I heard most code today is written by LLMs. I hope that's not true, but if it is, the future improvements will be slow (barring something like, actually teaching them to read the docs).
Recently, something quite rare happened. I needed to Xerox some paper documents. Well, such actions are rare today, but years ago, it was quite common to Xerox things.
Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form.
Our society decided as a whole that it was ok for the noun Xerox to be used a verb. That's a normal and natural part of language development.
As others have noted, management doesn't care whether the serverless thing you want to use is running on servers or not. They care that they don't have to maintain servers themselves. CapEx vs OpEx and all that.
I agree that there could be some small hazard with the idea that, if I run my important thing in a 'serverless' fashion, then I don't have to associate all of the problems/challenges/concerns I have with 'servers' to my important thing.
It's an abstraction, and all abstractions are leaky.
If we're lucky, this abstraction will, on average, leak very little.
> Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE#t=5m58s I don't think this dramatization (of a court proceedings from 2010) is related to Xerox's plight with losing their trademark, but said dramatization is brilliant nonetheless
I watch this video at least once a year, and make my immediate family do the same.
Everyone in the United States should watch this video, or something similar, on a regular schedule.
As great as the first part is, I actually think the second part, with officer George Bruch, is even more important.
It's not as smooth, it's not flashy. Officer Bruch comes across as just a regular guy who wants to help you.
I've long viewed the world primarily through the lens of incentives and motivations. When officer Bruch is talking to you in a little room, you just want to tell your story, get it off your chest, and he makes it very, very easy to do that. In fact, if the roles of these two guys were reversed, and professor Duane, with his slick and fun personality, was interviewing you, you'd likely trust him less.
Even though it feels like it, officer Bruch is not your friend. He's not on your side. It doesn't feel like it, but his incentives and motivations are mostly in conflict with yours, whether you are guilty or innocent.
Arabic OCR is a mess with historical texts. Take the word الف (alf/thousand) in dates like 1950 - in old documents, the ف (fa) had a dot below it, but modern OCR doesn't get this and outputs الد (alad), which is just gibberish in Arabic
Same problem with ق (qaf) written as ف (fa) in old Arabic
And don't get me started on merged letters! In محمد (Muhammad), sometimes the م (meem) sits right on top of the ح (haa), or appears as a little circle below the line. Modern OCR has no clue what to do with these
My solution? Run OCR first, then use LLMs to fix the mess based on context. The surprising part? In my tinkering, smaller fine-tuned models actually do BETTER at this specific task than the big general-purpose ones. They seem to learn the patterns of historical Arabic quirks more effectively. Pretty neat tradeoff of specialized knowledge vs. general intelligence
Yes. It was argued in court that they couldn't be expected to go into the trash to pull out documents. But they were later. The case was settled on some ground, I can't remember what. Maybe they handed over the documents in the end. This was a decade ago, so I'm hazy on what the final outcome was.
A lot of public bodies will play games like this. It's not even clear to me why they do it. It'll be documents that aren't even controversial that they will resist. Ask them what brand of coffee they buy for the break room and they'll immediately get defensive and find some random exemption to apply. Law enforcement bodies are by far the worst, I think because the public are seen as terminal nuisances all the way down through the bodies.
Perhaps too provocative of a question for this forum:
Assuming that this plant (and potentially others) ends up substantially reproducing the capabilities that are currently available only in Taiwan, how much would that fact change the US'/the west's response to a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan?
This discussion needs to distinguish equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. People don't mind playing games, but if they perceive the games' rules to be tilted (or some players to be cheating), then they will want to flip the board.
Avoiding totalitarianism means recognizing the need for both public and private power structures counteracting each other, not going all-in on one of them alone.
Also progressive taxation (a moderate position) which avoids the authoritarian measures of both left and right while counteracting the cancerous effects of exponential growth.
