More understanding for the seemingly sudden shifts and what they could mean. Mark Blyth has had a few works that seem to be slightly ahead of the mainstream, so I tend to really pay attention to what he's thinking about and why he thinks these things matter. Anyone telling you what's in store is very likely to get specifics wrong, but general trajectories are often easier to get right and prep for even if they turn out to not matter.
Also, this is probably one of the first question and answer periods for a talk that had any value what so ever. Some people in the audience there really trying to better understand these ideas and play with them together through dialogue. Not just grandstanding or asking about irrelevant things the person in the audience knows about.
I love when you couple this with the video friendlyjordies did about how Australia, having reelected their Labor government, is now perfectly set to do what America couldn't. Australia has Future Made in Australia, which has a lot of the same investment public-private partnerships the now abandoned IRA had. With the end of one, billions, if not trillions in private investment are potentially up for grabs. If not Canada, at least our sister state has a shot at the prize.
I maintain a website that I've built entirely by hand, being read by basically nobody, for no other reason than the joy it brings me and maybe the vein hope I can inspire someone to see what I see, or at the very least, consider reconsidering.
That said, yeah, get weird. Never fool yourself, you're the easiest to fool, but also never give in and never give up. As Bernard Shaw wrote, The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Nobody would have created many of the incredibly cool things we have if they'd stuck to what was easy and what already worked. They thought they saw what could work better and went for it. Many failed, some were right, a few even paid a high price for their dream. Most of the things around you are mealy an accident of history and incredibly hard work, not some divine truth. Reinvent things now and again for no other reason than you can. Do unconventional things for unconventional outcomes. To see what's possible, and to see if you really can make things better. Build your dreams, and maybe change the world. Probably not, but the avalanche starts with a single snowflake.
Another one of those people I brought up in a conversation that I think more people should know about. There may not be anyone less well known who's had as big an impact as Norman Borlaug. If you're alive today, that's partly the fault of Norman Borlaug. Truly one of the greats.
Less a learning and more a plea. It's so cringe listening to people talk about statistics like they're omnipotent, going to wipe out all life on earth, or obsolete the terrain for a map. Conversations become much more productive when sophists stop trying to bear witness to the next coming in the output of gradient descent. It's just a tool. It's not magic. Yes, this has significantly surpassed the state-of-the-art NLP models of just a few years ago. No, you shouldn't be using it in lieu of actually learning how statistics work and then picking the right model for the job.
As someone who's been using computational statistics and machine learning for about a decade, I'd years ago written off large parts of the literature as mostly non-replicable p-hacking by people running the software equivalent of the egg-drop experiment. So many "advances" boil down to either moving the goal post by making up a benchmark you're conveniently the best at, overfitting a model and declaring it state-of-the-art, Frankensteining an ensemble for a one percent improvement at ten times the cost, or one of a few other shenanigans researchers have been routinely pulling since AlexNet really shook things up.
As it turns out, I was right that Attention Is All You Need was, in fact, game changing. The game I wasn't really paying attention to was BERT, a model so bloated and of such limited utility, I thought it was mostly a joke at the time. Turns out, if you just keep going with the joke, well past reason, until your model begins to use so much energy that it competes with the fossil fuel industry to see who can cook the planet faster, there's some interesting and useful properties to the joke.
Just please stop telling me it's thinking or alive or concious, or any other biological adjective. We still have neither a scientific nor philosophical understanding of what thinking even is. It's just statistically likely unstructured data. Is it useful? Yeah, in some applications. Is it reliable? It's reliable enough for some applications. Is it efficient? Mostly no, but some applications don't yet seem to have efficient alternatives. Using it for those we do, seems pretty foolish given the situation.
Great breakdown on how to handle memory without uncontrolled malloc()/new everywhere. Instead, create a manager for a subsystem that has its own memory pool. It can then use array indices (either on the pool or a lookup structure) which it issues and accepts through its API.
I'd heard about the technique before elsewhere but this breaks it down and gives some great examples. You've already been doing this with files, windows, and other resources the operating system provides you, so you may even understand the idea intuitively. Either way, a great piece on the technique.
I'm the type of person to go listen to a live symphony orchestra once every few years. I went to a performance of a famous classic symphony that was preceded by the premier of a brand new symphony. A brand new symphony, delightful, and all I could think while listening was, oh, it's just a movie score.
When the only work for composers is scoring movies, new symphonies are going to sound a lot like movie scores.
When the only work for developers is SaaS, software's going to all start to look like web shit.
Unless a market and/or business model is soon found to bring about a renascence of desktop application development, I'm finding I have to agree with Casey Muratori that gaming really will become the Irish Monasteries of software development.
This is pretty funny. I love when someone pays an artist just to bring something fun into the world. I do it now and again but we can always use more of that.
Art and fun aside, if you don't know RFC 2199, now's your chance to learn one of the most influential RFCs ever written.
Already know that one by heart? Do you know about the related RFC 6919?
If you already know both of those, well then perhaps I could interest you in RFC 3339, what people usually mean when they say ISO 8601.
Not going to use Elm, nor do I condone trying to treat your type system as a formal specification language. However, there are a lot of data structures I often see that have all sorts of invalid states available. Mostly places where two or more pieces of data have to agree on a value or state. Structures that are begging for some incorrect logic to corrupt things and cause unhandled edge cases.
In almost every case, very simple changes to the structure of the data could completely eliminate the problems. If your familiar with normal forms, this will feel super familiar to you. Relational algebra transcends SQL databases because it started as math, and was later ported to a programming language to try and make it easier to approach. If your familiar with Entity Component Systems (ECS) from game engines, you will start to see how it's all interconnected. When you think in normal forms, both your data and logic improve.
I liked the analogy someone said a while ago, that LLMs would be able to make all texts interactive. One big body of text is a database. Obviously not an accurate mechanism to query the data, but who really cares about accuracy if you can sidestep those who'd thwart your aims at power?
As developers rushed to build the ultimate surveillance apparatus, we felt safe that at least access to the knowledge trapped in the database required some technical expertise. We the priesthood would be able to guard access to the troves of surveillance only for the aims of a better future. We could intervene and prevent sociopaths using the data to enact their control fantasies.
Turns out people with a lot of power really want to get a list of those who'd dare oppose them. Doesn't really matter how accurate it is. A list only 20% accurate works just as well for the goon squads.
This essay came up in a chat I was having with some people at work. It's a real depressing take on the topic, but worth a consideration if you've ever wondered why groups of people don't really exist in the real world anymore outside of capital generation.
There's more to it than capitalism fundamentally exploits everything to death as is portrayed in the piece. Sure that's one of the best modes to kill things. It doesn't fully explain why interest groups don't form much anymore though. This is one entry from the work, Meningness. I'm not fully sold on it all, but I think this presents a good picture of what any shared endeavour seems to experience as it grows and dies.
Recently had reason to briefly explain how Google Spanner works when I was discussing Amazon Aurora Limitless. I have no idea if Limitless implements the same tech as Spanner, but my guess is it's not entirely unreasonable. Again, I'm not talking about Limitless, I really don't know how it works. But someone was explaining it to me and it just sounded like Spanner.
Worth knowing if you're in the market for a job or hiring. The flip side of these scammers trying to get hired to infect your company with malware is running interviews for devs and having a technical interview involving running malware on your machine. They'll say it's something like a web API server you'll build a frontend against or something like that. They're hoping you use your employer's laptop to do it and either have a bunch of credentials on your machine, or if they're really fancy, they'll wait in the background and see what they can do over the next couple days. Even if it's just your personal laptop, expect to get extorted.
