Science has also given us time machine surrogates - photos and videos. I understand this doesn’t work for everyone and can sometimes make things harder, but for me, seeing our common past brings back the smile to my face.
Thanks for sharing. Two companies come to mind: Strix for kettle controllers and Shimano for bike gears. Maybe they don't fit exactly to the Hidden champions category because they’re not very hidden from the public (many manufacturers mention their names on final products, assuming consumers might take that into account). So the criteria for “hidden champions” could be more flexible imo
Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit fails. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.
Yeah, I think there's a lot more "good, focused" companies out there than what are covered in this hidden champions book. The book is just interesting to me. It highlights a lot of the economic export strength of Germany isn't due to the large corporations that people know, but a bunch of mid-sized companies people don't.
In some sense, what seems important is a business culture that has a mission or meaning to exist other than make shareholders money. I'd wager their employees will absolutely geek out about what the companies do throughout the organization. A lot of corporations these days, once you get above a couple of layers of management, is all fluff. I can't think of the last time I talked to a mid-level or above "engineering" manager in a tech company about any nuanced or interesting discussion about technology.
ECH is on by default for Cloudflare’s free plans, and paying customers can adjust the setting. That’s why CF already has an interesting history with the Russian authorities [1] (The discussion is short but has a lot of interesting details)
nice misspelling (or a joke?), related to all the lawsuits around LLMs.
Joking aside, it’s already there in a sense. Several times I started with a brief outline of what the prototype should do (an HTML/CSS/JS app), and sure enough, refinements and corrections followed. When the final version worked more or less as expected, I asked the LLM to create a specification (a reproducing prompt) of everything we made together. Even if the vibe-coded prototype is dropped, the time wasn’t wasted, I probably would never have come to the same bullet list specification without having an actual working app at my disposal to test and evaluate. So paradoxically this specification even might be used by a human later
I like challenges like this. First, the edit that introduced the "five-seven ascii" is [1] (2010) by Pete142 with the explanation "add a name for the PDP-6/10 character-packing convention". The user Pete142 cites his web page www.pwilson.net that no longer serves his content. Sure it can be accessed with archive.org and from the resume the earliest year mentioned is 1986 ( MS-DOS/ASM/C drivers Technical Leader: ...). I suspect that he himself might have use the term when working and probably this jargon word/phrase didn't survive to a reliable book/research.
You do better with a search for "PDP-10 packed ascii". In point of fact the PDP-10 had explicit instructions for managing strings of 7-bit ascii characters like this.
Related: Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437? (glyphdrawing.club) [1]. There are other interesting articles mentioned in the discussion. m_walden probably would comment here himself
It's a great aspect to evaluate (fiction books/movies), thanks for mentioning it. I think it's much easier to use as an evaluation tool than techniques like the apple example. One of the tests, for example, is to recall a book that you have never seen a movie adaptation of and try to remember the characters and scenes. For me, in these cases (when I try to recall), the characters appear faceless, while places are more detailed, but they usually remind me of some real places I have encountered before in my life.
It's interesting that if non-aphantasia people are so common, I wonder why so few paintings have scenery based solely on imagination. I even remember asking a person who paints (not in the context of this condition) how hard it was for him to paint something not directly before his eyes, but from imagination, and why he didn't do it more often. I recall that he definitely did this (painting from imagination) rarely or not at all, and the question really puzzled him
> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time
It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.
Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).
> finds that they're not credible enough to generate an answer
The credibility is one side of the story. In many cases, at least for my curious research, I happen to search for something very niche, so to find at least anything related, an LLM needs to find semantic equivalence between the topic in the query and what the found pages are discussing or explaining.
One recent example: in a flat-style web discussion, it may be interesting to somehow visually mark a reply if the comment is from a user who was already in the discussion (at least GP or GGP). I wanted to find some thoughts or talk about this. I had almost no luck with Perplexity, which probably brute-forced dozens of result pages for semantic equivalence comparison, and I also "was not feeling/getting lucky" with Google using keywords, the AROUND operator, and so on. I'm sure there are a couple of blogs and web-technology forums where this was really discussed, but I'm not sure the current indexing technology is semantically aware at scale.
It's interesting that sometimes Google is still better, for example, when a topic I’m researching has a couple of specific terms one should be aware of to discuss it seriously. Making them mandatory (with quotes) may produce a small result set to scan with my own eyes.
Science has also given us time machine surrogates - photos and videos. I understand this doesn’t work for everyone and can sometimes make things harder, but for me, seeing our common past brings back the smile to my face.
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