"Designer" is a very broad term and can mean very different things to different people, not everyone is doing stuff that can be represented nicely by vectors.
I think there are many cases where it was the tech workers themselves who argued for isolation from the customer so that they may focus harder on whatever tasks. I used to be one of these workers. I argued very hard for it. I regret that today.
On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.
> You could sell those and have enough money to pay for hosted inference for years.
From a quick search a 3090 looks to go for about 1500-2000 USD. So let's say $4K for two.
I'm spending far over $1K/month (employer-paid) on cloud AI, so if that could be anywhere near comparable we're only looking at less than a few months break-even.
Less really, because some months are more expensive. This month I'm up to ~$500 and it is only day 4 of this month.
You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.
Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.
Electrical engineers in the 1940s already had "infinitely stable" memory in the form of delay lines and Williams tubes. Quantum error correction is incomparably more difficult than using digital bits.
Incredible, I've played table-tennis since I was like 14, and I didn't notice that egregious error yet I noticed all the other small ones! Thanks for pointing that out, should have been very obvious.
Their DoH going down for hours multiple times is what forced me back to cloudflare, i don't trust cloudflare more but at least it works consistently.
Additionally the default of blocking 'malware' doesn't jive with uncensored internet - that should be an opt in and not a default on their flagship address if they want to be taken seriously as unfiltered provider.
If the encrypted endpoint can go down for extended periods and they curate list of 'malware' they are not something that should be considered a gateway to uncensored and open internet.
> "What is the point of insight? I thought its point was that it led to results."
The 'results' are a substitute product for the real social benefit, which is an availability of mathematically educated and educable society. There has been no 'waste' of public money except when the results of publicly funded research is published by for profit corporations and held from the public's access behind paywalls.
It is unfortunate that one outcome of this situation is apparently a public which perceives that the final 'result' of a math research project as the actual product of value, when it has repeatedly been shown by history that the most significant value is within the multiple alternate potential paths explored by other researchers working toward the same result.
Most of these do not lead to the specific result, and many may instead demonstrate that a specific approach conclusively does not lead to the initial objective result. This also has value for humanity, in many cases leading to new paradigms of thinking about similar or unrelated problems which may later provide foundational insight for new approaches to solving different problems in a manner not yet known or discovered. The value of the system is not enclosed within the single results, but in the collective search and expansion of human consciousness and ingenuity that the search for all of these results entails.
This point circles back to my original. When we cheat on a math test or homework, thinking that the objective is to get the answers right, we are only cheating ourselves out of the learning that would have enabled us to develop the correct answers on not only that one test, but on the unknowable challenges which will later arise that require the new solutions to build upon that learning.
The 'prize money' for solving the biggest hurdles in math is less about those specific problems and their specific answers, but on encouraging many people, who do not get 'first place' and win the prize, but who do work toward it in their own unique ways and in turn provide an uplift to the general capability of humanity to solve hard, as yet undefined problems large and small.
Having an LLM give us the answer is entirely missing the point of the challenge in the first place, and robs humanity of the opportunity to improve its collective capability through making the effort. It also does not find any unique perspectives, which new and unique perspectives have formed the basis for civilization scale improvements since the dawn of time.
A good example of this difference comes from Bruce Schnier, who teaches public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto from an article originally published in The Guardian, which compares LLM use in education to having a forklift at the gym. It may be the right tool in a warehouse to get heavy things across the floor quickly, but using one to do your workout is both overkill for the amount of weight you need for arm curls and bench presses, and accomplishes nothing in the development of your strength or cardiovascular health.
If the objective is to program another widget, and you can get it done in a fraction of the time with an LLM, sure, why not. But, if the objective is to expand the corpus of human knowledge, which is the most beneficial and desired outcome of the study of mathematics, then outsourcing that task to electrons through semiconducting silicon is both overkill which results in a 'proof' larger than the entire MatLab code base, and does not accomplish the stated objective. Humanity is not made any more capable through this process.
For a deeper insight into what the measurable benefits for individuals and society, an in depth study of the neurobiology results from the study of complex topics; such as linguistics, mathematics, and music theory might help with the comprehension of the less direct value of the process. Challenge yourself to discover what the effects of later-in-life study of foreign language have on the factors leading to senility and mental decline, and see if a study of mathematical theories has any observable effects on the brain's electrochemical development across different ages. Identify how these kinds of study can have collateral improvements for other fields of study, such as material science, medicine, or applied physics.
So, yes. I am saying that. In addition to looking for the result, because it's cool, I am saying that mathematics is indeed searching for the inherent uplift to humanity which are available through many distributed states of psychological insight that mathematics prizes can serve to inspire. The results are simply one of the points of this search, and if all of these searches are cleared off the board mechanistically, we may lose the greater race against our own potential for growth in the trade-off.
I am a non-hater of renewables. I add this because in plenty of _your_ circles, you are either all in on renewables or you are a coal thumper, basically. I am neither. We need to add nuance by complicating this conversation.
The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.
Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:
1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:
2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)
3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.
How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:
A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.
A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.
So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.
To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.
TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?
I've seen a variation of this where random engineers are pulled into production incident calls and engineers are not expected to be familiar with the system.
They were asked to "just use AI" and understand the component, triage the issue, build a fix etc. The engineer was forced to choose between accepting a potentially mediocre fix AI has suggested or risk being coming across as an incompetent resource who doesn't know how to leverage AI.
You can guess what the engineer chose. The fix wasn't bad but it was suboptimal for some edge cases. We had to later revise it. Have enough of these situations, engineers will eventually definitely give up understanding the system in detail.
Like the fact that software "engineering" is mostly nothing like real engineering (and it’s further regressing now due to LLM coding!), the general lack of drilling is again one of the things that make software-related stuff look really naive and amateurish from the perspective of those dealing with the real world. Imagine if the military, police, fire service, and so on did not drill and rehearse incident response?
Right, but the risk isn't really worth the reward in an economy that could've slotted this kid into a college job as a loan officer or something. I'm sure having large stacks of Benjamins at his disposal probably had something to do with it for him.
I wrote a paper around 2010 that tried to evaluate the potential value of Bitcoin as purely a method of exchange that bypassed traditional intermediaries, and came up with some ridiculously large figure that everyone dismissed. But one central point of the paper was that it should never be misunderstood as a store of value because its only inherent value was to bypass currency controls.
The article does not get the point. What aircraft companies did was separate training and work, and SRE/IT typically does not.
An AI can handle routine incidents and then present learning cases from that routine work for training, because the skill in SRE is not the mechanical log grepping, grafana dashboard browsing etc but forming the hypothesis. AI incident reports can create training cases that are a much better training for hypothesis forming and testing than the work itself can.
