But isn't the real issue how these small changes add up over time? Seems kind of like saying "a single car will not put out enough CO2 to impact the atmosphere" but here we are with millions (billions?) of cars that are definitely having an impact on their environment. Granted, we will not have millions of data centers but maybe we have enough that it makes a negative impact. Certainly seems plausible.
I don't know anything about ecology, but my intuition is that all of these things from wind turbines to data centers under water, have an impact on their ecosystems. It wouldn't surprise me if we found out these had a negative (or neutral) impact on their environments.
I guess my point is that it seems naive to simply hand-wave off the possibility that these supposed environmentally friendly technologies actually negatively impact their environment. Whether or not that negative impact is less than the alternative is an interesting question.
Sorry, I strongly dislike both "Work harder" and "Never give up". How hard is hard enough? When you're burnt out? Or even harder still? And why _never_ give up? What if you're "not giving up" pursuing a wrong thing? If you "give up" and start pursuing the right thing, why is this bad? What is "giving up" anyway. Not sure if trivializing these questions is necessarily productive.
You really want all their staff to lose their jobs just so your image search results experience is better? Seems a bit selfish don't you think? What about all the users that enjoy it?
I don't like pinterest and I get the frustration but come on, there are better solutions than "this thing bothers me so let's get rid of it completely."
At least for beginners, they absolutely are. I have found undergrads generally get the idea behind something like HashMap<Integer, String> but getting them to reason about OCaml modules takes quite a bit of effort.
(int, string) Map.t doesn't seem to be too many steps away from your example. When I was learning OCaml, I found that much of the module and module type system can just be seen as a more beefed up version of interfaces in OOP languages, so it didn't take long to see its benefits.
> I can't understand why OCaml doesn't have mass adoption.
Probably for the exact same reason each year you think about learning OCaml you decide not to (I mean this sincerely, not trying to be snide).
I think the main reasons it doesn't see mass adoption in industry:
* There are only two major companies that do a substantial amount of OCaml that I can think of off the top of my head, Jane Street and Ahrefs. Facebook does some OCaml too but I don't think it's a core part of their stack.
* The tooling is lacking.
* People have an easier time learning Python or Java so you'll have a larger pool of candidates if you use one of those languages.
Haskell is like the nerdy cousin of the ML family. Everyone knows he's smart, but no one would think to ask him to fix the kitchen sink or install the new dishwasher.
Seriously, Haskell is massively impressive, both as a research language and as an implementation. But it does not shed that certain research attitude. Every known problem seems to be boring. "Oh you want a proxying http server? No problem, this is just the inversion of the endofoo over the category of abstract Monobars!". Sometimes I get the feeling that no one focuses on shipping actual software with Haskell.
Care to elaborate on this point? Maybe it's just because I'm coming from Haskell (lol), but my experience with OCaml's tooling has been pretty darn good.
While I don't think there's a heavyweight IDE for OCaml à la IntelliJ, in Emacs I get my error messages inline, on-the-fly checking (including type inference and checking, which is huge), and pretty good completion. All of this seems to "just work".
The build system also seems to "just work" and utop is pretty nice.
I just cannot understand how people find Python easy to learn but languages like F# or OCaml hard to learn. I personally find Python to be a much more confusing language than F#.
I agree with most of your points. Though for the Python and Java thing, I think it's less that they're easier to learn and more that they are taught in school and/or already have a lot of popularity/momentum.
I am not sure I follow. It seems plausible that the sky-high taxes are a major motivator for people wanting to leave CA but a recent change in SF made it possible for people to move to a different state (e.g., Twitter and FB allowing permanent remote work and Google working remotely into 2021).
Poster was suggesting high state taxes were to blame, but if that was true, one would also expect that trend to extend to other cities in the same state. If it’s due to remote workers as you suggest, then it should also apply to cities with a high population of tech workers and headquarters like San Jose. According to the article, it doesn’t. This makes the state tax argument hard to defend.
I don't see how this is a nuanced perspective - it seems to restate the same complaints/arguments just about every comment makes in these discussions.
A nuanced perspective would look at the arguments as to why OpenAI is doing the things they are doing. For example:
* OpenAI publishes in closed journals (actually conference proceedings) because that is where all the cutting edge research is published and reviewed. I cannot recall an OpenAI paper that wasn't available either via arXiv or their website, despite being published in a closed journal. What is the alternative here? Where should they go for quality peer-review? Yes you can argue the peer review at top conferences is not quality, but is worse quality than no peer-review or peer review from open-access no-name journals?
* How does OpenAI make money? How much are they bringing in? How much does it cost to support things like the OpenAI Gym, etc.? How much does it cost OpenAI in terms of bandwidth to host pre-trained versions of GPT-3? At some point a company needs to make money and prioritize resources - they can't give everything away for free in perpetuity.
I don't think these questions have obvious answers - there is give and take.
It seems like there are a lot of good reasons for every choice they made.
Organizations are constantly making decisions that are trading off certain values for others, i.e. openness vs safety/expediency/funding. But if they use the word open in their name, signalling to people that is one of their foundational values, people will expect them to pick openness even when it's not necessarily the easiest, safest, most expedient, or most profitable choice. They expect them to pick openness when it's hard.
that's not what happened with OpenAI though. They're not a non-profit anymore, they changed to a "controlled profit" (lol) model.
I didn't know this was even possible/legal. Start as a non-profit for all the tax advantages and convert to for-profit once you've got a saleable product? Maybe startups should start doing this
What's the point? If your business doesn't turn a profit then you don't owe business income taxes anyways. Most businesses take several years to reach profitability.
"OpenAI is governed by the board of OpenAI Nonprofit, which consists of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & CTO), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Tasha McCauley."
Yes, but the computing they are trying to do is expensive, so it makes sense to then try and get some self-sustaining revenue by leveraging their research into a software service. I must admit I don't know about their current status of funding from large companies etc, but I do think it makes sense to try and make a bit of their own money to be more independent.
How on earth is any of the advertising antagonizing? I had to read through the course page twice to look for anything remotely resembling a criticism and came up blank.
If it is the quote you added to the bottom of your comment, my question still stands. That isn't an insult to anyone (certainly not mathematicians) but rather a comment that many people freeze up when it comes to mathematics (at least that was my interpretation).
There is a somewhat common attitude towards abstract mathematics that its preciseness is something of a bother to people and that it requires some kind of "cure".
Immanuel Kant wrote about it [1] and many engineers have a varying degree of animosity towards pure mathematics. So, in the book's description they say this:
This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.
I don't like the advertising, or the description if you will, as it basically tries to discount rigour. One can simply say it's an addition to the usual rigour of mathematics for the sake of daily street fighting style problem solving. The way they state it, however, it sounds like they are saying that rigorous math is not necessary.
My reference to George Orwell is simply that when he wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying his publishers made him write a lot of things he didn't want to write, and they even specified the amount of words the books needed to have (which is is somewhat understandable, but limiting still).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason. However, note that this is about metaphysics and one can argue that pure mathematics is not what he was critisising and that his work doesn't directly try to disprove the use of axioms, without which mathematics cannot exist.
> How on earth is any of the advertising antagonizing?
The word "antidote" is used in the book's summary, which is defined as (via Google) "a medicine taken or given to counteract a particular poison." One could take the "poison" to be mathematical rigor, or something similar.
Perhaps this does not change your opinion, but I do not think the original comment was completely off base.
God forbid anyone pursues higher education because they want to become a better researcher.
I would suggest you spend some time thinking about your EQ rather than spending time on the internet posting nonsense generalizations about entire classes of people.
I can only speak from my experience; and it seems perfectly reasonable for me to do so.
I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place. It's what produces such contention in similar software engineering groups.
There is no conflict between this motivation and my description of the psychology of people that tend to persue PhDs.
I am completely baffled by this response. At a minimum, that is not what narcissistic means in any sense of the word. I cannot understand how trying to improve yourself, whether as a research, programmer, or just general human being, makes one "narcissistic." I would love to understand this if you care to explain.
Imagine having to work with someone that judges based on your education rather than you as an individual! Probably something only a PhD would do, right? :)
> The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self".[2]
PhDs typically have, as an aspect of their core identity, their role as a scientist/philosopher/(..researcher) (cf. doctors being doctors, etc.).
Concern with excellence in this dimension then can often lead to narcissistic injury (aka., a threat to self-esteem, ego, etc.). ie., to fail to be excellent is a threat to one's identity. It makes the whole affair rather fraught.
Contrast with one's life passion being, say, a parent -- or a volunteer. A passionate volunteer is typically a less bitter pursuit, insofar as ones "psychological economy" depends only in sacrifice which is under one's control.
The bitterness of the PhD world, which I observe, frequently comes with this cycle: I am a philosopher; I am an excellent philosopher; but some other PhD is better than me; so I am not the best philosopher; so I am a terrible philosopher; but I must be the best philosopher etc.
And so on in ruminative cycles.
....
The building up of one's own intellect, one's own skill, one's own ... is a narcissistic (self-oriented) project. The pursuit engages in a significant amount of material and emotional sacrifice for the sake of internal intellectual gratification.
It is useful for society that such people exist: those who act to further their own ability to such (prima facie) pathological and self-destructive ends. Those caught up in it, however, are often rather bitter about it.
Most people understand "narcissism" to be pathological behavior. If you use it to not mean pathological behavior, most people are likely to not understand you.
I’d be careful with “most people” claims. A narcissist is in the dictionary as “a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.” That includes above average, not limited to a pathology (which people who are not doctors are unable to diagnose). I’m certain I’ve heard and/or said something along the lines of ‘oh he’s a bit narcissistic’ multiple times in my life. Having completed an advanced degree, I’ve met quite a few researchers I think are reasonably described as being a little narcissistic about their work.
I object to projecting your own personal non-dictionary definitions on others. Are you thinking of clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder? That is not the same thing as Narcissism.
My personal usage and understanding is quite close to the dictionary definition (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/narcissism): inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity. Those are not positive traits, which goes back to my original point: if you use the term not intending to imply something negative about the person, you're likely to confuse others. That confusion is why this subthread exists.
@mjburgess was using it to refer to negative attributes, and so was I. You stretched the idea into something it's not by saying it has to be "pathological", and that it has to negatively impact others, and you claimed that unless people adhered to those criteria, the term wouldn't be understood. Neither of those claims of yours is supported by the definition you just provided, nor have you demonstrated that "most people" agree. Narcissism can be a negative attribute about someone without being pathological and without affecting other people in a material way. Being narcissistic is judged as a negative attribute to have by the dictionary.com definition with the purely subjective words "inordinate" and "excessive", but it doesn't otherwise agree with what you said above.
I am unaware of any colloquial use of "narcissism" that would include going to grad school to learn more about a subject. Poster steev was also confused by this usage. You are correct, I have provided no evidence our confusion will be universal, but: don't be surprised if it is.
I don't speak for mjburgess, is that really an entirely fair or good faith summary of what @mjburgess said? Is it the strongest plausible interpretation of the comments above? If it was said that learning alone is narcissistic, then I agree with you, that'd be confusing. I don't quite see that anywhere above, but maybe that's what was meant.
Don't you think that researchers sand-bagging paper reviews with requests for citations of their own work is a tad narcissistic? That behavior is rampant in academics, among many other behaviors seeking public name recognition. I don't fully agree with the views above, and they seem to have a pessimistic flavor, but I don't see the word narcissism being misused according to the dictionary definition you provided.
Anyway, I don't really care what the definition of the word is, it just seemed like you had an extreme version in the opposite direction that is at least as prone to confusion. It doesn't exactly help prove the point if your version has the same defect, or if weasel words are used to back-up the claim, right?
> I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place.
This claim is independent of the negative behaviors; it's intended as independent support by claiming that the desire to be a better researcher is inherently narcissistic, without regard to the negative behaviors. As to my personal definition being extreme: well, yeah. I've never heard someone use it to mean anything remotely positive. The justification for using it that context was, to me, non-sensical. But I am a descriptivist; words mean how people use them. So I won't call it wrong. Just: don't be surprised if people are confused.
I don't know anything about ecology, but my intuition is that all of these things from wind turbines to data centers under water, have an impact on their ecosystems. It wouldn't surprise me if we found out these had a negative (or neutral) impact on their environments.
I guess my point is that it seems naive to simply hand-wave off the possibility that these supposed environmentally friendly technologies actually negatively impact their environment. Whether or not that negative impact is less than the alternative is an interesting question.