own" , for every thoughtful post,blog,site we are drowned in thousands of crappy sites and it is not always very easy to distinguish them, because it is the sad reality that quality publications will little by little become crap just to survive or fit-in.

> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket.

Running mainly a few apps/websites tightly controlled by a few companies strongly incentivised (by greed and their governments) to keep a tight leash in the type of content that can be consumed AND created. I think Orwell and Huxley foresaw many of these perfectly clear even before the term "cold war" existed.

So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage because you are stating you are not screening for it for FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.

What is your point? You are not comparing against the general population to see if there is a difference.

Also from the study:

> Such a low vaccine efficiency against infection by the Gamma variant was not expected because in vitro studies have shown a similar reduction of neutralization for Beta or Gamma variants by BNT162b2-elicited antibodies (5) and a conserved CD4+ T-cell response against spike proteins from the Beta variant (6).

So, no, this was not "business as usual", in fact the results are so shocking that the investigators wrote:

> Given the surprisingly high attack rate, we hypothesized potential dysfunctions of conservation or administration of vaccines, but the absence of traceable cold-chain interruption and the use of different batches seemed to refute this hypothesis.

So the study so far suggests that the Pfizer vaccines may well have an actual low effectivenes rate against this virus variant.

I suppose those miners are strong healthy men, wouldnt we expect the same results if they were exposed to the virus while being not-vaccinated?

> In other words, this case study is a relatively ordinary result in line with what we know: that the major COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance of severe illness but leave nontrivial chance of infection and transmission.

I dont think this particular case is a proof of your claim at all.

I am sorry but nothing about your posts give me any re-assurance. From your username (What is next?, John-Facebook and Louis-Microsoft?, that is idea for you budding SF writers, usual surnames will be replaced by corporation names) to the the condescension you have treat outsiders in the comments.

The article makes lots of very good points. QC is in a hype stage, it does not mean that there is no valid research or actual physical machines doing "computing" with a "small" number of bits, it means that the distance between what it is promised now explicitly or implicitly and what it can be achieved realistically from now to the next 20 years is so huge that it can easily be considered a lie.

Current QCs are only good for one thing and one thing only: "Simulating" quantum systems. But in that same sense, a wind-tunnel is a fantastic "fluid-dynamics" computer providing a "realistic simulation" of how wind flows through a wing. Nobody is solving any actual optimization problems with a QC in any meaningful sense and even less there is even 1 single problem in OR that can be actually solved now only by using a QC.

BTW the company you work for has a long history of making grandiose claims which are later totally refuted forcing you to backtrack, as anyone who has read Scott Aaronson's blog knows.

They "exists" in the same sense a hydraulic computer exists because I plumbed 5 valves at my house.

I am not sure if you are arguing if that is how it is or how it should be.

Maybe I am getting this wrong but that is not the opposite.

I think OP said: An UK citizen can be extradicted from the UK to the US just by having done a thing that it is illegal in the US but not in the UK.

You said: An US citizen can be charged in the US if he committed a crime abroad even if that thing is not typified as illegal in the US.

Wake me up when an US citizen is extradicted to the UK because he did something perfectly legal in Washington but which is considered a crime in London.

He has a lot of red-flags:

- Bringing over and over again that "he was an official of the US army"

- the "you didnt reject me, I reject you" spiel, although this part was hilarious to be fair,for being so childish.

- The part when "he bit his tongue" before answering to the kid. What does he think he had to answer?

- The "one person Christian company" thing

And I got bored, he sounds like a "Prima-Donna" too. The post is an exquisite example of projecting in action.

The book looks pretty great!,pretty much in spirit to what I wanted. It is very slim but it has a big bibliography so it is perfect as an initial roadmap.

Thanks. Ok, hear me out because here it comes naive time. GPU demand will continue to grow exponentially in this decade (VR, Crypto or whatever remains from it,ML,Data Eng,Steam Deck, Laptops etc)Wouldnt it be possible for some multi-country/university/companies to create a totally open GPU specification ? That has happened already? I understand we are talking about a long time of research effort and billions $$ but I think the benefits for all would be incredible. Open hardware, open libraries, open drivers. Imagine a world with no Linux, a totally closed x86 fully owned by IBM, closed webGL. Where can I read more about efforts in this direction if they exist?

Thank you, I will check them out. I remember having read an article by the smart young lady, I didnt understand half of it, hopefully I will get more this time..

Somewhat related I hope. Does anyone know a resource guide to learn methodically about GPUs? Let me see if I can explain my frustrations:

1. The usual recommended books for beginners, although good miss what I need, yes I love building ray-tracers and rasterizers but I can finish the book and not have the slightest idea about how a GPU actually works

2. Books like H&P although excellent, treat GPUs as an after-thought in 1 extra chapter, and even the content is like 5-10 years behind.

3. The GPU gems series are too advanced for me, I get lost pretty quickly and quit in frustration

4. Nvidia, AMD resources are 50% advertising, 50% hype and proprietary jargon.

I suppose what I want does not exist, I want a guide that starting from a somewhat basic level (let's say assuming the reader took an undergraduate course in comp architecture) methodically explains how the GPU evolved into a complete separate type of computing architecture, how it works in the nitty gritty details, and how it is been used in different applications (graphics,ML,data processing, etc)

I would only say that coming from a poor third world country too I am a little less gullible, or using the more PC term my degree of belief stretches a lot when reading posts like these.People in western rich countries trust more, that can be a blessing or a sin.

> Commercial software engineering is a creative endeavor; it is not a science,

And do you think Science it is not a creative endeavor? I know that you are coming from the "art/science dichotomy" where the terms are used metaphorically, to me it is an useless distinction still.

> nor is it a manufacturing process?

Why not? Software production IS a manufacturing process.