My uncle believed in bible chronology. He believed it so much that he learned to program computers (to calculate and explore patterns in dates) and then built a series of web sites culminating in https://www.biblechronology.com/
When he died he had assembled a team of people who worked on it. The site is now suffering from a bit of rot (the videos don't serve anymore) but he has been dead for six years so I suppose that's no surprise. I don't know if his "gang" still maintain it, but someone must be paying for the domain and hosting I suppose.
The time and energy he committed to this are astonishing to me, he was a talented man - he had the option to be a partner at Arthur Anderson (progenitor of Accenture) before becoming a CFO at a series of small banks and building societies. His career was firmly on the up, he worked for one of the precursors of what became RBS in the 1980's. If things had gone differently perhaps he would have muzzled "Fred the Shred" and we'd all be the richer, especially his kids. But, at some point a conviction and faith gripped him and he gave up everything for his bible project. He died penniless.
I wonder, because I don't understand, because I just see numerology and over interpretation, does it mean he was wrong? I think so, but perhaps that's just my faith talking.
Speaking as someone who has been where your uncle is (edit:was), I don't hear it discussed much how tempting religion is to scientific/nerdy types, or anyone with a thirst for knowledge.
If you believe your religion's scriptures are an infallible set of truths handed down from above, then you've got the secrets of the universe in your hand and all you have to do to expand your knowledge is deduce correctly from that. It's an addictive hobby, and much easier and less messy than real science, where there's no final authority and you have to work for years to make a small discovery in one area and even then you might fail. Isaac Newton himself got caught up in that sort of thing.
The reverse is also true. If you're a nerdy type, physics' power of prediction can lead you to think the whole of reality could be explained in principle by physics. But there's of course no good reason for making this leap. Physics explicitly limits its scope to the material, so cannot be used as an argument that the material is everything.
As someone who went to Seminary in my misspent youth I can't agree more.
Theology is a huge nerd snipe. Isaac Newton is my go to example for how it's a fixation with a extremely vicious cycle. There are whole manifestations of OCD that are just focused on religion as the core OCD fixation.
If forced to choose between owning a dishwasher, washer, dryer, AC, etc.... I would give up every moment of theology training, argument, etc. and keep the tech.
A big part of the difficulty with theological training is most people are graduating from schools that push hermeneutics that encourage tortured logic of the text. Ultimately training people primarily not to identify truth claims or evaluate propositions but to tie intellectual knots and take primrose paths that fall apart with any holistic scrutiny. Just read the papers coming out and you can easily see that people are graduating with PHD's in mental gymnastics.
All the good I've brought into the world, all the lasting things I've done and they have not had anything to do with theology.
My parents were academics who got nerd sniped by theology as well, the few times they stepped outside of theology they did so much good but all that time spent in theology just left them penniless and, ultimately, dying terribly early.
I think Cursor is great, it's really boosted what I can do.
I think it's made me 3 -> 5x more valuable.
Now, maybe it's done the same for other people as well, but I think my co-efficient was high, and I continue to insist that I've never worked anywhere that had enough resource focused on software development. The demand has always massively exceeded the organisations ability to fund supply.
And, as many have noted lower costs can also boost demand.
Finally, off shore devs are on a longer cycle time for many reasons. If cost onshore are reduced then that cycle time will crush offshore competitive advantage. I don't see any prospect of me getting work from India or Indonesia, but I do see AI as a driver that will reduce work leaving the UK for other places.
I'm a managing consultant, so I don't have much time to do actual work (due to having to chat up clients and tell other people what to do). With cursor I can do what would have taken me an afternoon, previously, in an hour.
This is huge for me, because I can realise ideas and show people how to solve problems whereas bc (before cursor) I was reduced to saying "I'm sure that will work if we do it that way" and hoping that my folks would follow through on the thinking themselves.
Cursor supports me in two ways.
1) It gets things moving - I can put all the boilerplate and infrastructure to build something in place in a few minutes.
2) It removes road blocks. When I get stuck it gives me fixes.
Now I recognise it's all from Stack Exchange, basically, but it's a terrific interface for that knowledge.
What it doesn't do is provide new knowledge or ideas for fixing things. That has to come from upstairs still, but that's never been an issue for me.
Ooh, what are these ASICs you're talking about? My understanding was that we'll see AMD/Nvidia gpus continue to be pushed and very competitive as well as have new system architectures like cerebras or grok. I haven't heard about new compute platforms framed as ASICs.
Is Cerebras an integrated circuit or more an integrated wafer? :-)
And yeah their cost is ridiculous, on the order for high 6 to low 7 figures per wafer. The rack alone looks several times more expensive than the 8x NVIDIA pods [1]
"It may have been the greatest rapid expansion in a given economic sector in British history, and it was the key reason we didn’t experience a Great Depression while Germany, the USA, and France did. "
But Great Britain (as it was then) did experience a great depression. 3.5 million people were unemployed in 1932.
Ok - one could say that the depression in GB was less pronouced vs. the situation from 1918 on, but I think that there is a lot of cherry picking & spin in this article. Comparisons are not made consistently and the context from history mean some things matter less in the UK and matter more, and have happened for particular reasons. For example folks often talk about reservoirs, but fundamentally the UK's reservoirs were largely built to support an industrial demand that is simply not there - and this capacity remains despite the loss of demand.
There are some good points, but I think they are obscured by the polemic.
It appears to have been produced by a right wing think tank, justifying its seeming lack of focus on how public funds could help build infrastructure vs the author's seeming obsession with private financing.
Also odd was the comparison to France, considering that France's great depression was arguably much less severe than in the UK, as it experienced less industrial decline, less unemployment and no financial crisis.
Well, you make it a capital office, or less draconian... make it an offense punishable by 10 years of hard labour in a dire penal camp somewhere cold.
In addition you make it an offense to fail to disclose knowledge of the use of such capabilities, and you institute a system of rewards to positively encourage disclosure.
Perhaps you call it social credit.
You are correct that there are a few people who would defy such a system, a very few.
The one fundamental that you have to understand about all government is that it is essentially a monopoly on violence. That monopoly enables things like taxation and broad social consensus and consent.
But, it's there, and if Bitcoin began to chip away at the core of any state you can expect it to be used.
Some people say that they can't take my gold.
Some people say that they can't take my guns.
But history says that they can and will and have.
Sure, but as I said, if they come after Bitcoin, it's a good time to worry about a lot of freedoms your governments are supposed to protect/afford you... it could be seen as the canary in the mine in that regard.
Is there a list of discoveries or siginficant works/constructions made by people collaborating with LLM's? I mean as opposed to specific deep networks like Alphafold or Graphcast?
It may cause a reputation or legal issue, so it is not in their interest to admit it. In the real world, is there PhD students or researchers using ChatGPT to move forward and help them think their ideas ?
Obviously yes, but admitting it may not be the right move.
"Water supply issues are already holding back housing development around the city. In its previous draft water resources management plan, Cambridge Water failed to demonstrate that there was enough to supply all of the new properties in the emerging local plan without risk of deterioration.
The Environment Agency recently confirmed that it had formally objected to five large housing developments in the south of the county because of fears they could not sustainably supply water. It has warned that planning permission for more than 10,000 homes in the Greater Cambridge area and 300,000 square metres of research space at Cambridge University are in jeopardy if solutions cannot be found.
A document published alongside the Case for Cambridge outlines the government’s plan for a two-pronged approach to solving the water scarcity issue, to be led by Dr Paul Leinster, former chief of the Environment Agency, who will chair the Water Scarcity Group.
In the long term, supply will be increased, initially through two new pieces of infrastructure: a new reservoir in the Fens will delivery 43.5 megalitres per day, while a new pipeline will transfer 26 megalitres per day from Grafham Water, currently used by Affinity Water.
But, according to Kelly, a new reservoir would only solve supply requirements for the existing local plan and is “not sufficient if you start to go beyond that” – a point that is conceded in the water scarcity document. "
The NIMBYs are the ones trying to stop the reservoir from being built. They created the problem they're complaining about. A big hole in the ground with water in it is not a complicated piece of infrastructure, but the planning system is so dysfunctional and veto-friendly that the construction timeline has been pushed out into the 2030s, in the best case. Previous generations got them done in two years flat. It is an artificial problem.
Same thing with transport. "We can't build new houses because it would increase car traffic", meanwhile putting up every barrier they can think of to stop East-West Rail.
Just adding onto this because I can't edit: it beggars belief that water supply would ever be a limiting factor for urban growth in England. It's preposterous that this is even an issue. Yes, Cambridgeshire is the driest region in the country, but that's only a relative thing! It still gets quite a lot of rain! Other countries have far less rainfall in absolute terms and they grow their cities just fine, because they build reservoirs and dams and water desalination plants. Nature has not forced this situation on us, we are simply choosing not to build things.
And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate?
So, either capitalism doesn't work, or your thesis isn't quite right...
I have two other counters to offer, first we have seen GDP per capita gradually increasing in major economies for the last 50 years (while the IT revolution has played out). There have been other technical innovations over this time, but I believe that GDP per capita has more than quadrupled in G8 economies. The USA and Canada have, at the same time, enjoyed a clear extra boost from fracking and shale extraction, and the USA has arguably enjoyed an extra extra boost from world dominance - but arguably.
The second one is simple anecdote. Hour for hour I now can do far more in terms of development than I did when I was a hard core techie in the 90's and 2000's. In addition I can manage and administer systems that are far more complex than those it took teams of people to run at that time (try running a 10gb size db under load on oracle 7 sitting on top of spinning rust and 64mb ram store for fun) I can also manage a team of 30's expenses, timesheets, travel requests and so on that again would have taken a person to do. I can just do these things and my job as well and I do it mostly in about 50 hrs a week. If I wasn't involved in my people's lives and happy to argue with customers to get things better I could do it in 40 hrs regularally, for sure. But I put some discretion in.
My point is - we are just more productive. It is hard to measure, and anecdote / "lived experience" is a bad type of evidence, but I think it's clearly there. This is why then accountants have been able to reorganise modern business organisations to use fewer people to do more. Have they destroyed value while doing this - totally - but they have managed to get away with it because 7/10 they have been right.
Personally I've suffered from the 3/10 errors. I know many of us on here have, but we shouldn't shut our eyes because of that.
> And yet we are told that competition will determine that capital and talent will flow towards that most efficient organisations over time. Thus, surely organisations that eschewed this practice would emerge and dominate?
That’s really not how competition works in practice. Verizon and AT&T are a mess internally but their competitors where worse.
GDP per capita has a lot more to do with automation than individual worker productivity. Software ate the world, but it didn’t need to be great software to be better than no software.
At large banks you often find thousands of largely redundant systems from past mergers all chugging along at the same time. Meanwhile economies of scale still favor the larger bank because smaller banks have more systems per customer.
So sure you’re working with more complex systems, but how much of that complexity is actually inherently beneficial and how much is legacy of suboptimal solutions? HTML and JavaScript are unbelievably terrible in just about every way except ubiquity thus tools / familiarity. When we talk about how efficient things are, it’s not on some absolute scale it’s all about the tools built to cope with what’s going on.
AI may legitimately be the only way programmers in 2070 deal with ever more layers of crap.
As long as you have the economies of scale and huge barriers to entry, companies can stay deeply dysfunctional without getting outcompeted. Especially when the same managers rotate between them all and introduce the "best practices" everywhere.
When he died he had assembled a team of people who worked on it. The site is now suffering from a bit of rot (the videos don't serve anymore) but he has been dead for six years so I suppose that's no surprise. I don't know if his "gang" still maintain it, but someone must be paying for the domain and hosting I suppose.
The time and energy he committed to this are astonishing to me, he was a talented man - he had the option to be a partner at Arthur Anderson (progenitor of Accenture) before becoming a CFO at a series of small banks and building societies. His career was firmly on the up, he worked for one of the precursors of what became RBS in the 1980's. If things had gone differently perhaps he would have muzzled "Fred the Shred" and we'd all be the richer, especially his kids. But, at some point a conviction and faith gripped him and he gave up everything for his bible project. He died penniless.
I wonder, because I don't understand, because I just see numerology and over interpretation, does it mean he was wrong? I think so, but perhaps that's just my faith talking.
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