I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently, at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help options, now always lead back to the return page.
So it's call them (which you can only find the number via Google.)
I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they slap AI in via phone too.
And so now that's slow and AI drivel. I guess soon I'll just have to do chargebacks!? Eg, if a package is missing or whatever.
Interesting, I regularly use chat-based support on amazon.ca to speak with (what I presume is) a real human after none of the control flow paths adequately resolve my issue. I've always found the support quick to reply and very helpful.
Granted, it's been 1-2 weeks since I had an issue, so it may have changed since then, or it could be only released to a subset of users.
Amazon is generally good at 1) resolving an issue in your favor and 2) getting you to a human if needed but gosh does it feel like I've taken a different path to do so every single time I'ever needed support.
Correct, and didn’t sell your data to do it. I’m okay with that. If I trust Apple with basically my life stored on their phone and in their cloud, and processing payments for me, and filtering my email, and spoofing my mac address on networks (and,and,and), it seems foolish to be worried about them knowing what tv shows I like to watch at night too. At least to me. It’s gonna be a sad day when Tim leaves and user privacy isn’t a company focus anymore.
Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism.
One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions.
From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights."
Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain.
And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days.
But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety.
Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt.
How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt?
There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual.
It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch.
Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care.
Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.
No way, it would be such a humongous quality of life improvement for humanity. I don't think we will just give up on it. Car interiors could be reworked once all the controls were gone, throughput on freeways/roads could be optimized, all the parking lots could be closed.
I'm starting to realize that this is most likely what will happen. They'll be available in select major cities, for certain areas, under certain weather conditions.
I'm also curious about this. They're coming to Minneapolis next year, so apparently they're confident in their ability to figure out cold / unpredictable weather (in urban conditions at least).
LIDAR can't be compared to radarless cars (yes, to Teslas) The car might have a better understanding in low visibility conditions than a person (blizzard)
I think this comment is referencing the government's recent announcement[0] to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. They do climate research at the Mesa Laboratory there.
It's open to the public for visits. They have a small science museum, offices, a library, etc. I highly recommend anyone with interest and opportunity to visit the mesa lab soon. It may not be open much longer. The view alone is worth the trip, and the building is cool too.
I really dislike systemd, and its monolithic mass of over-engineered, all encompassing code. So I have to hang a comment here, showing just how easy this is to manage in a simple startup script. How these features are always exposed.
Taken from a SO post:
# Create a cgroup
mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/my_cgroup
# Add the process to it
echo $PID > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/my_cgroup/cgroup.procs
# Set the limit to 40MB
echo $((40 \* 1024 \* 1024)) > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/my_cgroup/memory.limit_in_bytes
Linux is so beautiful. Unix is. Systemd is like a person with makeup plastered 1" thick all over their face. It detracts, obscures the natural beauty, and is just a lot of work for no reason.
I applaud your efforts, but that seems difficult to me. There's so much nuance in language, and the original spanish translation would even be dependent upon locale-destination of the original dictionary. Which would also be time based, as language changes over time.
And that translation is likely only a rough approximation, as words don't often translate directly. To add in an extra layer (spanish -> english) seems like another layer of imperfect (due to language) abstraction.
Of course your efforts are targeting a niche, so likely people will understand the attempt and be thankful. I hope this suggestion isn't too forward, but this being an electronic version, you could allow some way for the original spanish to be shown if desired. That sort of functionality would be quite helpful, even non-native spanish speakers might get a clearer picture.
What tools are you using to abstract all of this?
If the spacing and columns of the images are consistent, I'd think imagemagick would allow you to automate extraction by column (eg, cutting the individual pages up), and OCR could then get to work.
For the Shipibo side, I'd want to turn off all LLM interpretation. That tends to use known groupings of words to probabilistically determine best-match, and that'd wreak havoc in this case.
Back to the images, once you have imagemagick chop and sort, writing a very short script to iterate over the pages, display them, and prompt with y/n would be a massive time saver. Doing so at each step would be helpful.
For example, one step? Cut off header and footer, save to dir. Using helpful naming conventions (page-1, and page-1-noheader_footer). You could then use imagemagick to combine page-1 and -age-1-noheader_footer side by side.
Now run a simple bash vet script. Each of 500 pages pops up, you instantly see the original and the cut result, and you hit y or n. One could go through 500 pages like this in 10 to 20 minutes, and you'd be left with a small subset of pages that didn't get cut properly (extra large footer or whatever). If it's down to 10 pages or some such, that's an easy tweak and fix for those.
Once done, you could do the same for column cuts. You'd already have all the scripts, so it's just tweaking.
I'm mentioning all of this, because combo of automation plus human intervention is often the best method to something such as this.
Thanks for the suggestions, I do appreciate it. I was being pretty brief with my post but I really have spent a lot of time and tried this from a number of angles. I've had good luck with non-LLM tools to do the initial OCR, but it's not context aware especially about column/page breaks (like I mentioned it's kind of a dirty scan, and if the breaks happen on a Shipibo part it barfs a bit. Good for a rough search at least).
I would love to create a json version of it that would essentially have a bunch of fields for each word (Shipibo/Spanish/English word/definition/example, type of word, etc). It's further complicated by how words can be modified in Shipibo (it's actually a very technical language- words can have any number of prefixes and suffixes tagged on to change their meaning and their precision. In their "icaros", the healing songs they sing in ceremony, the most technical use of the language is considered to be the most beautiful. Essentially poetry from their "medical" jargon).
I've done some human-in-the-loop attempts but still come up short in one way or another (I end up getting frustrated and throwing my hands up after seeing how much time I dump on it). So I figure this will remain a good test as the tools (and my prompting abilities) get better. It's definitely not urgent for me.
I feel dumbfounded. All I've ever heard from rust users, is the equivalent of football fans running up, waving pendants in my face and screaming. So much so, that everything else said seems like the wild fantasies of "our team gonna win".
To hear "yes, it's safer" and yet not "everyone on the planet not using rust is a moron!!!", is a nice change.
Frankly, the whole cargo side of rust has the same issues that node has, and that's silly beyond comprehension. Memory safe is almost a non-concern, compared to installing random, unvetted stuff. Cargo vet seems barely helpful here.
I'd want any language caring about security and code safety, to have a human audit every single diff, on every single package, and host those specific crates on locked down servers.
No, I don't care about "but that will slow down development and change!". Security needs to be first and front.
And until the Rust community addresses this, and its requirement for 234234 packages, it's a toy.
And yes, it can be done. And no, it doesn't require money. Debian's been doing just this very thing for decades, on a far, far, far larger scale. Debian developers gatekeep. They package. They test and take bug reports on specific packages. This is a solved problem.
Caring about 'memory safe!' is grand, but ignoring the rest of the ecosystem is absurd.
Debian has been doing this for decades, yes, but it is largely a volunteer effort, and it's become a meme how slow Debian is to release things.
I've long desired this approach (backporting security fixes) to be commercialized instead of the always-up-to-date-even-if-incompatible push, and on top of Red Hat, Suse, Canonical (with LTS), nobody has been doing it for product teams until recently (Chainguard seems to be doing this).
But, if you ignore speed, you also fail: others will build less secure products and conquer the market, and your product has no future.
The real engineering trick is to be fast and build new things, which is why we need supply chain commoditized stewards (for a fee) that will solve this problem for you and others at scale!
But then you as a consumer/user of Debian packages need to stay on top of things when they change in backwards-incompatible ways.
I believe the sweet spot is Debian-like stable as the base platform to build on top of, and then commercial-support in a similar way for any dependencies you must have more recent versions on top.
> But then you as a consumer/user of Debian packages need to stay on top of things when they change in backwards-incompatible ways.
If you need latest packages, you have to do it anyway.
> I believe the sweet spot is Debian-like stable as the base platform to build on top of, and then commercial-support in a similar way for any dependencies you must have more recent versions on top.
That if the company can build packages properly. Also too old OS deps sometimes do throw wrench in the works.
Tho frankly "latest Debian Testing" have far smaller chance breaking something than "latest piece of software that couldn't figure out how to upstream to Debian"
The difference is between staying on stable and cherry-picking the latest for what you really do need, and being on everything latest.
The latter has a huge maintenance burden, the former is the, as I said already, sweet spot. (And let's not talk about combining stable/testing, any machine I tried that on got into an non-upgradeable mess quickly)
I am not saying it is easy, which is exactly why I think it should be a commercial service that you pay for for it to actually survive.
I agree with this, but the open source licenses allow anyone who purchases a stewarded implementation to distribute it freely.
I would love to see a software distribution model in which we could pay for vetted libraries, from bodies that we trust, which would become FOSS after a time period - even a month would be fine.
There are flaws in my argument, but it is a safer option than the current normal practices.
When it is tailored to one customer, that dependency being maintained for you is probably a very particular version you care about. So while copylefted code you can always reshare, it's the timeliness and binary package archives that are where the value really is.
Not dismissing your point, but Looking at the article, it looks like it's in rust unsafe code. Which seems to me to be a point that the rest of the rust code is fine but the place where they turned off the static safety the language provides they got bit.
Hey! Can't I just enjoy my schadenfreude in peace?
I guess the takeaway is that, doubly so, trusting rust code to be memory safe, simply because it is rust isn't sensible. All its protections can simple be invalidated, and an end user would never know.
Morality being absolute means just that you subjectively consider some moral rules absolute. Doesn't make them so, the way the law of gravity is absolute.
And it doesn't mean that every human society agrees to what you consider "absolute".
All things you consider "absolute", there are whole societies which found them to be just fine, and you'd do too if you were raised in them, including incest, murder of innocents, slavery, torture...
Many things are naturally repulsive, but are indulged out of necessity or gain. For instance Aristotle wasn't opposed to slavery, yet nonetheless in his writings, now some 2400+ years ago, he found himself obligated to lay out an extensive and lengthy defense and rationalization of such, and he even predicted what would eventually end it:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
There were millennia of efforts to end slavery, but it's only the technological and industrial revolution that finally succeeded in doing so. But the point is that even though Aristotle was ostensibly not opposed to slavery, he nonetheless knew it was a decision that needed justification because it was fundamentally repulsive, even in a society where it was ubiquitous and relatively non-controversial, thousands of years ago.
This 'natural repulsion' is, I think, some degree of evidence for persistent, if not absolute, morality throughout at least thousands of years of humanity's existence, and I see no reason to assume it would not trend back long further than that.
>Many things are naturally repulsive, but are indulged out of necessity or gain
Most "naturally repulsive" things were accepted just fine in one society or another.
Aristole spent time to defend and rationalize slavery because that was just job, to spend time rationalizing things. Other societies practiced it with no such worries, and found it perfectly natural.
But even if we grant you your "naturally repulsive" actions existing, it doesn't mean they are objectively morally wrong. Just that their moral judgement is not just based on culture and historical period, but also on evolutionary adaptations. These could very well be considered fine in an earlier/later evolutionary stage (in an earlier one, for sure: animals don't have such qualms).
His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts. And indeed his arguments for slavery were some of his weakest precisely because they were uncharacteristic rationalizations.
I completely agree that if you go back far enough in the evolutionary pipeline then my claim becomes invalid. I also think it would not apply to people of a sufficiently reduced IQ. You need to have a minimum of intelligence to understand what you're doing, alternatives, and its consequences on others. But once you have that baseline of IQ then I think morality, and a natural repulsion to certain behaviors, comes as naturally as communication.
>His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts.
I think that's an after-the-fact assessment of what his treatment of the subject was, which we arrive at because of our modern morals.
In his time he, and his audience, didn't think of it as rationalization, but as legitimate use of logic and reason, just like his treatment of other topics.
>But once you have that baseline of IQ then I think morality, and a natural repulsion to certain behaviors, comes as naturally as communication.
Might go the over way around too though: once you go above a certain IQ, it might be easier to treat morality as a fiction naked apes developed, as opposed to something objective, and even discard it entirely.
No, his arguments were materially different in this case. Most of his arguments came from first principles and worked outwards from some baseline; in particular - what is virtue and how virtue, itself, leads to satisfaction in life, and onward to how this can apply to systems and politics in general. But slavery he treated in an entirely different, practically ad hoc, fashion starting from slavery and then trying to shoe-horn in a justification along the lines of what you alluded to already with e.g. natural order and it being an inescapable inevitability.
It was a complete, and poor, rationalization. He even added, almost as a disclaimer, that there was not a complete overlap between 'natural' slaves and legal slaves, giving himself a plausible out to explain the endless examples of the repulsiveness of the institution by applying a no true scotmans fallacy, 'Ahh yes, I would agree with you there. But that is because that is not a natural slave, but merely a legal one.' And this is not my opinion alone. It has long been considered notably weak, especially from an otherwise brilliant man.
And I think that leads into your next issue. I don't think higher intelligence makes it easier to treat morality as a fiction, but rather even average intelligence, without discipline and virtue, makes it very easy to engage in self delusion and cognitive dissonance. Even those conditions are hardly a guarantee - Aristotle certainly had and strived for both discipline and virtue, yet the desire to rationalize what we want to be true, even if we know it is not, is a never-ending struggle that's easy to fail.
I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently, at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help options, now always lead back to the return page.
So it's call them (which you can only find the number via Google.)
I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they slap AI in via phone too.
And so now that's slow and AI drivel. I guess soon I'll just have to do chargebacks!? Eg, if a package is missing or whatever.
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