Under the existing DST system (1 hour difference from Standard Time) they currently go to school (wait, children in school in the summer?) 3 hours after sun up but that's not seen as a problem?
177 karma · joined March 8, 2021
In brief, our bodies evolved in the the movement of the sun, not numbers on a clock, so called solar time. Standard time aligns the numbers on the clock the best with solar time for most all of the world. There are some exceptions along the equator and at the poles at different times of year, but those are exceptions that have been, and can continue to be, handled well by people in those areas.
In the 70s through the mid 90s, before the WWW v1.0 bubble taught the world you could get rich quick in software, there was a greater appetite to, say, take your time working your way through an article on a new technique in C. Now the vast majority of people just want copy/paste Python code examples from Stack Overflow. At most they may suffer through a brief video tutorial.
Part of this is not some “kids these days” sort of reason, but the reality that most code is much more short lived than ever before.
those unfortunate two lost their jobs 10 years ago to existing automation and process improvements.
call centers, it could be noted, are already ahead of the curve in terms of cost pressures on a business: human wages in India and the Philippines will not grow faster than what an AI company will want to charge to validate their absurd ($100 billion? $3 trillion?) valuation.
yeah, it’s cynical sounding, but the truth is that exploiting humans will continue to be cheaper than paying for humanless tech for a lot of these supposed AI use cases.
AI also needs to compete with the previous decades’ main cost cutting measure of offshore business process outsourcing.
Let me provide a counter point: I work for one of the largest corporations in the US, inside an organization dedicated to advancing AI solutions across the enterprise. I would know of anything sufficiently advanced to "threaten" anyone's job white collar or not. This is simply not the case.
(going to be a little vague here for the sake of anonymity)
Here's a few examples where I see the opposite of the claimed effect.
1. In the call centers: at best improved search capabilities can help agents do work faster, maybe ultimately such productivity gains could reduce staffing, but that'll probably never happen. Search is improved a little with AI, but LLMs are kind of garbage. We've even partnered with a Big Tech Company With Famous AI People and the results are unusable.
2. Back office: call it the shuffling of papers. Think of the series of transformations of, say, new orders and things like that as they pass through various systems. These are already automated to the hilt at most every company! AI is maybe assisting with quality control a bit but whatever jobs exist in this area already survived being automated. They aren't going anywhere.
3. Fraud detection: Any company operating at any scale already has great (almost all automated) systems in place for detecting whether they are getting ripped off. Again, already automated to the hilt and anyone with a job in this area isn't going to lose it to any amount of further automation.
Articles like the one linked to need to explain, at the very least, exactly which jobs in 2024 have already escaped 50 years of automation efforts. It should beggar belief that somehow these corporations that ruthlessly cut and automate already somehow have jobs left which don't actually require a person!
Anything short of actual AGI (that is, a perfect human simulacrum that can be infinitely cloned) isn't the threat to human employment that these articles want us to believe.
The real question is what motivates these outlandish claims? My best guess is that it's paid PR firms seeding these articles at respectable news outlets like the WSJ just to keep pumping up the bubble a bit more. Keep it going and let the early money get a sweet exit before this whole thing collapses.
The language is run by a “steering committee”.
The community has a couple of shining stars such as Mohammad Anwar who runs The Weekly Challenge https://theweeklychallenge.org/ and Gabor Szabo https://perlmaven.com/about
They are also both co-editors of the Perl Weekly https://perlweekly.com/
The Perl Foundation co-ordinates activities such as grants funding development, fundraising, and conference organizing. https://www.perlfoundation.org/
There are also a few senior Perl personalities still around such as brian d. foy who continue to write and update books and blogs.
The post-Larry Wall community seems to be doing ok so far. What is notably missing is more active participation from companies making the most use of Perl such as Craigslist or Duck Duck Go.
I wonder if there is a connection to Japan's FGCS project which was active during that time frame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
It would make sense if Sega was involved and the activity on this "extremely rare and unknown system" was due to it being funded by research grants instead of purely commercial new product development. The FGCS was heavily invested in advancing Prolog based systems and that makes the possibility of a connection to this system even stronger.
At the end of the day customers have a working solution, but it’s all developed and operated in a completely bespoke way each time.
https://www.autoimmunetherapies.com/
The business still seems active, but operates outside the US after it caught the attention of the FDA.
The original story is long gone (rip kuro5hin!) but is thankfully archived.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060523232308/http://www.kuro5h...
Things like finishing a Masters degree after work, having places to go where you know you’d run into people you knew, physical media all rung true.
One thing that seemed to be missed though was that the downside of not having the technology to enable work from home meant the development of the “late at the office” culture.
Think of the xkcd comic with the sword fighting while compiling. Those sorts of silly things were routine after, say, 6pm in an office.
Now if you need to work after hours you do it from home, where your day may have started anyway. Twenty years ago you and some colleagues would stay in the office, order some food, play some music on someone’s speakers, take occasional breaks for a game or even a nap and keep plowing through work until 11pm or even later.
Also “on call” was still a thing, but it meant a phone call or page and then you physically go to the office to solve the problem!
While talented I doubt they would work at a “lesser” company and instead just wait around for the next cool thing.
Are we to believe that humans are now able to replicate many of their own conscious abilities but with no real understanding of the mechanisms? A grid search of TensorFlow functions mashed together in different combinations could have done the same thing?
I am starting to feel like I am playing a Gary Marcus role here in this thread, against a mob of overly optimistic connectionists. (that may be too generous, I imagine many in this thread have no implementation experience with AI, just a Reader’s Digest level of understanding)
I, much less Penrose, have anything in common with the Discovery Institute, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong in their conclusions. Their ahem “methods” may be a bit suspect as well.
To learn more read “The Emperor’s New Mind”. It’s quite a book! A good addition to your summer reading list.
What happened with Perl is that, effectively, the “pumpking” held that power but when Sawyer X actually used his discretion to announce Perl 7 there was a mutiny by jealous and bitter collaborators. They felt they should have some say in the matter and formed this Perl Steering Committee. As the brilliant Reini Urban has pointed out elsewhere in the comments, this group are fairly mediocre talent wise and mostly just spend their time sniping at each other.
Reini’s cperl or Will Braswell’s rperl are both worthy projects that in a more perfect universe would have long ago supplanted the now rudderless mainline perl interpreter.
I write “mostly” because recently neo4j has a “neosemantics” project which handles RDF. It is all pretty standards compliant RDF though, nothing custom at all.
For more information this may be a good start: https://neo4j.com/blog/rdf-triple-store-vs-labeled-property-...
The value to being able to have a public reverse SSH proxy to a home network system is great!
While it has none of the nice UX my opinion is that Oracle Cloud Free Tier is the spiritual replacement for the old Cloud9 IDE which Amazon bought and then destroyed. Again, not as nice, but for me I can get the equivalent compute resource that Cloud9 would have provided and just use emacs entirely for free. No need to play stupid games with AWS credits or whatever.
https://www.masteringperl.org/2013/06/how-abigails-prime-num...
This blog article does a nice job discussing Abigail’s work.
If it could not be parsed it could never work!
And this is totally OK in my book, I use Perl for prototyping ideas and an expressive language that allows creativity from me the programmer is a feature as it promotes looking at a problem from multiple aspects.
Of course CGI has scaling issues, that is not deniable, but it is still a quite strong technology. I would argue that the main reason to avoid CGI is not for performance reasons, few sites will encounter those usage levels, but rather because CGI coding patterns ultimately end up breaking MVC best practices.