Not saying it's not a problem, I actually don't know, but new CPU's are just old models with more improvements/tooling. Same with TV's. And cars. And clothes. Everything is. That's how improving things works. Running out of raw data doesn't mean running out of room for improvement. The data has been the same for the last 20 years, AI isn't new, things keep improving anyways.
Well from cars or CPUs its not expected for them to eventually reach AGI, they also don't eat a trillion dollar hole into us peasants pockets.
Sure, improvements can be made. But on a fundamental level, agents/LLMs can not reason (even though they love to act like they can). They are parrots learning words, these parrots wont ever invent new words once the list of words is exhausted though.
Meh. Good article but not sure it's globally relevant.
Spotlight is about personality. Some people are visible, outspoken, and in the spotlight, and impactful. Others are quiet, subdued, behind the scenes but impactful. Some of the best developers I've known have been on either end of the spectrum.
At the end of the day it's about impact. When the quiet guy gets the job done every time, people still notice. When the loud guy doesn't, people notice even more.
Sure, there are cases where one guy screams from the mountaintops about how much he has done and gets promoted. And there are cases where the quiet guy gets passed over no matter how well he does. But these always wash in the end unless you work for a supremely shitty company. And even then they tend to work themselves out in life eventually. Even if it sucks for the people involved at the time.
Impact is the name of the game. Loud or quiet is irrelevant.
> based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives.
That is an absurdly small sample size to make such a conclusion.
It seems this age range could at least partly be culturally attributed. In modern industrialized life, many people don't have to "grow up" until a later age. At the risk of generalizing, people have more support from family, friends, and society at large.
Is the forming of those neurons based on some natural law, or is that people just haven't had to live the experiences that do so until their 30's nowadays?
As far as I know, forming neurons isn't something that "just happens". It happens due to catalysts in life. In pre-modern society, and indeed most likely in under-industrialized nations today, those catalysts, those experiences, would happen earlier. As others mentioned, there is a clear correlation with the typical age in which modern society gets married, settles down, and has kids.
I wonder what that era age would have been 200+ years ago.
You require "statistical calculations" to support the notion that a sample size of 4000 people in two countries, two of the most modernized and affluent nations on the planet at that, is too small for a study to conclude how the human brain works across billions of people alive today across the world, Much less in human history? How about common sense?
Ok, let's do some math.
Approximately 108 to 117 billion humans are estimated to have lived in human history. Let's take 110 billion (the low end) for our purposes.
4,000 / 110,000,000,000 = 0.000003636%
Let's just go with people living today, which is approximately 8 billion (the low end).
4000 / 8 billion = 0.00005%
Not sure if that covers the "statistical" part of your requirement, but it covers the "calculations" part.
I myself would be hesitant to make claims about knowing how neurons and brains and ages work based on a sample size of pessimistically 0.000003636% or even optimistically 0.00005% of the human population and their brains.
Not sure why this is downvoted.
The authors themselves note that parenthood could be a catalyst for the change at 30-- in previous centuries, when parenthood happened much earlier, why could it not affect the brain's timeline? This study is simply descriptive of a particular dataset, a collection of snapshots at a particular time and place. Certainly the brain is elastic and responsive to external conditions.
What I noticed is that the 4000 samples are all from England and the U.S. Replicating this study with a greater geographical and socio-cultural diversity would be very useful in supporting or expanding these results.
There is another aspect that many people aren't discussing, the communication aspect.
For a medium to large organization with independent programs that need to talk to each other, Kafka provides an essential capability that would be much slower and higher risk with Postgres.
Standardizing the flow of information across an organization is difficult. Kafka is crucial for that. To achieve that in Postgres would require either a shared database which is inherently risky or would require a customized API for access which introduces another layer of performance bottleneck and build/maintenance cost and decreases development productivity/performance. So you have a double whammy of performance degradation with an API. And for multiple consumers operating against the same events (for example: write to storage, perform action, send to data lake), with a database you need a magnitude more access, so N*X with N being the number of consumers multiplied by the query to consume. With three consumers you're tripling your database queries, which adds up fast across topics. Now you need to start fixing indexes and creating views and other workload to keep performance optimal. And at some point you're just poorly recreating Kafka in a database.
The common denominator in every "which is better" debate is always use case. This article seems like it would primariy apply to small organizations or limited consumer need. And yea, at that point why are you using events in the first place? Use a single API or database and be done with it. This is where the buzzword thing is relevant. If you're using Kafka for your single team, single database, small organization, it's overkill.
Side note: Someone mentioned Postgres as an audit log. Oh god. Done it. It was a nightmare. Ended up migrating to pub/sub with long-term storage in Mongo. which solved significant performance issues. Audit log is inheritently write once read many. There is no advantage to storing in a relational database.
At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.
People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.
Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.
I like the realistic idea of Duolingo. I know I'm not going to get fluent with it and I'm not trying to, but I do want a good app to expand vocabulary and basic structures that I can do in 30 minutes a day. And I'm a sucker for streaks, but not all the other gamification. I don't need gems or XP or potions, just a streak to form habits, which I am bad at and need that positive affirmation.
Does anyone know any alternative apps that achieve the same goals with less of the fluff?
This is really helpful. Every comment is about immersion, I get it people, but how do you achieve that in the real world. Most of those comments seem to ignore that fact that many people can't move to another country for a couple years and leaving their significant other to get a new one that natively speaks the desired language isn't a great suggestion. I understand those are the best ways to learn, but let me run that by my wife and kids and we'll see how that goes.
Would you rather have Big Tech sit on their cash and not innovate? Some of these ones would 100% fail, and that's the nature of doing business. Apple is trying something radical with Vision Pro. It isnt successful, but I'm glad they are trying it. Microsoft did something crazy with Windows Recall. Will I use it? Nope, I appreciate the risk taking.
When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
My wish is folks on hacker news have a bit of humility about these kind of things.
> When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
No, because my friend (presumably) doesn't have an extensive track record of failing in business. But Google does have an extensive track record of killing products for no good reason. Precedent matters, and at this point it's foolish to start using any Google product that you don't have to.
To you. If you dont understand the reason, again, I encourage you to be humble and try to understand what is going on. Remember, all of these companies are operated by perfectly reasonable people.
This is a ridiculous reply. I'm not friends with Google. We're frenemies at best.
Google has zero reason to keep this effort going. It won't make them any significant money.
If I were a bettin' man, and I am, I'd say it's a promotion project for some developer or team who is going to abandon it as soon as they move on. Which is SOP for Google.
Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
Uber didn't have to convince anyone, taxis were ripoffs. It didn't even have to always do with money. Taxis asked people where they were going and drove off if it wasn't far enough was a significant issues. Taxis not picking up black people. Many taxis in my town were dirty and and the drivers were jerks or creepy or both. With protections built into law and no competition the industry didn't have to even try to cater to the customer.
The taxi industry sealed it's own death warrant a long time ago. Ride sharing services solved a real problem at the right time. If that cost a bit more, it was well worth it. I won't take a taxi now unless I am forced to.
