One of the best recent articles I’ve read, a vivid picture of paleontology research. Science needs more big personalities and disputes, in its mysterious way it actually advances science
I know someone who worked for the archaeologist who uncovered the then-oldest human tools in the Americas (the first pre-Clovis finds, IIRC).
He was ... unusual. My friend once spent an entire day hiding in their car at the worksite, because he was onsite that day, and they forgot to bring duct tape to cover their shoes. Shoes had to be fresh-wrapped in duct tape to prevent anything modern from dropping out of the treads onto the excavation floor.
You can ask lots of logical questions... "Why didn't they just...?" Answer: because the famous archaeologist was a nutbag, and controlled the worksite as his own personal absolute fiefdom. OTOH, if someone ever found a miniscule piece of glass at the 15,000YA level in that dig (as an example), his reputation would strengthen the dating.
That being said... his success was undeniable. Could he have done it, AND been less of a nutbag? Probably. But we don't live in Dr. Strange's multiverse.
From my read of the article, those big personalities were lording over a pretty dysfunctional and toxic workplace. At least from the expendable juniors' PoV.
Indeed, I've come across enough of those kinds of researchers, scientific knowledge comes a distant second on the list of priorities to bolstering their own ego.
There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.
To me it's pretty clear the way this will happen. You will need to buy additional credits or subscriptions through these LLMs that feedback payment to things like NYT and book publishers. It's all stolen. I don't even want to hear it. This company doesn't want to pay up and willing to let user's privacy hang in the balance to draw the case out until they get sure footing with their device launches or the like (or additional markets like enterprise, etc).
LLMs are not massive archives of data. The big models are a few TB in size. No one is forgoing a NYT subscription because they can ask ChatGPT to print out NYT news stories.
If you are internal to Google, you can find his goodbye letter with a fair amount of additional detail. He chose not to make that additional detail public, so I won't either.
Here’s what I want, a keyboard only code editor, (ideally with all the vim keybindings and features) that also has in built lsp for popular languages like C, C++, Go and just works out of the box (even better if it has good code completion with copilot or something similar). I can’t seem to get this anywhere. I’m still sticking with neovim for now but it’s code complete doesn’t work well that I’ve turned it off and I have to maintain its config every few months.
My experience is that C and C++ can't be done well, unless you have the world's most trivial code base.
There are dozens of possible build tools for C and C++, all with complex syntax and most with mandatory user provided input to configure the build. For anything beyond simple syntax highlighting, you need to be able to context parse all the multi-file cross references and inputs that can only come from building the entire project with preprocessing and then parsing the LLM (the intermediate syntax, not the AI thing). For most projects that are nontrivial, a compilation cycle can be 10 minutes to 4+ hours, and requires the specific settings you want to build with. Breaking them down to per-file also doesn't work because you'd have to do a complete dry run execution of the build system just to get the specific toolchain build settings for each file. And remember there are dozens of possible build tools that your tool has to emulate a dry run of now.
Most tools I've seen can only make a half attempt at C/C++ as a result, and usually the solutions scale incredibly poorly. The basic CTags for example, that just indexes symbols in your project source code, easily generates a >4 GB database file on something like a Yocto build. Which is why they invented Exuberant CTags that uses a binary database to try and speed it up. But even still, you're getting almost no useful context from results, and it has a very long lag in response when you do ask something.
The AI LLM support for C and C++ seems able to make guesses with the partial info that's available to them, whether its only the one file of context or the whole project (very uncommon), but it has the lowest successful output rate of any context helper I've ever used.
1. An authoritarian government that can actually do things but also mess up and be harsh against anyone opposing it - China
2. A democratic government that can’t get anything done, citizens can’t rely on police for any crimes, courts for any justice, politicians for any development, where the politics of the nation just constantly seeks to divide on basis of caste, religion, language etc, and the nation as a whole wallows in mediocrity.
What is special about India that condemns it specifically to these two choices? There are other countries (which aren't China) which somehow manage to have democratic governments that aren't incompetent.
India is as the commenter said, the worst of both worlds. The government managed to drive a comedian into hiding, for a make a crude (non political) joke about sex with parents. The government drove another comedian into hiding, for making a political joke and closed down the bar where he was performing, for the sole crime of hosting him. The government regularly censors movies, bans books, censors speech etc. At the same time we get no development, the drain outside my house is still not covered. It’s just arbitrary authoritarianism on the most pointless use cases.
India should have just been given to a monarch who liked the country and its people unlike the British or the Mughals
Don’t forget the guy who had to flee India because he explained that the weeping statue of Jesus was not a miracle, but the result of capillary action from a nearby clogged drain.
1. “So much money your grandchildren don’t need to work”
2. 100M
3. Not 100M
So what is it? I’m just curious, I find 100M hard to believe but Zuck is capable of spending a lot.
reply