rors

The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction. The term brutalist refers to béton brut, which means raw concrete. I.e. you can see the shape of the wooden slats used as a cast. The concrete in the Barbican was finished by drilling to create a dappled pattern, which obliterated the shape of the slats.

There are also lots of post modern elements. For example, the columns of the girl’s school have pyramids at the top to resemble pencils.

The south bank has more buildings that are a purer expression of brutalism.

I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM.

I’m hoping more recent developments, like WASM or Graal, provide a route for more flexibility when selecting languages. It’s nice to see Rust slowly become a serious choice for web development. Most of the time JS is fine, but it’s good to have the option to pull out a stricter low-level language when needed.

A bit of a tangent but the same byproduct effect is seen in the production of sherry casks for finishing Scotch.

A lot of sherry bodegas only really exist to churn out barrels for whisky distillers.

There has also been a big change in the UK’s tax regime that discourages hiring new workers

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/30/bosses-reeve...

The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life expectancies were so low. A popular policy delivered at low cost to the state.

That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.

People are odd in terms of what they will tolerate. I prefer having a 15 mins stroll to pick up my coffee or food, for others it’s deal breaking.

The time argument is also weird. I find that I have a maximum of 6 hours highly productive work in me a day, perhaps an additional few hours of less productive work. A stroll or cooking recharges my mind. I envy all the people here who are working a productive 12 hour day.

I remember attending ACL one year, where the conference organisers ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of double blind reviews. They asked reviewers to identify the institution that submitted the anonymised paper. Roughly 50% of reviewers were able to correctly identify the institutions. I think there was a double digit percentage of being able to predict authors.

The organisers then made the argument that double blind was working because 50% of papers were not identified correctly! I was amazed that even with strong evidence that double blind was not working, the organisers were still able to convince themselves to continue with business as usual.

I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a generative AI startup in 2019 and signed deals with huge consumer goods companies, debugged distributed training jobs on a cluster with thousands of A100s, and wrote PyTorch training pipelines for a financial ML trading signal that made money.

Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI

My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super specialised.

I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.

This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.

In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.

However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.

My statement did not imply zero sum thinking. The pie can get bigger and the bigger slices can get disproportionately bigger.

As an analogy, economies can increase their GDP and inequality can also increase. Just because something is getting bigger doesn't mean it's getting fairer.

The value of content creators on YouTube will follow a power law distribution. There will be a very small number of hugely profitable creators and a vast sea of people who do ok. This power law distribution makes YouTube very different to setting up a physical retail store in London. Even if I do well with my shop, I won't outperform my neighbour 1000x.

If anything Mr Beast is an argument for not using YouTube. Alphabet is incentivised to keep him happy so that he doesn't move to X. I'm sure they consider his needs before they change their algorithm, at the expense of almost all other creators on YouTube.

I wonder if the homogeneity has come from gentrification and high property prices. NYC might have been a crime-ridden dump in the 60s, but it was cheap enough that Andy Warhol could afford to rent a massive studio. And a modern day Leonard Cohen wouldn't be welcome in the Chelsea Hotel.

Now you have to be a lawyer or work in finance to hope to even get a modest sized apartment in NYC.

I feel like a lot of these debates boil down dealing with discomfort. We seem to be creating a society where everyone feels they have the right to not feeling stressed and uncomfortable. The danger to never feeling challenged is that you don't grow. You get stuck in a rut and everyone passes you by.

Part of dealing with discomfort is learning what your limits are. No one should put themselves in a situation with you have a breakdown. I find that a small amount of stress in my life is good and results in growth. But a huge amount is overwhelming which leads to burnout.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in my 40s. It's helped me understand why I struggle with certain tasks. Overall having a label has been a net positive.

I'm hesitant to share my diagnosis with colleagues. I've been able to develop coping mechanisms and I feel like it doesn't impact my day-to-day. I don't want to cause disruption for those around me. I do have a friend with much more severe dyslexia and she does get the help she needs to be productive.

I wish we could discuss these labels at work without baggage. It's all about consideration. Forcing everyone around you to change their behaviour around you to make yourself feel more comfortable is not being considerate. On the flip side enforcing strict working policies that prevent people from participating in the workplace is also not considerate.

To reinforce your argument, in the linked article GFS claim that they weren't responsible for the tax avoidance. The recruitment companies they subcontracted out came up with this wheeze.

Complex corporate structures enable plausible deniability. The CEO of GFS probably didn't know what was happening, but also probably didn't want to know whilst enjoying the low fees charged from the recruiters.

The UK government doesn't mandate units for reporting your own weight. The examples listed are required by law.

It seems obvious to me that LLMs wouldn't be able to find examples of every single problem posed to them in training data. There wouldn't be enough examples for the factual look up needed in an information retrieval style search. I can believe that they're doing some form of extrapolation to create novel solutions to posed problems.

It's interesting that this paper doesn't contradict the conclusions of the Apple LLM paper[0], where prompts were corrupted to force the LLM into making errors. I can also believe that LLMs can only make small deviations from existing example solutions in creation of these novel solutions.

I hate that we're using the term "reasoning" for this solution generation process. It's a term coined by LLM companies to evoke an almost emotional response on how we talk about this technology. However, it does appear that we are capable of instructing machines to follow a series of steps using natural language, with some degree of ambiguity. That in of itself is a huge stride forward.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gsm-symbolic

Your analogy is a little biased in that most professional basketball players careers are over by the time they hit their mid-thirties. If they want to go pro then they need to be playing at a high standard in their teens.

Whereas someone talented at math would be productive much longer than that.

David Bowie said it better

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Eric Hobsbawm's tetralogy on the long 19th century: Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire, and Age of Extremes.

A truly epic date-driven summary of how the industrial and political revolutions of the 19th transformed the world.

Perplexity is term from information theory. It's one measure of the quality of an LM. I.e. how perplexed is my model? To an experienced researcher it's a unit of measurement like metres or kg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity

I agree that it doesn't transfer out of that specialised domain.

You've managed to move on from a situation where you were deprived of security, both with respect to love and money, to a new situation where you are secure at a relatively young age. That's a huge achievement. I would suggest first contemplating what you have achieved. You sound like an ambitious individual, and you should recognise how much you have done from a poor start.

It's natural that the things you once craved were things that would lead you to achieve your goal of security. It's also natural that now you are secure, you no longer need money etc. If you're still ambitious, then you are now in the lucky position where you can be a bit more playful. You have bought yourself the opportunity to try new things, to explore your values. To think about what really excites you.

Don't feel bad that you don't know what those are yet. You've gone from meeting existential needs to now thinking about fulfilment. What an exciting time of your life!

My partner is a surgeon in the UK. She's planning on leaving the profession at the end of the year. We talk a lot about what is wrong with the medical profession.

One issue is the type of person attracted to the profession. They're incredibly academically talented, not driven by money, and desire status and recognition. Surgeons are the most extreme cases of this personality type, as they're harder jobs to get and have a lot of pressure. These people are the types who get their head done, roll up their sleeves, and get on with things. They're not used to asking for help or additional resources. They're the sort of people who care for others! Medicine self-selects for martyrs.

In addition, you have so many hoops to jump through (training, specialisations, etc) with significant time investment that can be lost in moments by pissing off training directors or other senior doctors. My partner ends up working more than her contracted hours because her bosses expect her to, although they would never explicitly enforce stricter rules. If she works her contracted hours she can kiss a consultant job (UK equivalent of attending) goodbye as her bosses won't provide a reference for the role.

Because the stakes in medicine are literally life and death, meaning that it is heavily regulated. There are horror stories around the GMC, the UK regulator, and doctors are terrified of being investigated. They adopt a legalistic mentality where they only treat if they're sure that they won't get prosecuted. It's very different from aviation with its no blame culture.

Finally, another factor that is making medicine so tough is that it is a success story! People live longer, and pathologies that were once fatal can be managed with ever more complex treatments. As demographics lean to older populations, then the demand keeps increasing.

Over the last few months I've been experimenting with Buddhist meditation, which leans heavily into this metaphor. They phrase the metaphor differently, with a focus on flattening of the grooves in your mind.

I've found these ideas helpful, but they're hardly novel. The Buddha lived over 2000 years ago. One big difference the objective. Most of these blogs are about hacking your mind to be more successful, whereas religions aim to make you more comfortable with your life as it currently is.

I think if you're going to experiment with upgrading your wetware, then you could do worse than look at Buddhism, or any other practice that encourages deep contemplation and promotes kindness. I have my issues with organised religion, but why not at least consider the thousands of years of prior art?

I wrote my thesis on tropical geometry for machine translation[1]. You can use it to train a a linear model for structured prediction, which used to be the dominant model before RNNs.

[1]: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N15-1041

Keynesians advocate for large amounts of public spending during recessions to stimulate the economy. They don't advocate for racking up a large amount of public dept to spend during the periods of growth, which is what happened in Greece.

There are many other issues with the Greek economy such as clientism, the inability to collect taxes, etc that all economists would agree needs fixing.

Andrea was sent pictures of her head superimposed on porn actors. She was sent rape and death threats. Was Hank sent death threats?

To be clear, my definition of 'a campaign of intimidation and fear' are threats to your personal safety and your life.

I can buy that the joke was just inappropriate, and no doubt that she massively overreacted.

However, she was the one who ended up with the death threats. It's hard to reassure women that they're safe at tech events if the result of them making a social faux-pas are threats to their safety.

Have any white men on this site ever been on the receiving end of a campaign of intimidation and fear? I sure haven't. We then complain that women have an irrational fear of violence and intimidation? Sounds like a lack of empathy on our part.

After reading this I don't like Adria Richards very much. She seems very self involved with a persecution context. However, she is still very much a victim of sexist online culture. Bad people can be victims too.

A man makes a mildly sexist unfunny joke and the result is a woman is unemployed for six months and fears for her safety. That is 'not cool', and ironically only reinforces her and other women's belief that there is a patriarchy out to get them.