Whether a song is uplifting or not is completely subjective. Intelligence has nothing to do with it… Sometimes even a perfect expression of despair in a song can be uplifting to the listener, for many reasons.
Whenever I’ve been at my lowest, for ex, the various versions of Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" have always been a source of comfort.
Is it the embargo that prohibits fishermen in Cuba from fishing, farmers from harvesting, cubans from freely doing business? Is it also responsible for cubans getting beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently? Was it the embargo that destroyed every sugar mill in the country, textile factory, shoe factory, you name it?… The dictatorship is the one responsible for all these things.
CIA-backed groups in Miami were bombing Cuban hotels in the 1990s. They were bombing Cuban passenger airlines, killing many civilians. They were burning sugar fields. Of course there was also the Bay of Pigs invasion, the theft of Guantanamo harbor etc.
I feel the same way but do agree there’s a general lack of respect for the field relative to other professions. Here’s another thread on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23676651
Since you mentioned Einstein, it reminded me of a comment by Max Born on the subject, from the Born-Einstein letters:
“Einstein expressed over and over again the thought that one should not couple the quest for knowledge with a bread-and-butter profession, but
that research should be done as a private spare-time occupation. He himself wrote the first of his great treatises while earning his living as an employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He believed that only in
this way could one preserve one's independence. What he did not consider, however, was the organizational rigidity
of almost all professions, and the importance which individual members of a profession attach to their work. No professional pride could develop
without it. To be able successfully to practice science as a hobby, one has
to be an Einstein.”
Indeed. I recommend also checking out the 2nd volume of Einstein's collected papers. There is one with the proceedings from a conference on the subject, and Einstein is basically alone in trying to convince his peers, including Planck, of the reality of "quanta" of light, independent of the process of emission and absorption or mathematical tricks.
Are there no distinguishing features between these vector databases? I'm not familiar with them so I was looking for any comment on that in the article, whether some make different tradeoffs than others, are easier to operate or implement, more scalable, etc. That together with their relative novelty might help explain why there are so many.
It's not purely a matter of cost, right? Say you want or need a highly available, high performance distributed database with externally consistent semantics. Are you going to handle the sharding of your Postgres data yourself? What replication system will you use for each shard? How will you ensure strong consistency? Will you be able to do transactions across shards? These are problems that systems like Spanner, CockroachDB, etc solve for you.
Just curious, why would distributed be design requirement? Is individual machine failure likely in AWS/GCP? The only failure I have seen in region level issues which spanner or dynamo don't help with AFAIK.
Individual machine failure is not likely, but we're hypothesizing the need for multiple shards for high performance. So now we have more machines and so the probability of failure increases. So we need to add replication, but then we need to deal with data getting out of sync, etc.... As others have mentioned though, these issues only really become important at a certain scale.
Whenever I’ve been at my lowest, for ex, the various versions of Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" have always been a source of comfort.