> Hancock is a crank that thinks Atlantis existed in Antarctica.
Hancock claims to have been misrepresented about this by the BBC in an interview many years ago, he explains it here [0]. I think if you asked him today, he would say the most likely location for the ruins of Atlantis is somewhere off the coast between southwest Spain [1] and the Celtic Shelf [2]. While certainly outside the mainstream, that is not an unreasonable hypothesis. In my experience, when you start to really research ancient civilizations you often find the mainstream view a bit unsatisfactory. In searching for alternate explanations however, you quickly end up in the land of fringe theories. Hancock often presents these ideas in a more favorable light than what the evidence supports, but there’s also some good history mixed in and he doesn’t go off into ancient aliens territory like many of the people who write about these topics.
That’s a strange sentiment for thread on OpenAI, considering it is one of many startups founded a guy who decided to take the millions from his sale of PayPal and do cool R&D projects like spaceships, electric cars, solar power, AI, and brain-machine interfaces. Good thing Elon Musk didn’t buy a boat I guess.
Startup time is only relevant in specific cases, and doesn’t really reflect what most people think of as the language speed. It’s most important in serverless apps or similar cases where a small script is going to be called very frequently and the results are time critical, in most other cases it is very quickly made irrelevant by the duration of the task itself. For example, Java and C# start up slower than many interpreted languages, but can be significantly faster once they get going. I suggest a more accurate benchmark to be something that include some file io, string processing, arithmetic, and some basic data structure operations. I have an idea I might code up later.
> It's about making it really clear what is happening.
You could say the same thing about Java, so your argument basically boils down into “I like Go, and I don’t like Java”. What is clear and important to one person is needlessly verbose to another, what is cryptic to a newcomer might be beautiful and concise to an expert. I’ve encountered idioms that horrified me the first time I saw them which I eventually grew to love, and I’ve been smitten by syntax sugar that I thought would be great and turned out to be a disaster. It’s hard to know how stuff like this will play out, every language evolves its own style and rhythm over time, and sometimes it takes reading and writing a lot of code to find the right balance.
After using in ear headphones for a few years I started to develop fairly bad ear wax problems. Like, my ears would become completely blocked and I would have to go have them cleaned by a specialist. YMMV but putting things deep into your ear canal isn’t necessarily a good idea.
Everest is not mountain climbing anymore, hasn’t been for years. It’s a dangerous guided hike for a very expensive selfie. If you want a real challenge go to K2 or basically anywhere else. I have more respect for people that climb their local peak than those who summit Everest.
It’s interesting to consider how mathematics was viewed in ancient times, often interwoven with other disciplines and seen as the mystical language of nature rather than the sterile way it is often taught today. The legacy of Pythagorus is as much about reincarnation, music, and philosophy as it is about geometry. Numerology and geometry has played a huge role in religious practices from the I Ching to Gothic cathederals. Most divinitory practices are essentially algorithms for generating randomness, not only granting the benefits you mention but also allowing the guide to tap into their intuition and semi/unconscious mind, which may produce insights not as easily accessible via analytical methods.
BO disgusts you but you don’t mind someone smoking meth or shooting heroin on the train/bus near to you? Because I’ve experienced both of these in SF, and it’s a bit unsettling.
As opposed to being stored in Google/Facebook's databases? I don't know if blockchain is the answer, but I would prefer not to trust any of these large corporations and use a decentralized identity system where no third-party has control of my identity information.
I thought Civic (https://www.civic.com) was one of the most interesting projects to come out of the blockchain space for secure identity, but haven’t really seen it adopted anywhere. Facebook sign in is everywhere, but Facebook is also completely untrustworthy when it comes to personal data and so I tend to avoid it whenever possible. This idea of sharing attributes seems interesting but does it go any further than “This app wants access to your email address, contacts, and photos” that already exists?
Sound quality and audio codec compression of these services (Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo) is generally quite good, they are designed to support rapid coordination of large groups in high intensity situations and e-sports tournaments. It was not uncommon to have 40+ people in a single voice channel for MMO raids 10 years ago, and things have only improved since then. However, your experience will be significantly affected by your choice of headset and microphone. I have spent a lot of time in voice channels and it's common to have long conversations among groups of friends or online acquaintances there.
From a hobbyist developer perspective, EQ is very interesting. Unlike most companies, EQ/Sony/Daybreak has allowed emulators (privately run servers) for a very long time. They have come out publicly and made written statements that it’s ok, they do not have an adversarial relationship. As a result, there is a very active emu community, you can find the EQEmu source code and tools on github, and there are emu servers that have been around for well over a decade (ex Project 1999). If you have ever been interested in running your own online world, it’s not a bad place to start. Some people run very authentic servers, others create entirely new experiences with custom graphics, classes, combat systems, quests, etc (Shards of Dalaya). There is also a very active bot maker community, for example with macroquest and redguides. To the point that I have seen individual operators control 20+ character armies to defeat raid encounters singlehandedly. Some very advanced scripting and tooling required. In some ways the company learned from the emu scene, they saw that people wanted a return to the classic game, so they released time locked progression servers that have been very popular. If you can get past the clunky bits from 20 years ago, there’s still some fun and interesting stuff going on with EQ.
No, configuration defines the system and is therefore significantly harder to test. Application code can be unit tested and run in staging against simulated real world traffic. Configuration, on the other hand, often differs so much between production and staging that the only real way to test is to roll it out gradually and monitor the results. Just make staging and production identical then right? Easier said than done when your production infrastructure runs most of the worlds internet traffic. There’s a good reason that the last major outages to both AWS and Google were caused by infrastructure configuration changes, and it isn’t that their engineering sucks.
A modern ops team should be sending configuration changes through the same code review process application code goes through. Infrastructure changes in something like Terraform, configuration changes in Puppet/Chef/etc, these are deployed and tested in dev, staging, prod.
This is nothing new and it is not unique to modern advertising or politics. Important philosophical and theological texts going back to ancient times are very clear on how unfulfilling material desires ultimately are. To make it even worse, our own desires are terrible predictors of what will make us happy. Lessons from psychology abound. Winning the lottery often ruins peoples lives. Couples in arranged marriages report similar satisfaction to those with chosen partners. When presented with more choices, we are less happy with our final decision. The deeper you dig, the “worse” it gets.
> To understand the limitation of things, desire them. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Given that there is no fencing/stonith mechanism, I’m curious how this avoids possible split brain scenarios. Let’s say you have one primary and two standby in sync replication, as recommended. The primary experiences a network partition from the other two. Is one of the standbys auto-promoted, or not? If so, there is now the possibility of two running primaries and a divergent timeline. If not, then you don’t have auto-failover. What am I missing?
Edit: After looking at the architecture page, it seems that the monitor would ask the failed node kill itself? That is polite but wouldn’t work if monitor is partitioned with the standby nodes. Does this expect the primary will self-suicide if it cannot connect to the monitor? Such an approach could be problematic if the keeper process is hung but pg itself is still running. Would love clarification.
Given that the author was quite vague about the nature of this “pipeline” and that their product is an “AI-powered Startup Selection engine”, I have a suspicion they were probably crawling and scraping a whole bunch of pages for new startups. It’s possible that this was totally legit and it just looked like a ddos attack, or that it was something else entirely, but everyone here seems to have taken him at his word that what they were doing was actually above board.
They are all going to have some form of automated protection against malicious activity, but I suspect AWS and Google’s algorithms are better than the others. My experience with AWS and Google in general is that your treatment varies with your support plan. With business or enterprise level, you have dedicated resources within the company that are going to be aware of such issues or can escalate and sort it out quickly. I understand not wanting to shell out the base cost for enterprise if you are a small company on a budget, but paying at least for business support is a good idea if you are actually running a business. I have never actually heard of this happening to such a customer though, so perhaps they have extra processes in place?
You should try the Tree Style Tabs add-on for Firefox. You may need to tweak some of the settings a bit, but once you experience the power of this extension I guarantee you really won’t ever go back to Chrome.
This seems fascinating but most of it is way above my understanding. The main conclusion I got was that “entanglement between phosphorus nuclear spins in Posner molecules might stimulate coordinated neuron firing”, and that this could have implications in a wide array of other applications, but requires further research to be proven true.
Have you seen any methodology work consistently when dealing with fixed deadlines? The reality when dealing with large contracts, as you mention, is that there are almost always timetables with expectations. This poses an inherant problem due to the unreliability of estimates, so either quality or features must be sacrificed if the timeline is in jeopardy. My only experience in such an environment was using some hybrid waterfall/sprint methodology that mostly worked fine, but i suspect that was more to with the general culture and people involved than anything else.
Seems romantic I guess but there are things I would rather be doing than sitting in the middle of the ocean watching Star Trek. When I quit my job I traveled in Asia and Europe for a couple months, then bought a van and have been happily traveling the US ever since. This seems like a drastic disconnect intervention for someone that truly feels addicted to their devices, but they haven’t replaced it with anything. I can tell you from personal experience that staring at the ocean for hours on end does get old, I would have brought some good books.
You need a mix. Solar is great during the day in nice weather. It's useless at night, it's significantly reduced in bad weather, and it's completely inelastic to demand. If the population of a large metropolitan area turns on their air conditioner for an unexpectedly hot (but cloudy) day, you can't just generate more solar power. Pumped storage reservoirs can alleviate that demand to some degree, but we would need to flood significant new chunks of land and invest in relocation of humans/wildlife and construction of new dams and hydro plants. Combining solar with wind power, geothermal, and biomass can help to mitigate the issues of each solution alone. It's also just a good idea to have multiple systems in place as it makes the entire thing less prone to catastrophic failure.
It is unfortunate that many smart people go through their life without being truly challenged to work hard and develop these skills. It is often too easy for us (excuse my pride) to coast by on our ability to grasp material quickly and intuitively, yet ultimately feel dissatisfied as we know we didn’t work that hard at it. The only way I have found to overcome this is to engage in rigorous study with those who are better than you. In some ways I think many of the elite schools in the US do a disservice to their students by coddling them with inflated grades and subjective assessments. Having experienced both, I far prefer the brutal and objective assessments of difficult midterms and finals found at large public universities. If you don’t have access to such an education, then start by reading the original works of great thinkers. Take courses at the best school you can find. Online is ok, but don’t neglect the work. Find professional work with peers that challenge you. Being surrounded by smart people who work hard will change your perspective on what is possible. Procrastination is just one form of self-sabotage which allows us avoid confronting our own limitations. There’s no shame in turning in a crap project because you did it the night before, but it would be a catastrophe to spend weeks pouring your heart and soul into a piece and still have it be garbage! The reality is that many hard things require lots of practice, and you won’t always nail it. Laugh at your mistakes, throw it away, start over, iterate and improve. It’s ok to fail, it’s not an indictment of your potential. Great projects may start with inspiration from a long walk, but they also require lots of editing and refactoring. The important thing is to start the thing and keep working at it, keep chipping away at the small pieces until you get there.
The most valuable thing I learned at university was how to tackle difficult problems. Taking advanced math and science courses where I had to really study, and still struggled, and having to write essays so frequently that I could no longer procrastinate or wait for the spark to hit me, was more valuable in the long run than any of the actual knowledge I gained.
The advice to break a hard problem down into simpler pieces good, but I feel like that is often difficult without proper domain knowledge. In many cases, knowing how to break apart a problem like that is how you become an expert in the first place. If you want to learn a musical instrument, there are plenty of good simple excercises to start with, but only an expert can tell you what they are, you can’t easily intuit them from scratch. An experienced programmer will know how to break down a difficult project into small and simpler pieces, that ability is part of what makes them an expert. “Find a good teacher” and “put in the work” seem like rather banal pieces of advice, but it’s a system that has consistently worked throughout the ages. If you are truly breaking new ground then you should already have a framework and significant experience to guide your exploration.