This reminded me of an interview I listened to by a startup founder talking about how his company integrates AI into all of its workflows. During the Q&A, he said that they could tackle any challenge simply by iteratively constructing better contexts for the AI. At first this sounded optimistic, but then it struck me that it was actually the ultimate pessimistic view of what current AI can do. His assumption seemed to be that software engineers have already implemented all the primitives humans will ever need. If that’s true, then the only task left is to phrase our instructions in the right way so the model can stitch those primitives together into a production system.
I don't doubt the concern or the observation of the author. I'm not sure if the phenomena observed by the author is any different, statistically, from before. If I look back, it was always a small percentage of people, driven by their innate curiosity, who moonlighted their way to great discoveries. If anything is different, we have more people working in the tech industry, and naturally the concentration of curious and driven people gets diluted. Consequently, one may not observe the same intensity or prevalence of curiosity in her daily life.
> Most of the metadata activity is contained within a single shard:
>
> - File creation, same-directory renames, and deletion.
> - Listing directory contents.
> - Getting attributes of files or directories.
I guess this is a trade-off between a file system and an object store? As in S3, ListObjects() is a heavy hitter and there can be potentially billions of objects under any prefix. Scanning only on a single instance won't be sufficient.
It's definitely a different use case but given they haven't had to tap into their follower replicas for scale, it must be pretty efficient and lightweight. I suspect not having ACLs helps. They also cite a minimum 2MB size, so not expecting exabtyes of little bytes.
I wonder if a major difference is listing a prefix in object storage vs performing recursive listings in a file system?
Even in S3, performing very large lists over a prefix is slow and small files will always be slow to work with, so regular compaction and catching file names is usually worthwhile.
What saddens me is people take different political views as hatred, and medias run with it. I can't remember how many times a person is labeled fascist or communist just because their views are different.
Kirk didn't deserve to die for having or expressing hateful ideas, but his views were not merely "different."
Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0].
And [1]:
> America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
And [1]:
> The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
Charlie Kirk was a theocrat. He hid behind freedom of speech with the intent to remove it for everyone else once in power. Freedom of speech is completely incompatible with theocracy. The reason people like Peter Thiel prop him up isn't to make people smart - it's to dumb them down and legitimize the worst in people for political gain.
The people crying fascist are sometimes correct. The people crying communist genuinely seem to think it applies to Democrats. Democrats are a center-right party by European standards.
There's a side that is genuinely, factually, deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis and it plugs into Fox News. This isn't a political statement. It's documented up and down.
Unfortunately that is not true anymore. Some far-left policies have been implemented or originated first in the US, in the democrat environment and later imported to Europe with more or less success.
It is funny that every side believes that the other side is genuinely, factually and deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis.
> There is more and cheaper education available than ever before.
The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials, but the healthy pressure and right push from experienced teachers. People tend to overestimate how self-driven most students are. The truth is, most students aren’t naturally motivated to learn. They need society to give them a sense of purpose, and they need teachers to challenge them with problems that keep them just outside their comfort zone. Sadly, the U.S. school system provides neither. Take my kid as an example: even though he’s in a decent public school, he thinks his schoolwork is tough and the SAT is challenging. Yet the SAT wouldn't even measure up to the high-school graduation exam in my country, let alone the college entrance exam. In the end, it’s the broad middle of students who suffer from low standards. With the right motivation and push, they could learn so much more, but instead they end up wasting precious time in high school.
> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials
Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.
In my kids' schools, the textbooks haven't been removed due to cost, they have been replaced with even more expensive online material that no one properly consumes.
Educators have been brainwashed into believing "computers are the future!" and don't seem to be able to even contemplate that reading something on a screen is a poor substitute for physically interacting with something (a pen and paper, a book, or the actual thing being described in a video).
I regularly have to tell my kids to stop doing math and science problems on their computer and get out a pencil and paper to do the work so they can organize it and understand it. They argue at first because their teachers tell them not to (so they say), but stop when they actually see it working.
This is in a way like doing math. I can read a math book all day and even appreciate the ideas in the book, but I'd practically learn little if I don't actually attempt to work out examples for the definitions, the theorems, and some exercises in the book.
I fall into this trap more than I’d care to admit.
I love learning by reading, to the point that I’ll read the available documentation for something before I decide to use it. This consumes a lot of time, and there’s a tradeoff.
Eventually if I do use the thing, I’m well suited to learning it quickly because I know where to go when I get stuck.
But by the same token I read a lot of documentation I never again need to use. Sometimes it’s useful for learning about how others have done things.
I'm the same, but thing is, 99% of the things I read about (on e.g. HN) are just... not important. I don't use them in my daily life.
But I do have a very large knowledge base of small tidbits of information, so if I do need to ever go in-depth, I know where/how to find it.
...not that I do of course, I struggle with my long term attention span, I can't read documentation front to back and for twenty odd years now have just googled for the tidbit I needed and skipped the rest.
> The whole LLM era is horrible. All the innovation is coming "top-down" from very well funded companies
Wouldn't it be the same for the hardware companies? Not everyone could build CPUs as Intel/Motorola/IBM did, not everyone could build mainframes like IBM did, and not everyone could build smart phones like Apple or Samsung did. I'd assume it boils down the value of the LLMs instead of who has the moat. Of course, personally I really wish everyone can participate in the innovation like the internet era, like training and serving large models on a laptop. I guess that day will come, like PC over mainframes, but just not now.
How would people cope with the demand that we need to spend increasingly more time exercising when we age? Mobility, strength, Vo2Max, power, endurance. It takes a long time to cover these five areas, and more if we desire to cover all the muscle groups.
There used to be a popular meme claiming that anything private tends to get cheaper over time, while anything regulated or run by the government keeps getting more expensive. But is that really true for all goods? If it is, then why do so many countries choose to adopt universal healthcare systems with tightly regulated insurance?
Maybe the more relevant question is: why is healthcare so expensive in the United States? It can’t just be because the U.S. is more advanced or developed. After all, one of the hallmarks of an advanced country should be making essential services affordable, if not cheaper.
Unless we consider JDK as external library. Speaking of library, Java's concurrency containers are truly powerful yet can be safely used by so many engineers. I don't think Go's ecosystem is even close.
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