Evals saturating faster is interesting. Do you think this is an indication of RL or training pipelines getting better over time at the labs, or is this primarily an indication of the data / RL-environment industry scaling up over time?
Providing API for building applications that have transactions and help with idempotent producing is really exciting. This will help lower a lot of pains associated with building stream processing systems. Doing it with very little performance overhead is amazing.
I do feel that calling it "Exactly-once delivery with kafka" is slightly misleading as this requires the applications to be written in a certain way. The title makes is sound too general and borders on claiming something that is close to impossible. I dont want to be too critical here as the author was very honest with what this means in the blog post. Regardless of the title this is an amazing feature.
I got the link in an email. Not sure how to link to the email. Anyways the questions are specific to brokerage I dont think it is of any use to anyone other than them.
I think even those who are not worried about their next meal are not going to protest this. India has seen so many terror attacks labeled as intelligence failure that any move to beef up the intelligence infrastructure may even be welcomed. The sad thing is that the probability of this data being misused for political reasons is so much higher in India than in the USA.
I dont know if bitcoins will ever stabilize or go down to zero but I also believe that no one can be so sure about how a free market is going to behave to just write it off at this moment.
Bitcoins slipped into speculative realm a couple of weeks ago and probably after the crash the speculators will exit the market. A stable bitcoin can easily serve the three functions you listed above. As I said in my first comment this volatility raises questions about longvity of bitcoins but they have not ceased to be real money, at least for now.
It is just a 3-4 year old technology lets wait and watch how this plays out before writing it off completely.
If we get down to the basics I think anything that is a medium of exchange is a currency. So in some circles cigarettes and Tide work as currency. Though these "currencies" are not legal tender.
Given the volatility you may doubt the longevity of bitcoin as a currency, but since you can exchange it for some goods and services it looks like Real Money to me (at least right now).
I think the volume/unit time during the crash is generally higher than during the bubble phase. This can be seen in the steeper slope of price-time graph during declining phase compared to the rising phase of most bubbles. I guess fear is a quicker call to action than greed in financial markets.
I agree that Bitcoins were designed as an instrument to facilitate transfer of value and not as store of wealth. But the example of a transaction you just gave in your post is not how people spend currency. No one converts a currency (100$) to another currency (0.478 Bitcoins) for immediate spending in the real world. People generally minimize number of currency conversions (to save transaction costs) and store the currency (wallets or banks) for some time before spending it, and storing volatile currencies carries huge risk.
The current price explosion is not good for bitcoin if you look at it as a currency. People who believe this is a bubble will just cash out of bitcoins anticipating a fall and the (apparently) greater number of people thinking the value will rise will just hold on to the coins. The only way this price explosion can be helpful is in providing media exposure to bitcoins and cryto-currencies. Only after we have sustained period of stable prices we can hope of bitcoins becoming a major facilitator of transaction.
I dont know a lot about Thatcher but when Indira Gandhi's election was overturned by the courts on ground of election fraud she proceeded to suspend elections and civil liberties. I hope that you are correct and we would never see anyone like Indira Gandhi, no nation deserves to be ruled by a tyrant like her.
This is exactly the same algorithm as the standard one we use : Multiply all possible combinations of digits and appropriately combine the results. This is just the graphical version of writing down numbers.
I read an article today which pointed out how Feynman went around cracking safes during the Manhattan Project. Something fundamental has changed in the society ... Imagine the present if people like Jobs/Woz would have been locked up for phone phreaking.
As a society we do agree to follow the law and punish those who break them. But remember that the law of the land is not some God given set of laws. Several people broke segregation laws during the civil rights movement and in my view they should not have paid up (I think you may also agree with this). Turing paid up because he broke the law but now I guess there is almost unanimous consent that him paying up was not the right outcome. So paying up for breaking the law is not as black and white as it sometimes seems. Lets reserve our judgements for some time.
Edit : Also as Udo points out lets stop this line of argument for a bit. Some members of the community either knew Aaron or were affected by his work, lets not subject them to this argument right now.
Someone who could have contributed very positively to the society just killed himself. We can't reverse that, the best we can do now is to learn from this incidence and try to minimize it in the future. Explaining it away in the name of insanity will not help.
This may make good business sense as you point out, but do you think pros and cons for google's business were evaluated before Larry decided to pay for these vaccines? I think in absence of any evidence, we should give him the benefit of doubt and look at this as a genuine act of charity.
I genuinely want to know how a conspiracy theorist thinks. I can understand the though process behind believing a vaccine having side effects like autism, or adverse effect on the immune system. But the line of thought that leads one to believe that a flu vaccine can allow the government to read you thoughts is beyond my comprehension.
Are you serious? I think he is a very strong man. He rose above petty concerns, like how his masculinity will be judged in a public forum, to forgive his wife and then share the fact.
These regulations are definitely not stupid. Hotels keep detailed records of who checked in and out which can be used by law enforcement. If people are allowed to sublease their places they would have to build a similar infrastructure else it will become easier to evade law enforcement.
I agree with you. Inventing a new business model is difficult and can take a lot of time. While keeping a website like twitter up takes a lot of money, so they do not have the luxury to keep working on this new business model.
I guess to succeed in this business you need to have your business model figured out from the start, else you may end up making similar decisions as twitter did under pressure to make money quickly.
When you say the algorithm affects 0.3% of searches on google do you mean you select each query with a probability of 0.003 and pass it through this algo, or this algo is used 100% of the time when query A is followed by query B and these combinations account for 0.3% of all searches. If it is the latter then the fact that Obama is a magic keyword may mean that you are biasing a very high percentage of political searches. I am sure election involving an incumbent is an edge case which is very difficult to account for, but now that we know of this I hope google will try to correct the results to remove these specific accidental biases in the future.
Academia has the same incentive system as other fields, i.e., a combination of money/fame/power and all three comes from doing great research. Great research will get you the citations regardless of the number of former students. Also number of citations is a necessary but not a sufficient indicator of great research.