I’ve never drank. Half a glass of what I was told was a really good champagne at my wedding 27 years ago. That’s it. It was a conscious decision at first, based on alcohol problems of a family member, then a habit. I’m pretty sure my non-existent social life/skills are at least partly attributable to this. Without something to relax my continuously racing brain (never diagnosed, won’t bother now), I’m probably pretty tedious company and there’s a limited time in your life to build a social network. I don’t complain, as there’s a ton of time that’s freed up when you simply don’t go anywhere and I’ve made good use of it. But I do miss the long glorious conversations straddling both the intellectual and the profane between a group of smart relaxed individuals who, for the moment, have forgotten the world and it’s problems.
The search function has also become patently unusable. I was looking for a specific bike widget. No luck, doesn’t exist according to Google search and Gemini. Fine. Unlikely, but fine. And then, there it was, a week later. I just stumbled upon this thing randomly. The product had the right keywords and everything.
Very well done, OP! Lots of reflection, methodical approach, practical design. I’ve also gotten back to making physical things recently. I did not recognize the feeling at first, but soon realized I’m looking forward to getting back to building that shed. Have not felt that for a while about coding or other work. One advice I have is not to skimp on tools. I had some old wired tools that were OK. On a whim invested into a good Makita impact drill and it’s just another level. Got a circular saw as well and few other bits: having proper tools makes this so much more enjoyable. It doesn’t have to make financial sense, DIY is mostly about enjoyment. So why don’t I make sure I enjoy it?
Same. It’s a tiring exercise keeping up with what is going on in Giant Steps. I marvel at the intricacies I can’t mostly even begin to understand but it doesn’t speak to me musically the way eg Watercolors or Kind of Blue or Take Five does.
Lemmy. The man, the myth, the legend. Like with Ozzy, there was no stage persona. I’ve met him on a street the day after the gig looking exactly as he did on stage the day before. If you listen to stories about him, you’ll find the obligatory drinking and excess. Sure. But immediately after you’ll find a lonely man who deeply cared about his team, who was probably too smart for the business and who added warmth to even simple human interaction. Ozzy was the same and it’s no coincidence his most vulnerable songs were written by Lemmy. Having met both, I miss them in this world.
Thinking and writing are complementary processes. If you write things where you don’t have to think, let the AI do the typing. No harm done. But any writing, where you actively think while you type not about what the next word should be but about the entire topic, so it yourself. Otherwise you’re not thinking and that’s pretty much the only value-add that’s left.
I have removed a person from a project. Doing their share of work, paying them exactly as agreed. Because they decided to have Claude write 10 pages of feedback on about 5 pages of content I created even after I asked them for clarification. If anyone uses AI in communication, fine. If people think an LLM can express their thoughts better, than they can, ok. No problem. But if I wanted to talk to computers all day long I can already do that. I’ve been doing it close to 40 years now. The reason I work in a team is so I get to connect to actual human beings. Live people, warts and all. If I can’t get that, why would I bother? Again: I have plenty to do talking to computers.
The author does not emphasize a significant reason why this is. In Russian Orthodox belief, there is no purgatory. This is one of the key reasons they consider the catholic heretical. In their belief system, the suffering, that’s supposed to clean us of our sin, happens while we live and not afterwards. Suffering in itself is good for the soul. This is why there’s a saying in Russian about violent husbands: “beats, that means he loves”. Not beating my wife was considered amazingly progressive by my Russian relatives 20 years ago. And this is also why they don’t care about their fallen soldiers or treat GULAG sites like the sites of former concentration camps. Suffering is good for you.
This assumes the current demand will continue. Which is unlikely given the order of magnitude difference between capex by the Big Folks and the revenue generated by that capex. Given they now need to fund this spend from money markets, they are likely to be told off pretty soon. Feds go “ooh” and Google goes “aah”.
What’s the rationale of all this? I mean countries have gotten (mostly) rid of black books without such systems. Maintaining such a solution must be horribly expensive and what if it goes down?
What makes large things slow is not the individual pieces of code but the way the architecture dynamically reacts to changes in the load. Sync vs async calls, buffers, parallel vs sequential processing. This includes optimizations made: do we want to wait until the call returns or do we proceed anyway and deal with the negative response later? Most developers can’t coherently (ie, with math, graphs and figures) explain, how a connection pool prevents undesirable consequences of brief spikes in incoming requests. And I’m pretty sure AI can’t either.
Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.
There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.
Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.
Everyone deserves compassion. I feel sorry for him. But the fact remains, that he deliberately used lies and deception to gain a high social position in a very politically derisive context. It couldn’t have come as a surprise, that every single racist out there would jump at the opportunity to pull him down should there ever be doubt about his academic work. Plus the people, who really care about academic integrity. Plus a whole lot of folks who simply do not like people blatantly lying for massive personal gains. The vitriol was entirely predictable. The internet is not known for being forgiving. He very deliberately and knowingly took a huge and, given the absurdity of some of his claims, unfounded risk the materialization of which he could not handle. I do feel sorry for him to have started on this path. What state of mind would push a person to take such risk? He must have been a tortured man long before it all exploded into the open.
Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.
It’s not at all immediately obvious as to why the bicycle stands upright or turns. The physics is non-trivial and, based on the drawings, offsetting the center of the wheel from the axis of thw wheel being turned was not a thing. But it is this feature, that allows the modern bike to maneuver. Counter-steering is very unintuitive. If you lack the underlying physics or, in fact, personal experience, the bicycle sounds utterly mad. It doesn’t make sense. Which is why people did not work on it.
The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.
What’s weird is how emotional people get on this. I told publicly (because I was asked, not out of an obligation to have an opinion), that the prices we pay for LLMs are likely to go up because that’s what happens when the ratio of operational assets to foreign capital drops due to the capital having been turned into heat rather than operational assets. The grief I got from people, dear Lord…
It’s a simplified example of a broader principle. This structure shows how oscillation can emerge from a very simple system and how it can be remedied by adjustments of the delays. Oscillating systems are very much a thing and this explains why.
By the way, what you said about stock levels is correct, of course, but doesn’t necessarily avoid oscillations. See, all of these metrics are feedback-based as well. With a delay. How much history do we take into account? Are account lead times influenced by delivery times. This is a classic problem in system dynamics: where do we draw the system boundary? Since everything is connected to everything, the right thing to do is to model the entire universe. Since this is not practical, we draw a line _somewhere_. _Where_ exactly does not matter much as long as the resulting model is useful.
Mac user for 20+ years now. Helped my mother with two Windows laptops. One would not allow her to reset her pin. Nothing allowed me to do a safe boot, the option to enter the password was just not there. The other wouldn’t connect to her wifi. Switched to an admin account and, after login, am greeted with a black screen, a cursor and nothing else. Yesterday OneDrive just randomly would not sync a specific file. Just wouldn’t.
I could go on. That’s the network effect for you. The only reason I ever touch MS (or Meta or whatever) software is because someone I’m connected to cannot switch. And they can’t switch because others are in the same situation. At some point you don’t have to care any more. There’s no money in working software compared to igniting a massive feedback loop that just can’t stop regardless of if and what you do.
We had a lady down here in Estonia working for police. She used their extensive databases for non-work related reasons and got, very publicly, fired. She decided to appeal and lost. Through all levels of court up to the EU one. So for years, there would be a newspaper headline “remember that person who invaded your privacy? Still guilty”. Could not wish for a more impactful public execution.
It’s a sign of a badly designed system. In a well-designed one (have seen one, have helped to improve several) the drivers license database only has a personal identifier and the class of license identifier. Which is private information for sure but it would hardly be an end of the world if the feds learned I have the right to operate a motorcycle.
Perversely, this is the consequence of misguided privacy initiatives. Government agencies are discouraged or even forbidden from sharing data. Nobody has a reliable identifier. As a consequence, every single database out there will contain your name, dob, address and probably a photo. Oh, and because there’s no identity, they need to store a bunch more data to make sure you are not a fraudster. Also, in absence of a sensible electronic identity (because there’s no identity at all in the system), all of this data is used as a shared secret. Which makes it immediately commercially useful for identity theft, once obtained. And, of course, any of these giant piles of personal data can and will be breached in some way or another by both local and remote state actors.
It’s all because “identifiers are bad” and “no sharing information”. Are you guys satisfied with the privacy situation yet?
There’s one more aspect to this. Look at Claude self-reported availability figures. It’s two nines at best, not enough to build something serious on top of. Historically, adding another 9 is an order of magnitude cost shift. Even in best case scenario, where a LLM scales much differently, you are looking at significant cost increases just to achieve something people would be willing to have their business depend on.
You just need to go north. Most of Finland requires massive amounts of heating for most of the year for industrial and residential purposes. If the math doesn’t add up there, I really can’t see how math for orbital data centers would add up.
Why would you want to earn a billion dollars? You must have the maturity to handle the money. Hopefully you’ll mature sufficiently through the process of making that money but if the money’s fast, that might not happen. I’ve seen people get 9-figure rich overnight. Didn’t change them at all, they are still the wonderful folks they were. But I’ve also seen people drink themselves to death as it turns out a few mill in the bank does not answer the question “wtf do I do when I don’t have to do anything?”
Thus is the crime of the communist Russia: forcing millions into hard labor to die for progress yet squandering innovation for ideological reasons. But the same mechanism is there in, say, Microsoft. To get the attention of leadership, your idea must have 9 zeros at the very least. If it doesn’t, you either leave M$ or stay there and abandon your idea. But a 7-zero idea is a pretty expensive one to be abandoned.
True. But in the physical world, ideas (or memes, if you will) are bound to people and can only survive, if the carrier survives. The idea of curing headaches with striking your head with a hammer does not spread, because the carrier dies. On the interweb, that connection is no longer there. An idea is independent and can spread without direct human involvement. We are like a tundra species finding itself in a rainforest: completely unprepared, lacking both immunity and the ability to keep up with the environment as it changes.
Exactly. So is that level of obvious hygiene where the bar is or is it somewhere else. What ticks me off is the audacity of blanket claims without an attempt to even remotely state why it’s said this is a list of successful patterns and what does success mean. We’re just supposed to eat it up, because, you know, Claude.