_glass
Joined 585 karma
hacker and painter
twitter.com/_glass
- _glass parentSorry, the phrasing might not have been clear. Until that event, I was always propagating to drink tap water. After that I realized that research is important.
- No, it is now nine years ago, but I think it was from some state government agency. I know it was not from Hamburg Wasser, as it concerned not the public lines, but from the house itself. And I just saw that beginning next year it will be not allowed anymore: https://www.hamburg.de/politik-und-verwaltung/behoerden/bjv/...
- Yes, in Hamburg, Germany there are a lot of lead pipes still. When moving there I got to find this out by a letter from the government, that I should know that I have many times over the limit drinking water which I was consuming. I was always telling others to drink the safe tap water ...
- Yes, this is so true for me. Especially when I had this revenge arc, where I knew I could be good. Most of my strengths came later. Now people think that I am talented in that stuff, but there's always hard work behind it, and I was mostly the worst in class. But there was always a shining light in sight, where I knew I could, and that it is a good pathway.
- I did my PhD while working, so it's not even that either or. And just to add to your point, it is really so rare to get that kind of mentoring, feedback than in a PhD program. It might depend on the program, but you finally have access to the brightest minds in your field and get to socialize with them.
- Hard, but doable. Here is the analysis by an experience diver.
https://www-ostsee--zeitung-de.translate.goog/panorama/exper...
- SAP has also a fork: https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine.
- I think it is a great insight that every ideology can be turned violent. I first heard this where Zizek cites the book has a story from: "During World War II, Zen Buddhism provided a strong foundation for Japanese militarism, including Imperial Japan's use of suicide warfare."[1] Where a Japanese soldier in WW2 wouldn't do the killing, but his sword (?) This is seen that all ideology can be turned violent.
[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997).
- Yes, and the project can be criticised by reducing until there's no value anymore. Well known instances of this process:
- Predicate Fronting in Free Relatives: In sentences like “What John saw was a surprise,” labeling the fronted predicate is not without problems, Merge doesn’t yield a clear head.
- Optional Verb Movement in Persian: Yes-no questions where verbs can optionally move (e.g., “Did you go?” vs. “You went?”) messes up feature-checking’s binary mode.
- Non-Matching Free Relatives with Pied-Piping: Structures like “In whichever city you live, you’ll find culture” mess up standard labeling, needs extra stipulations.
- Some Subjects in Finnish: Nominative vs. non-nominative subjects (e.g., “Minua kylmä” [me-ACC cold]) complicate that Minimalist case assignment.
- I think it is important to realize, that we need to understand language on our own terms. The logic of LLMs is not unlike alien technology to us. That being said, the minimalist program of Chomsky lead to nowhere, because just like programming, it found edge case after edge case, reducing it further and further, until there was no program anymore that resembled a real theory. But it is wrong to assume that the big progress in linguistics is in vain, the same reason Prolog, Theorem provers, type theory, category theory is in vain, when we have LLMs that can produce everything in C++. We can use the technology of linguistics to ground our knowledge, and in some dark corner of the LLM it might already have integrated this. I think the original divide between the sciences and the humanities might be deeper and more fundamental than we think. We need linguistic as a discipline of the humanities, and maybe huge swaths of Computer Science is just that.
- I teach programming to designers and architects at the local university. We're using Processing quite successfully, because it skips a lot of steps. My daughters are too young and are still doing Scratch (with the great micro:bit). But I think next would be Processing, or Arduino with Micropython. But yes, typing is a problem. My older daughter inputs almost all her text via voice input. At work we're doing a lot of low code for new architectures. I think agentic low code tools for kids would be nice.
- I missed out so much. When I was a college student, I rejected photos, as digital cameras where everywhere, and I was a snob, in my high school times taking analog camera photo. I read a lot of books about Zen, living in the moment, but now I regret this. The view photos I have I cherish as very dear memories.
- They do though: https://www.spotify.com/us/audiobooks 15h per month at least.
- Don't believe them. I was also going to university in Germany and had to work so much to compensate for bad lecturers. Until now I can say I needed 100% of what I learned in university. Even the most esoteric stuff came back to bite me. For LLMs, they are close to useless if you can't review the stuff. Maybe at some point in the future they are better and can reason about their code, but as in fusion, self-driving, etc., you never know when this is. And there will always be people who have to develop this.
- For me it is only the visiting family use case, where rental doesn't make sense. We have car sharing in the city (Miles) which fixes almost all use cases. Driving to the airport only when without kids, as they both still need car seats, that I can't leave. Otherwise car sharing rental is perfect to get to the airport.
- this might be in the way of alan kay's core idea, sending messages with interpreters. if we want to go all the way of the snowcrash pipe dream, then imagining objects with programs thrown around is more realistic than making it somehow work with html. on the other hand, in brings back bad memories of flash silverlight, java applets, that almost destroyed the open web. there is a beauty in easy-to-read text rather than binary blobs.
- this is a fun exercise. but I saw it a lot of times in big companies where people are too afraid to make changes. where also the open-closed principle comes from. something I don't like anymore in practice. because one has to get away from the fear of breaking things to maintain clean code, and clean architecture.
- I did OR in my Bachelor thesis, and then at my first project at my first job. It worked like magic, and business was sure it wouldn't work. Still one of the projects I always talk about. It was for organizing screens unto pallets unto trucks. Then I never anything with OR ever since. Even for a few early AI products 8 years ago, in the end they didn't go for it. I think you are spot on with the expertise. Even though quite a lot of businesspeople heard about it in university.
- This is a really good idea. This spatial exploration seems to be a normal thing, here for my location in Hamburg, Germany: https://hamburg-business.com/en/commercial-real-estate/comme...