The argument for universities to be a place to learn to think critically and not learn specific skills is an even stronger value prop in an era where useful skills likely change rapidly.
There needs to be a realization of how important communication skills are to develop and possess. The act of disagreement has skill levels that do not trigger emotional responses, and cause cross understanding to occur. Learning how to convey understanding and gain understanding from others becomes more and more important in a landscape of rapid change. Which we are collectively terrible at, with most companies being miscommunication circuses, with all the stress that generates, needlessly.
The problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time.
This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.
Some will probably dismiss your comment as partisan but it is very hard to (honestly) argue that this isn’t the case. “Think critically…” but only about the cliché punching bags of academia: capitalism, Western culture, American foreign policy, The Patriarchy, etc. I didn’t witness any college classes that encouraged us to think critically about socialism, or think critically about Islam, or think critically about non-Western countries’ foreign policy aims, or think critically about third-wave feminism’s impact on society. Instead, even questioning any of those sacred cows usually brands you as “far right” and professors sometimes even get fired for making others “feel unsafe” if they even try.
Note: you can still be an avowed and serious leftist and have my respect if you allow your ideas to be questioned, hold yourself to a standard of proof, and tolerate dissent. What I’m criticizing is the way especially in universities, people jump right to “You’re a Nazi/fascist and the only acceptable response is to shut you down and eject you from the community” if someone doesn’t embrace all the same political dogma as you.
"I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them."
Those on the left have been trying to advance their power through creating new taboos that cement their position. But they've misjudged. As a result Trump, by simply speaking to the resulting pain points, has been put on a potential course towards dictator. (Note, he doesn't have to do anything about it - just name the pain.) Will he succeed? Probably not, but he's certainly making a try of it.
Very few on the left are willing to engage in the self-reflection to realize how they have contributed to Trump's rise. It should be obvious - if Trump is an existential threat then you should reach out to people you dislike, who dislike Trump more than you. But no. We've been doubling down on ideological purity. And the horrible result is in the (currently partially demolished) White House.
100% agree. But this seems to be standard now for most political dialog. Either one group will call you a racist or the other group will call you communist. Or maybe antisemitic.
This is a compute memory trade, not compression vs. turobquant? Lemma 1 is something like, "forward pass is deterministic because it's deterministic" which means the input tokens were always the lower bound...which isn't caching? Smells tautological. What am I missing?
Well yeah, I just wrote it as a lemma, but it's basically close to tautological. Its only job is to formally ground the entropy argument that follows it. The interesting claim is what comes after: because KV vectors are deterministic functions of tokens, and because the model is a near-optimal predictor of its own distribution, the conditional entropy of each new KV vector given all previous ones is bounded by token-level perplexity. TurboQuant compresses against the marginal distribution of each vector in isolation -- that's the gap.
And yes, it's a compute/memory tradeoff, all caching is. The claim is just that the memory floor is much lower than anyone had formally established. Whether the compute cost of getting there is worth it is a fair open question the paper doesn't settle. But what if it is? Caching is the thread running through most of my work, and I intend to find out.
HN used to provide a really high signal to noise ratio for me, but it's degrading pretty quickly. There are new accounts below saying "hey I just learned what RTOS means, thanks!"
I reflexively reload HN many times per day, but I'm wondering if I need a walled garden with some sort of curation of individuals - which sucks - to get the signal level I want.
This probably isn't just an HN problem (GH's model is broken now). It's so cheap to make software that the previous process of releasing something new associated with a person is probably outdated. AI knows what sounds impressive too. So now we're drowning in software releases and attributing software to a person is meaningless.
This site is very much drowning in all the slop. It's over half of posts now I think, not just the "Show HN" posts. Those are 100% slop, as are all the non-show-hn new project announcements.
All the moderators have done is drop Show HN posts by newish accounts. It fixed nothing. I have to hope they have some ambitious plan along the lines of what you suggest.
I've noticed a gigantic uptick in text messages and phone calls where people try to bypass the call screening. It may get to the point where I'll only want to see comms from people in an allowlist.
My standard response in such cases is “Hello unknown number, who are you and why should I not immediately hang up?”.
The response “Am I speaking to…” gets cut off with “Nope, you answer my questions first”. If they _must_ speak to Mr [MySurname] I claim to be my PA and that they aren't talking to him(me) without convincing me they aren't a junk call first. If I have a few minutes to spare, it can be quite an entertaining little game keeping them on the line so they can't be conning someone more vulnerable. Unfortunately must junk calls these days are either initially automated or the humans are wise to people like me being a waste of their time so they hang up cutting that fun short.
I solved this by renting small office that has reception and they handle deliveries. They are not far and so if I get something I get a text and then I collect when is convenient for me. I really hate waiting for couriers to ring, so it's a massive stress relief.
That’s also what I want to do. I currently have my office/lab at home and waiting for deliveries to come is very stressful as I basically have to be ready to answer the door at any time, which can be many hours.
I usually answer unknown numbers if they are from my own country only. And then i open with a sound like 'huh??' so they cannot do the voice cloning. if no one says anything then hang up. usually its robocalls using crappy TTS but there are crews with more advanced capabilities out there.
devs have really got to start using NSA style naming conventions where they use the Joycean compound with random stuff that sounds cool e.g. BANNANADAIQUIRI or FOXACID.
Longer answer: About 10 years I moved into leadership roles (VP Eng) and while I continued to write code for POCs, it hasn't been my primary role for quite some time. DDIA has been a book I pull out often when guiding leaders and members of my teams when it comes to building distributed systems. I'm writing more code these days because I can, and I still reference DDIA and have the second edition preordered.
There's almost no shot to get hand authored posts some views (I tried with one of mine recently). I felt like I submitted it and a moment later there were like 20 new very obviously AI generated posts ahead of it.
Shameless plug - I sort of eluded in this post I wrote about Dark Factories generally and about rust being better than Go for building software (not just agents) with AI - but I think something generally important is feedback loops. While not all feedback loops are created equal and some will be superior, my argument is that holistic approach of including diverse, valuable feedback loops matters more.
