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Tbh I've had a couple tablets and never used them much for anything. The niche between bigger than a phone but smaller than a laptop isn't one that I have many uses for.

But, assuming you use a tablet for something, I can definitely see the appeal of having a terminal on it. A lot of my time on ssh is spent occasionally checking on or configuring stuff, with lots of down time in between. So if you're reading on your tablet, it would be nice to quickly check whether your job completed or whatever.

"Worthy" I'm not sure about, but if you're talking about ensuring leaders are effective, I get it. But its something of a self fulfilling prophecy I think. If someone is so distracted / distracting because of issues unrelated to what should be their focus, they could be the best free software advocate imaginable but still not suitable for the job. But it's only because of people deciding that other issues are more important than the purported cause. So I don't disagree that agitators are able to render someone ineffective at their job and unable to lead, but I don't think its right.

The title is a little misleading. Whether or not these people are "free software advocates", they appear to be more defined by their social justice cause, and seem to feel that this is more important than actually talking about free software.

That is what I disagree with most, many of these causes are important, but none of them are the one true cause that we need to drop everything and attend to. If you're interested in equality issues, join such a cause, don't try to pretend you're interested in free software so you can co-opt that cause for your own purposes.

Ironically, this kind of behavior actually does the most harm to the people involved in it. There are lots of examples of e.g. gay rights organizations being commandeered by other groups to try and champion their "more important" cause.

To some extent, if, as a journal, you have to start policing submissions in the ways described, you have already lost. In that so much of the journal industry is not about sharing knowledge, but about generating a metric (publication count) for profit. Rather than create more hoops that are only going to push good science away to other venues, they should reconsider what they are trying to accomplish overall, and where appropriate, go out of business.

I feel like this is less a problem of serious science (where it's generally known what authors and journals are reliable, and where people using the results of others know enough to subject them to scruitiny). It is a problem of the publishing industry and of evaluating academics for tenure and promotion.

When I was in high school (25 years ago) we learned about civil disobedience as an important part of the evolution of the legal system, and as a civic responsibility. Examples like abortion and segregation laws were brought up as important times that people pushed back against the mainstream and brought about important changes.

I get the sense that this attitude would be frowned upon now. Anybody going against mainstream thought is a "denier" or anti-x-er, there is no room in public discourse for any dissent.

I'm reminded of the (maybe PG) essay about asking people whether they would have been slave owners or abolitionists, and everyone pretends they would have been an abolitionist, when the reality is that would have been a strongly nonconformist position to take in many places. I think dissent is much harder now than it would have been back then.

Some basic word counting on text files in bash, I was tokenizing to one token per line and then counting:

tr -cs '[:alnum:]' '[\n*]' | sort | uniq -c

The sort takes a long time (probably just n log n I guess) on a big text. Swapping for

awk '{k[$0]++} END {for (token in k) print token, k[token];}'

and then sorting on the numbers does the same thing faster.

I think I agree with your sentiment, but should the GP be worse off for being honest/pessimistic/seeing things clearly? I'm sure there are lots of people doing what the GP describes that don't feel they are doing anything immoral. Are they in the clear? If you're actually participating in fraud it's one thing, but doing something legal but morally dubious like working around browser privacy comes down much more to individual perspective.

This potentially is another argument for laws / regulation.

I always feel like it's better to draw attention to these things rather than let these weirdos reinforce each other in a dark corner of the internet somewhere. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that.

But yeah, I'm pretty right wing (not in the popular media sense, basically leaning fiscally conservative libertarian), but I've always considered the Quillette outside of what I consider reasonable. This kind of "incel" stuff though is a whole different level than the usual "universities don't support free speech" or whatever. But the article is from 2019 so I guess this garbage had been going on for a while.

Because the attitudes about women that embodied in this kind of garbage are so abhorrent that they need to be called ou, debunked, and ridiculed. That's why my original point was that more attention needs to be drawn to this nonsense, so it doesn't quietly fester in corners of the internet.

> The revealed preference among most women to attempt to engage romantically only with the same small percentage of men who are perceived as attractive is consistent with the social system called “polygyny,” in which a small percentage of males monopolize the mating opportunities with all females, while many other males have no access to mates.

This whole article and line of thought is bat-shit crazy and needs to have more attention called to it so it can be debunked.

This is the second time this week I have seen this kind of thing on HN. Honestly I'm not well equipped to provide help and information to people that think this way, but this whole line of reasoning is horrible and in my view is on par with conspiracy theories, and can only harm society.

I don't think this is fair. I've known lots of big families at median income or lower and like the GP says, it's about budgeting and priorities. There's a big difference in the cost per kid of having two in daycare, then each with their own room, their own new clothes, etc, vs 7 kids cared for by a parent, wearing hand me downs, eating home cooked meals, etc.

Additionally, their cookie consent is straight out of that caricature that was posted on HN yesterday. After deselecting all the ways they want to track you, the default choice at the bottom is "allow all cookies". This kind of scummy behavior needs to stop.

Harvesting peoples behavioral or other data is depriving them of privacy. There is lots of precedent for why privacy is important. So to be specific, the data collection is "stealing" privacy.

And with respect to the gp comment, this is actually different than copyright infringement, where the infringer is not depriving the copyright holder of anything, except potentially a business model based on withholding information. There is obviously a lively debate about the appropriate reach of copyright law, but imo at least, copyrights are more abstract that the privacy rights that are being infringed through surreptitious data collection

Somewhat related, I got a new computer this week, and had to boot into windows so I could partition the HD to install linux. This was the first time in 15 years I have booted into a brand new "consumer" windows install (it was windows 10 pro). The "setup" was basically just 10 minutes of them asking in different ways if they could collect my personal data, track my location, send back telemetry etc. Office 365 is the same. I find some new thing every day that I have to opt out of to prevent them stealing my and my business data. Its like they have given up on trying to improve their products (which are basically stable) and shifted into finding more ways to steal data. As much as I dislike google for this, I realize I'm the product there, with Microsoft I thought I was paying to get business tools, not to be spied on. (To be fair, I then installed ubuntu which also wanted to send my data back to canonical)

Another example, I bought a car recently that defaults to stealing my personal information and sending it to the manufacturer. I had to call, and provide more information to them, to opt out (and I can only assume they are still stealing information they have deemed critical in some way)

Anyway, I'm reminded of all of this because I think the obfuscated cookie consents are just one facet of how hostile consumer tech has become to users. Aided by complex and ambiguous regulations, companies are able to stay within the letter of the law while making it impossible to just be left alone with your purchase and not be tracked and marketed to.

If there is a regulatory solution, it has to focus on clarity and spirit, not on just more rules. I'm not aware of an example of something like this working elsewhere.

One idea is a heavy tax on advertising. I've argued before that there is a lot in common between environmental pollution and the effects of advertising on the public value of the internet, and I would say this extends to tech generally. Charge a 25-40% tax on ad revenue, and make it less economic for companies to pollute.

Thanks a lot for answering my questions. I am definitely going to give this a try. Right now I see this as a great option for an always on dev instance that I can work in all day with GPU access and not worry about breaking the bank.

I saw someone ask on reddit about separating storage from the GPU instance, so that one could do data transfer and other setup without reserving a gpu. I want to echo how important this is. Another case is where I might want to use only one GPU and then scale up to 8 for training, or i might want to have N GPU instances attached to the same storage to run jobs in parallel. There are lots of other examples, but overall it would add much flexibility.

On the other hand, it might encourage people to be more "peaky" in their use, which could be a challenge for you. From what I understand, you are much better off if I want 1 gpu for 70 hrs vs, 70 gpus for an hour, in which case I understand how you might want to encourage steady use.

I think some cats are different because they are antisocial and there aren't that many of them. Compared to humans (and e.g. dogs) that have to hunt but also feed a group and support a social structure. Social cats like lions I believe do mostly eat bigger game. But cats overall are also extremely smart compared to most animals. Look into how intelligent tigers are. But they dont collaborate so they don't need that side of intelligence.

I do like your idea about the extant hunter gatherers, that should be easy to confirm.

The headline should be that declining customer service quality threatens the industry. This had nothing to do with the technology getting better.

Chatbots are something nobody likes and that are simply being pushed by companies to see how much people will tolerate.

This reminds me of (a) the backlash of outsourcing call centers years ago to companies that did not have clear english speakers and (b) the talk a few years ago about trucker jobs being obsolete. Until there is AGI, we are no closer to a useful chatbot then we have ever been. And hopefully people will continue to reject dealing with companies that don't respect them enough to provide a real, knowledgeable person they can talk to.

One more comment / suggestion: I watched the video and saw there are lots of pre-configured environments. I see this a lot, but to be honest this is not to helpful for me because I'm not doing development in your environment, I'm writing and checking the code somewhere else and then training on the gpus.

For the same reason, I'm only getting value out of the gpus when I am right ready to train. So I would be much happier if I could push a docker, or maybe even a conda environment spec, along with my code, attach data storage, and run e.g. train.py (or more likely a shell script that calls it) to completion and then immediately release the GPUs. Everything else is just the overhead of as quickly as possible trying to get the environment right, run my script, and then shut down the instance as soon as it's done. It would be awesome to have this kind of functionality, or is there a way to do that I missed?

Sorry if I missed it in the FAQ, do you have finite capacity or do you have an agreement with the data center where you can bring on more gpus with demand. My worry would be to wake up one day and find that all GPUs are in use.

And (this may sound naive) I work with other companies' data, I have a responsibility to them to keep it safe, do you have any concerns with this being used for "professional" applications or are you targeting research / hobby?

To be clear, I am dealing with things that my clients are comfortable with me working with on mainstream cloud providers, not state secrets or data with legislative requirements.

I have rarely if ever seen examples of specialized knowledge being outsourced. If someone (who understood the details) has already build a "product" out of that knowledge that lets you understand what it does for you without knowing how it works, you can use the product. But if you want to make a new product (in the sense I mean here), you actually have to understand. This is a pretty classic mistake I see being made, where managers assume they can outsource understanding something, and are left with an end result that is dummed down to meet their misunderstanding.

I'm not sure about the OCR example, but there are information / sampling theory limits on what can be discerned in an image, based on sampling rate (pixels basically) and optics. Any extrapolation outside these limits is proveably guessing.

Edit - re OCR do you mean e.g. from a picture of a blurred license plate we could rule in or out a subset of possible numbers, depending on how blurred, like a B could be a 8 but not a L? (And sorry if your example is unrelated). This is valid, and unrelated to super resolution, you can do this analysis with Nyquist and point spread functions.

All personal anecdotes but:

Flights - wierd fare classes that dont have the normal options re changes and cancellation, no recourse through the airline if there are any issues

Customer service - hours on hold, and you have to call them to change anything, the hotel/ airline wants nothing to do with you

Hotels- treated like a 3rd class citizen, no points, cant use your status if you have it, worst room, I have been charged extra "urban fees" at the hotel on these fares. Hotels (business hotels anyway) dont want you to use Expedia and treat you like shit if you do.

I expect they have a niche for infrequent, budget sensitive, travelers as I have seen deals on there, but if you travel regularly, or expect plans to change, stay away.

What I like about google flights is how minimally commercial it is, it really looks just like its reporting fares, not flashing promoted bundles of things in your face.

I can see this going one of two ways: either nobody signs up, they get made fun of a bit, get the message and pivot, or the publicity they're generating gets the app in front of the niche they are targeting, they get users, feedback, and the ear of people who put this kind of value on the productivity boost they get.

Either way, I don't see the harm in putting it in front of people now, and I see a big downside to either polishing it more, or pivoting without having tested it on people.

I opened the article expecting to agree with it, then I got to the part about "does anyone use google flights instead of travelocity" and started to wonder if it was satire.

This was disappointing and naive. McKinsey is a private company that markets itself to c-level folks. What possible benefit would they have in becoming more open and transparent as the article suggests. They are going through a brief and unwanted period of public exposure. What they want to do is get out of the spotlight, and go back to a state where they only ones paying attention to them are prospective clients and aspiring consultants. The article acts like they are subject to the same whims as public companies who make their money from advertising. For better or worse, they are (metaphorically) mercenaries, and just like the real ones, are responsible to their clients and staff only, not to twitter, the media, etc. Their best policy is to fade back out of the spotlight.

I dont agree with this, either we know what the pretext task was, or we fine tune with labels, but in either case, it's no different to analyze than supervised models.

I do agree that more parameters and a bigger training set makes the models more opaque (or at least more expensive to understand), but the self supervision is not the reason.

I'm just thinking aloud about what would make this valuable enough for me to pay for...

I have several computers with different os's and a phone, that sometimes I call into meetings with, sometimes I use the apps.

I have meetings on teams, zoom, google, webex, (Skype is dead right?)

I may have presentations that I need to give in these meetings, in google docs, ppt, browser tab, etc.

So if your app could unify all of this, so I can click once on whatever device I'm on to get into my meeting, and have my meeting materials at hand, that would be cool.

I'm less big on notifications of any kind, I get too many already, making some new kind of extra important notification won't help.

I don't usually read any US news as a rule, because of how sensational it all is. But I think I see most NYT headlines because someone inevitably posts them to NH. And honestly, when I compare them to what I saw on Fox News (which admittedly I only looked at for about a week around the election), I see no difference in the level of partisanship or spin. If anything there is less on Fox News just because the headline writers are not trying to show their undiscovered writing talent in the same way as NYT.

Champion Kenyan runner being interviewed on what makes Kenyans better runners: "when I train with foreigners, they don't keep up. I ask why and they say they feel like they're going to die. I feel that way too. But I keep running"

I'm not convinced the relationship is casual. For example, couldn't the people who already had experience be enthusiasts who are more interested in driving generally?