JBorrow

Moving all of astronomy to space based observations is entirely incompatible with the way that instruments are funded, built, and deployed. It is only valid for a set of highly specific and well funded observatories that take decades to get off the ground and can never be updated, improved, or modified to search new scientific directions.

Why don’t “we” just build more cell towers?

Not in Europe, where there are strict limits on credit card surcharges

JWTs are very helpful if you maintain many downstream services on separate domains that need shared auth and identity infrastructure

I just can't get behind this perspective, perhaps because I am a 'bad prompter', simply due to the lack of capability from current models. I end up rejecting them, asking them to implement again, they spew out tons of crap code instead of a 10 line fix, and on, and on.

Note that I'm not saying the agents are useless. They certainly write a lot of code and sometimes it is good. But I don't think you can get away without touching code yourself simply because at some level it is often the most concise way to get your idea across. I find it best to implement a core set of changes by-hand, and then ask the system to e.g. replicate them to other dependencies. I genuinely don't understand how anyone can work on a system with any complexity, and get the results they actually want, without touching code.

It’s started in TFA

This cross platform rendering engine’s website doesn’t render well at all on Safari on the iPhone.

People write applications that work with the S3 API but may want to host their own storage for a variety of reasons. Personally I make use of S3-compatible services for pre-signed url access to data on disks I own. The distributed aspect is only one reason why someone might want an S3-like service.

Yeah, having your agent write 3x the code in exhaustive tests (I tried this recently and got 600 lines of tests for my 100 lines of code!) sure makes things look great, but when you actually look at the content of the tests they’re meaningless. Good tests validate the use of design patterns, ensure that dependencies hold, and are meaningful (e.g. shortcut debugging by setting up useful state) when they break.

Maybe I'm entirely out of the loop and a complete idiot, but I am really not sure at all what people mean when they talk about this stuff. I use AI agents every day, but people who say they spend 'most of my time writing agents and tools' must be living in an absolutely different world.

I don't understand how people are making anything that has any level of usefulness without a feedback loop with them at the center. My agents often can go off for a few minutes, maybe 10, and write some feature. Half of the time they will get it wrong, I realize I prompted wrong, and I will have to re-do it myself or re-do the prompt. A quarter of the time, they have no idea what they're doing, and I realize I can fix the issue that they're writing a thousand lines for with a single line change. The final quarter of the time I need to follow up and refine their solution either manually or through additional prompting.

That's also only a small portion of my time... The rest is curating data (which you've pretty much got to do manually), writing code by hand (gasp!), working on deployments, and discussing with actual people.

Maybe this is a limitation of the models, but I don't think so. To get to the vision in my head, there needs to be a feedback loop... Or are people just willing to abdicate that vision-making to the model? If you do that, how do you know you're solving the problem you actually want to?

They're pretty much equivalent.

My point was that there’s a stop sign every block, so they need to stop anyway.

At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small.

I don't know that 'removing' these as bus-stops would actually change anything. I think a larger question is whether route changes should occur.

There was a large effort in Philly called the 'Bus Revolution' [1] that aimed to re-balance routes (I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today). The problem there was that there was a funding crisis that massively delayed the implementation [2]. These services are massively under-funded, and that's the primary issue; implementing the article's suggestions are not free.

[1] https://wwww.septa.org/initiatives/bus/ [2] https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/transportation-and-tran...

Complete and utter slop with no actual information about McDonald’s or changes in policy or advertisement.

46 authors isn’t that many. Big projects necessitate many authors (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06209)

Racing and street driving are completely different. Racing involves detailed knowledge of vehicle dynamics and grip. Street driving is mainly obstacle recognition and avoidance. No waymo ever operates anywhere close to the limit of grip, which is where you are all the time when racing.

I don't really understand how me saying that this tool isn't good for science as gatekeeping. The vibe-written papers that I am talking about have little-to-no valuable scientific content, and as such would always be rejected. It's just that it's way easier to produce something that _looks_ reasonable from a five-second glance than before, and that causes additional load on an already strained system.

I also don't understand your second paragraph at all.

The journal that I'm an editor for is 'diamond open access', which means we charge no submission fees and no publication fees, and publish open access. This model is really important in allowing legitimate submissions from a wide range of contributors (e.g. PhD students in countries with low levels of science funding). Publishing in a traditional journal usually costs around $3000.

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their undergraduate affiliation (in accounting) to submit a paper on cosmology, entirely vibe-coded and vibe-written. This just wastes our (already stretched) time. A significant fraction of submissions are now vibe-written and come from folks who are looking to 'boost' their CV (even having a 'submitted' publication is seen as a benefit), which is really not the point of these journals at all.

I'm not sure I'm convinced of the benefit of lowering the barrier to entry to scientific publishing. The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research). Connecting this together in a paper is indeed a challenge, and a skill that must be developed, but is really a minimal part of the process.

There is also FITS, but that is mainly for astronomical applications (and is in general an insane and terrible format). But it supports tons of types!

I’m not sure that’s an accurate description of the word’s entomology not least because “goyslop” is itself derived from… “slop”, which is low quality high-volume food for livestock.

Why? They don't necessarily increase productivity at all [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912

It's back now indeed, after around 1h30 of downtime, https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/nasa.gov.html

I stand corrected, either way NASA.gov is entirely down.

For an hour now the DNS record for nasa.gov has pointed to 192.0.66.108, leading to a total outage of NASA web services.

Yes, that's tens of thousands of people.

You should look up 'cap-exempt H1B'. Many postdoctoral researchers, research staff, and doctors use the H1B program.

All cap-exempt institutions that I know of are treating it as if it does. There has been no clarification as of yet.

Many people on H1Bs work for nonprofits or hospitals, or are otherwise publicly funded.

That 'excellent seeing' is for sites that are chosen for telescopes. Typical seeing from sea level is much worse:

- https://www.ing.iac.es/astronomy/development/hap/dimm.html

- https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig-C1-Seeing-distributi...

- https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/9/2225

Around 1-2 arcseconds is 'good' seeing in your backyard. There is a good reason for telescopes to be on some of the tallest mountains on Earth.

Astronomical seeing severely limits the efficacy of even multi-million dollar telescopes. The size of the pixels in this image is ~0.2 arcseconds, which is far below typical seeing limits even in excellent conditions.