Commercial libraries = private library where you pay a membership fee? I’ve not really heard of that here outside of arguably university libraries and similar.
But SF public library has a couple dozen branches or more?
Yes. I had a membership for years. The place looks 19th century, which it is. There are multiple levels of stacks over two floors, carved dark wood, comfy chairs, and librarians who scold anyone who talks.
Members can go there, plug in a laptop, and type. Quietly. It's never crowded.
It's a well-curated, library. It's most useful if you want historical information about 19th and early 20th century technology. They have a complete bound set of Popular Mechanics, from the days when it was a serious technical publication. The multi-volume engineering study for the Panama Canal, with drawings, is there. Current offerings are well chosen and updated regularly.
Yes, the one I went to as a child had a monthly fee and a per-book fee. It had a far more extensive collection than the SFPL library at 4th and Berry in a much more compact space. Most SFPL libraries appear to be homeless-support centers, which diminishes their capacity to carry books since they assign greater room to support functions. But perhaps that is the source of the value observed in the OP.
As an aside, are there university libraries one can join directly for a fee? I was under the impression they were bundled in with tuition etc. If it’s around $100/month I wouldn’t mind that, but perhaps that is an unachievable target.
One thing worth noting, these accesses do not always include access to electronic resources. Access may only be available from computers that are in the library.
Personally I've never heard of or been to any commercial library before, perhaps it's really good startup idea with internal coffee shop (library first, cafeteria second).
I've been to coffee and books cafe (basically cafeteria first, library second) in France and normally it's full during the day (close at 7 pm).
In the US, there are some private archives. And university libraries with varying degrees of public access somewhat depending upon the degree that you can walk in and look like you belong. But real public libraries don't generally have a lot of restrictions.
> (as an aside: bland food won't work well on someone who lost their sense of smell from long covid, and prison populations were heavily affected)
The consistent texture of the Nutraloaf may “help” here. My spouse lost her sense of smell (for other reasons than Covid) years ago and now relies heavily on textures for food enjoyment.
The second list only matters once you've checked the correct box. If you go to a .NET shop and say "I've never used Microsoft products before but I'm a quick learner, look at these haskell projects" your resume is going in the bit bucket.
with the exception being if they have some constraint that means you are the only person applying to the job, e.g. they want you onsite 5 days a week in the middle of nowhere and you're the only person willing to move out there
Agreed there is a semantic argument here. I don’t think anyone is anthropomorphizing LLMs. I’ve had to adopt “objective” with one customer instead of “task” (my preferred default term) because their industry overloads “task” with something else. Now that said, as you point out, the real objective is next token prediction not “help the user with a truth bomb.” and it just happens to have emergent accidental usefulness (I think a natural bias from the training data).
They (chatgpt et al) do move closer to “clear and coherent” by adding extra layers such as a beam search on LLM outputs. Good to remember that ChatGPT et al are products, not bare metal LLMs.
My mother and her husband still use AOL email, which I thought was bad enough, I managed to persuade them some years ago that they didn't need to use the AOL portal to get at the internet.
I still haven't managed to persuade them to change ISP though, even though AOL removed themselves from the broadband ISP business in the UK, what, 20 years ago? And their connection had been bought and sold by different providers multiple times over those years, my stepfather is concerned that if he changes ISP then the email will no longer know how to find his house.
In the face of this sort of argument, I crumble. They could be paying less for a faster service with better support than they get now, but I guess that's never going to happen.
My 85YO mother still uses the AOL email address I set up for her in 1996. It works perfectly on her iPad Pro with IpadOS $CURRENT.
I got the iPad-before-the-iPad-before-last. It maxes out at iOS 9. One of the only ways I've got to get ebooks on it is to email them to my 1996 Hotmail address, which is the only one my my half a dozen that iOS 9 Mail can handle.
The email address? There's no reason they should IMHO. At this point Aol email really has to be one of the longest lived and most stable services out there, and it's weird to even type that :)
The ISP? They could be paying less for a faster connection, and a new ISP would probably throw in a better wireless router than the ancient one they're using (and occasionally having trouble with).
The two are not related - AOL is a free online portal these days, accessible to anyone using any ISP. You can even go there and sign up for free email right now if you want. I can imagine a 'retro' email address fad might hit at some point ...
You can even go there and sign up for free email right now if you want.
Looks like my email address from 1985-1993 is taken. I wonder if at some time it got recycled for lack of use, or if it's still me, but I have no way of logging in to QuantumLink or the old AOL service.
retro_email@aol.com appears to be available though :)
I have no idea if they recycled any addresses, I used to know someone that worked for them about 20 years ago, but she was non-technical and probably wouldn't have access to that info back then. And 20 years ago AOL were already considered outdated and uncool!
Looks like Scholar Turbo has GPT-4 and Chatpdf is still on the waitlist. But yeah, these chat-with-your-doc webapps are popping up out of the woodwork.
My long-horizon strategy has been the kinds of roles I take on. A product-focused role lets you go deep into a narrow problem area, whereas a customer-facing consulting/services role forces you to go wide, learning a new area every time. Over the years I’ve used time in the latter to select what to go deep into.
Indeed! I built a system just last year with - count em - three parsers to deal with PDF table extraction, including one built on TableTransformer. And then when GPT4 came out I just copy pasted a PDF into it as-is and darned if it didn’t do at least as good a job.
Now I can’t do this in earnest because of document privacy issues but I’ve diving down the rabbit hole of how small can we go and still get decent results. Spoiler: gpt2 is too small. :-)
If you were asked to extract lists or tables from html pages only, how would you go?
I was thinking:
a) use the metric used in TableTransformer to detect the structured data.
b) use the Markup LM model, maybe mixed with TableTransformer.
c) find a way to work directly with GPT4.
> it’s 30+ minute charge time. As great as electric is, an extra hour in the car on a road-trip with 3 kids is a tough sell.
I dissent! Just did a 2-day (each way) road trip with young children and those charging breaks are pretty great and well-spaced for letting them run around and blow off steam. It’s not such a bad idea for the adults either…
Maybe but a lot of my family road trips are haul ass to Disneyland or San Diego (from Phoenix) where we leave at 6AM and want that travel day to be usable at our destination. We usually have about a 10 minute stop for gas fill up and snacks or lunch.
IDK I’d say high school. I took a semester welding class at community college and we only spent 3 sessions on MIG (what this appears to be) before moving on to other processes. Most of the learning was around dealing with PPC, listening for the sizzle, identifying a good bead and common mistakes. This seems expensive for a one-class tool, especially since they still need the regular welders to complete the training.
But SF public library has a couple dozen branches or more?
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