LLMs are built based on human language and texts produced by people, and imitate the same exact reasoning patterns that exist in the training data. Sorry for being direct, but this is literally unsurprising. I think it is important to realize it to not anthropomorphize LLM / AI - strictly speaking they do not *become* anything.
If COVID demonstrated anything it is exactly the contrary, that we should not count on readily available vaccines, and rather should have *systemic* responses ready to be implemented when needed (including vaccine development, but not only). Every new virus is a new challenge and a vaccine may take time to develop. Meanwhile isolation protocols, masks etc. are all sensible actions. Prevention and prior investments into a wide range of measures, from education, to health protocols development and to vaccine technology research are all necessary to have these systemic responses ready in place.
I question the correlation and causality. I wonder how much of these eras are caused by brain physiology and genetics versus changes in the behavior with age, which can even be caused by external sociological factors, for example. Or a mix of both.
> From 32 years, the brain architecture appears to stabilise compared with previous phases, corresponding with a “plateau in intelligence and personality”.
For example, here - is this *caused* by genetics, or is it because in today's society this is about the age when you have finished your schooling and first working experiences and have simply less to learn?
I know my examples simplify the reasoning, but the question about causality still stands, I think.
I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)
As the Web becomes more and more entangled, I don't know if there is any guarantee of what is really independent. We should make a diagram of this. Hopefully no cyclic dependencies there yet.
Exactly. Even if my eyes adjust well to the relative darkness with my lights, the effect is erased the instant I encounter a car coming on me on the opposite side of the road.
One thing that helps is to make sure you don't look at the headlights directly. It really helps to look at the white line on the side of the road when the other car is close to preserve your night vision.
> Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays
What happened to having a business continuity plan? E.g. when your IT system is down, writing down incoming orders manually and filling them into the system when it's restored?
I have a creeping suspicion that people don't care about that, in which case they can't really expect more than to occasionally be forced into some downtime by factors outside of their control.
Either it's important enough to have contingencies in place, or it's not. Downtime will happen either way, no matter how brilliant the engineers working at these large orgs are. It's just that with so much centralization (probably too much) the blast range of any one outage will be really large.
My wife and I own a small theatre. We can process orders in-store just fine. Our customers can even avoid online processing fees if they purchase in-store. And if our POS system went down, we could absolutely fall back to pencil and paper.
Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online.
We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.
I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive.
The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer.
Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
Okay, as someone who also worked in that era I’ll be pedantic: internal phone systems went down. I experienced it multiple times so I certainly know it happened.
FWIW nothing I said was “self defeatist”, I made it clear I don’t think it’s a good thing. It’s just a simple financial reality that the additional redundancy isn’t worth the extra cost in a lot of situations.
Most businesses are totally fine if they have a few hours of downtime. More uptime is better, but treating an outage like a disaster or an e-commerce site like a power plant is more about software engineer egos than business or customer needs.
If AWS is down, most businesses on AWS are also down, and it’s mostly fine for those businesses.
I’ve worked in cloud consulting for a little over five years. I can say 95% of the time when I discuss the cost and complexity tradeoffs of their websites being down vs going multi region or god forbid “multi cloud”, they shrug and say, it will be fine if they are down for a couple of hours.
This was the same when I was doing consulting inside (ie large companies willing to pay the premium cost of AWS ProServe consultants) and outside working at 3rd party companies.
It's better to have diverse, imperfect infrastructure, than one form of infra that goes down with devastating results.
I'm being semi-flippant but people do need to cope with an internet that is less than 100% reliable. As the youth like to say, you need to touch grass
Being less flippant: an economy that is completely reliant on the internet is one vulnerable to cyberattacks, malware, catastrophic hardware loss
It also protects us from the malfeasance or incompetence of actors like Google (who are great stewards of internet infrastructure... until it's no longer in their interests)
Very nice that it can show the metadata. If you rather focus on the data itself, a Swiss army knife in the terminal is VisiData [1] . It works with many formats from CSV to Parquet. You'd need to install Pyarrow I think to read Parquet files. VisiData is great to not only peek into the file but filter it, sort, compute simple metrics and even can plot a histogram or scatterplot for ex. I avoided a lot of Jupyter notebooks by using VisiData :)
