martopix

It's worth mentioning one of my favorite language facts of all time: the word dram (small unit still used for a portion of whisky in Scotland), drachma (the pre-euro Greek currency), and dirham (the currency of Morocco) are all cognates.

> not a single country should interfere with this

I'd rather say "a single country should not interfere with this". IF we have a "simple" internal conflict between local factions, then it should be an international community (the UN, or an agreed conference of major international and local powers) that steps in and ensures mediation. However, this happens very rarely. The reasons it happens very rarely is that major powers such as US, China, Russia, pretty much always have some opposing interests even in local conflicts. When there are no interests, conflicts just end up forgotten and nobody cares, but that's not good either.

So my take on "should the rest of the world interfere" is - yes, but only if the rest of the world does so by agreement.

If you end up concluding "the problem is most people", then you are likely missing the point. Rules need to work for everyone. Including those who are newcomers, those who don't have the time to study them, or who aren't educated enough to understand them fully. If "most people" refuse to use them, then clearly there's an underlying problem and blaming it on them simply sweeps it under the carpet.

Populist take aside, this is somewhat true. In Italy there has been talk of electing the president directly, but I think that would be a terrible choice. Currently, he is elected by parliament, and this (surprisingly) has worked mostly well. The president ends up being an older well respected politician who takes a neutral role. If they were elected by a public election, there's no way you could have a neutral figure.

It is true that there is a convention not to actually exercise many powers as a King, leaving them to the government. But it wouldn't be an absolute monarchy anyway, in fact it's one of the first examples where the monarch could not do as he wished, and had to call Parliament. So it's a parliamentary monarchy.

"The boss wants to see you immediately."

It would be a much better headline if it said "HPV, for which a vaccine exists, causes cancer: get vaccinated".

The conclusions are something that is well clear to anybody that is familiar with the environment of scientific research. The kind of metrics used to judge research are greatly damaging.

I mostly disagree with the distinction made between scientific research and research in the humanities - "Unlike scientists, humanities scholars generally need time, rather than large amounts of money, to do their work." - while some scientific projects also require expensive equipment, the problem of publication pressure and therefore lack of time to do proper work is identical in the sciences.

> The stigmatization of mental conditions in Europe is sky high, to the point that it's barely possible to be seen as sane if you're just seeing a therapist.

I think this is just not true. I've never seen so many people talk openly about seeing a therapist as in the last few years. I'm almost surprised by how mainstream it has become.

This isn't whining. It's about understanding what their role should be in this context.

> OpenAI wasn't created to "Do Science".

That's exactly OP's point

The article does not state that "interview questions were regularly approved by a committee". It says that this question was banned because it was leaked to the public. And that he, very reasonably, asked the hiring committee if he could use it anyway.

If you've ever tried machine learning, it's easy to understand what a prejudice is: inference based on learning on biased data. Or sometimes the data doesn't even need to be biased: your stereotyping may be factually true on average. It's just that we should not make assumptions based on averages, especially when they involve people.

Fantastic for teaching high school physics

ah right my bad, but the observation stays

Not only bad people. Everyone has to find ways around it. Even the bureaucrats themselves tell you to ignore the rules and stuff like that.

These are kibi-meters

I keep thinking that what I'd really like is a substitute of latex that is based on markdown and CSS. This is a hint of what would be possible, although of course it would take decades to get to the power of latex.

Correct for the exact opposite reason. Our homes use less and less power as better insulation becomes widespread. Italy for example just had a massive campaign of incentives for people to renovate their homes to better power saving.

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture.

I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It's extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution.

Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 years ago, meaning that you work on a tiny problem and you only try to take it forward by epsilon. This is different from the idea we often have of science as "eureka!" and revolutionary changes of paradigm. Most of our time we only aim to publish some paper on something, and move on, even without fully believing in what we're trying hard to convince reviewers of. Which is a horrible feeling.

All this causes one clear phenomenon: lack of motivation. Motivation is essential for any hard job. But it's very very hard to keep motivation high, let's be honest, on working like crazy on some project that ends up in a paper that probably almost nobody will ever read.

I don't ever want to do that again. And it's not about the salary, or my boss, or working long hours (I don't).

I feel you. And you know what, it's really ok. It's difficult to accept because sometimes our disciplines have become parts of our identity. But the moment I accepted that I didn't need to love it, and I could move on and do many exciting things with my good education, life became so much better.

Enjoy the rest of your postdoc. Do what you need to do without stressing too much. Also look at the other things in it that you may like: perhaps working with students, perhaps writing an open source software, perhaps volunteering for some extra teaching duty if you hate research, etc. A postdoc can be many things. This is what I'm doing now.

And if you can't wait, start looking for jobs and then quit. Looking for jobs can in itself be uplifting.

Sorry for the preachy tone -- I don't know your situation and I'm more telling you about mine. In the end that's how I managed and it went ok.

Being a professor is much, much more about research than about education. You don't normally become a professor because you're good at teaching, nor because you love teaching (or maybe you do, but not only that). This is a bit sad actually, as I am an odd case of an academic that thinks teaching is much more important and even interesting than research. It's changing a bit in that positions that are research-only or teaching-only are starting to appear.

The way I would build a DM with GPT4 is with a few external tools: the character sheets, random dice, and perhaps other things should be available on the side, and fed to the chatbot when needed. Same for a summary of the campaign, so that previous events are not forgotten.

The article clearly states that the "placebo" theory is baseless, so I'm not sure what your "bottom line" that closes with "everything else is a placebo" comes from. What is "everything else" exactly?

I asked ChatGPT to be my dungeon master for a tiny text-based dungeons&dragons game. It took a bit of prompt engineering (it would initially believe me if I unilaterally said I won dice rolls and even the whole game). The result was pretty astonishingly good.

Then that's what 'interesting life' means to you, which is ok

I'm in exactly the same situation. Possibly.

I really resonate with this. I work in academia and I finally decided that I don't want to do research any more, but I want to teach. The choice now is whether to take a teaching-only position in a university, or do something a little crazy and try to go back to my country and teach in a public school. Either way, I hope to feel the same as you say.

Beautiful answer -- why would you just accumulate savings without using them for living an interesting life? It's worth taking risks. I'm considering doing something of the sort, probably much less risky actually.

> Sure, but what's not really python per se.

But that's exactly the strength of Python: it's an interface language. It's meant to make pretty sophisticated things like CUDA easy for everyone.