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mendigou

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I am former AWS and this is pretty accurate.

The other factor to add here is that, with some exceptions, the whole company feels like a Rube Goldberg machine and very few people care about what happens outside their cog (because they’re not incentivized to do so).

I’m sorry but that is an insane interpretation of turn signals. If you only turn them on once you’re about to execute the maneuver, they’re useless. The whole point of them is to warn other drivers you intend to do something so they can anticipate your movement and allow you to do it safely.

How are turn signals explained in the driver handbook (or equivalent rulebook) in northeastern US? As far as I know they clearly state that turn signals are about intent, so they should be turned on the moment you decide you need to turn or switch lanes.

I keep hearing this thing about apps and I'm confused. I write code on my MBA M1, run orbital simulations, run a media server... All like I would on Linux. What am I missing on userland?

I understand there is low level system stuff I can't control, but I've made my peace with that. When using Linux I hadn't touched its internals for years.

After so many years, so many people still believe in this user control paradigm.

Giving users control works for the slim percentage of power users. Most users will end up obliterated by scammers and other unsavory characters.

Perhaps there is a way to give control to today's users (that includes my non-technical mother) and still secure them against the myriad of online threats. If anyone knows of a paper or publication that addresses this, I'd love to read it.

Indeed there was a split second of primal flight response, and then awe. Not like you have a long time to think about it!

I was lucky enough to see this one live.

It was astounding. It became day for a few seconds and then it broke off into a half dozen pieces or so. It left an incandescent trail behind.

It looked incredibly close. I had the feeling we were going to hear it coming down nearby in a few seconds, but it ended up in the Atlantic Ocean (actually not that far from us since we were by the ocean, but far enough).

So glad we were having drinks outside and I wasn't grabbing anything in the house!

I haven't touched this in a while, but you can train NNs in a distributed fashion and what GP described is roughly the most basic version of model parallelism, where there is a copy of the model on each node, each node receives a batch of data, and the gradients get synchronized after each batch (so they again start from the same point like you mention).

Most modern large models cannot be trained on one instance of anything (GPU, accelerators, whatever), so there's no alternative to distributed training. They also wouldn't even fit in the memory of one GPU/accelerator, so there are even more complex ways to split the model across instances.

How is Germany similar to the US? Perhaps in the enshittification of society, but certainty not in the forces that drive innovation.

Germany could be that innovation hub in Europe, and it seems incredibly resistant to do so. And all of the EU is trailing behind, unfortunately.

I also don't get it. I worked there for 8 years. I'm southern european and there was always a "half joke" about our lazyness. But we worked the hardest. My local colleagues were incredibly entitled and produced very little value.

In my opinion, Germany was at some point at the top of the world in most aspects, and the people became complacent over time. Which leads us to where we are today. Enshittification is palpable in every single aspect of society. No one cares about doing a good job anymore. Getting something done takes months where it should take days. And then that thing you got done breaks in a few weeks.

I'm sorry for the rant. I got pretty burned out of living there.

Off topic: was Kunming's slogan still "civilized Kunming"? I found it pretty funny when I was there some years ago.

The point of the conversation is how people express these relationships in their day-to-day so they can be encoded in software.

Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom".

In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly labeled in their localized app.

But then you look at Japanese (and other far east) websites and they're full of info, buttons, links, etc. Like old western websites!

I've always wondered why we diverged so much on UIs between eastern and western countries. Chinese characters pack information in a way that our alphabet doesn't, but that can't be the only reason, can it?

100%. I'm also a Spaniard and immigrating next year to Bay Area and I can say that I'd only move to a handful of cities in the US. The cultural shock was too hard in places outside major metros. And I've lived in South East Asia!

E.g., around CalPoly most people just... Went home after work? No meeting up to do something, have a drink, etc. They just went home and stayed there. I found it super strange.

I just returned to Spain and went through this Cl@ve thing only to realize it cannot be used for a lot of "federal" (estatales) services nor for the "state" (comunidad autónoma) services.

In Spain we have so many layers of bureaucracy that it's making me glad I left. Public notaries, the State Registry, and the Cadastre, are some of the most archaic institutions I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They even look at me like I'm an alien when I ask about digitized records (escrituras) or at least an index.

On the other hand in Singapore I paid my taxes and my company taxes in literally less than 5 minutes. In Finland I had an integrated citizen experience. Even in Germany, despite the reputation, things were somewhat integrated between the tax authority and the social security.

That's all good in theory. In practice, it's just a massive time sink for citizens. I know because I'm going through some of it right now for regularizig an inheritance and I've wasted so much time, but having this data separate has brought nothing to my privacy. In fact, given the legacy systems, I'd argue I have less privacy because there are fewer (or no) controls.

On the other hand, when these connected systems are in place it's not like employees can just tap your name and get the data, there is some Auth process with your eID/certificate.

It all boils down to people's trust in the government. In Scandinavian countries that trust is high. In Southern European countries it's very low (and much lower in the US).

A little off-topic, but: I just found out about Comma.ai and... is it really legal in the US? I know it wouldn't be in most (all?) EU countries, as modifications to the vehicle require certification by a professional engineer.

It's kind of terrifying that anyone can modify their vehicle as they please and drive it on the road with everyone else.

Everywhere in Europe. Every European language other than English (that I know of) uses "billions" for 10^12 and something like "milliards" or "thousands of millions" for 10^9.

I worked for years at ESA and at least there this was not true at all. Most of us came from pretty normal backgrounds and had a passion for engineering.

It's definitely not a place where "money ambitious" people go. It's not particularly well paid compared to other engineering jobs (and I think this is even more true at NASA). What we all had in common was fierce passion and a sense of fulfillment that I haven't found anywhere else yet.