I think you need to define what solved means and what better means.

Have you tried one-shotting real distributed systems problems? What was the result and how did you verify correctness?

Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.

Or perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.

I care and I'm part of Nature.

The comment was paraphrasing the message of the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" (which Bradbury used for the title of his story), which is exactly about this: that Nature won't know or care when we're gone.

"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.

I see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability.

I don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature is not going to survive either once you broaden the time horizon a bit.

I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. Yes the planet is doomed sooner or later. But I'm talking about nature as in trees, animals, etc. The natural eco-system. And it existed and evolved and adapted naturally long before humans and will continue long after we're gone.

In philosophy there is a debate regarding the meaning of the word nature and if humans should be considered a part of it, and I see the points, but that's a different discussion.

My point is the whole "nature existed and will continue to exist" thing is honestly trite. Nature created us, we're just another output in the universal system. There's no real point behind the whole statement that nature will exist without us, and it contributes nothing to any discussion besides unnecessary smugness.

There's a difference between discussing our impact on the environment vs. the silly "lol nature will outlive us" stuff, which contributes nothing.

It's the takeaway from the story in OP and the poem with the same title, so I'd say it's very much on-topic. Your only contribution is "acktually, humans are nature too and once the universe collapses everything is doomed" and shut down any other discussion as "silly".

> Nature will be better off once it happens.

As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.

The world has been much more inhospitable than it is today and I'm sure it will recover. The problem I see with us is how we destroy everything in our path on an industrial scale. As long as the wheels keep spinning we extract everything we can, see water use for data centers as the latest example.

Other species co-exist in the eco-system, we destroy it.

> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story.

I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :)

  And not one will know of the war, not one
  Will care at last when it is done.

  Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
  If mankind perished utterly;

  And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
  Would scarcely know that we were gone.

It's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.

Oh! I didn't even think it could be a spambot. You may be right :(

I'm not a spambot - it just felt sort of poignant for today. Ultimately, doesn't bother me that it got downvoted. Created some discussion, I got maybe mistaken for a bot - so all good ;).

Fair, but even though I don't comment often, my account is almost 15 years old. So I'd hope that at least pushes back against the spammer aspect - but ultimately, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's also common for spammers to hijack old accounts.

Thanks. Glad at least a few people understood. I pulled out my copy of Martian Chronicles today (which I'm fortunate to have signed by Bradbury) when I saw this pop up on the main page.

By the strangest of coincidences, I was just re-reading The Martian Chronicles (randomly picking stories) this week, after re-buying it because I lost my copy. So this story and the poem were on my mind.

Awesome that your copy was signed by Bradbury! I only saw him in person once in 1997, from far away, when visited Buenos Aires for a book fair. I would have loved to get his autograph, but it was too crowded.

The argument for universities to be a place to learn to think critically and not learn specific skills is an even stronger value prop in an era where useful skills likely change rapidly.

There needs to be a realization of how important communication skills are to develop and possess. The act of disagreement has skill levels that do not trigger emotional responses, and cause cross understanding to occur. Learning how to convey understanding and gain understanding from others becomes more and more important in a landscape of rapid change. Which we are collectively terrible at, with most companies being miscommunication circuses, with all the stress that generates, needlessly.

The problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time.

This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.

Some will probably dismiss your comment as partisan but it is very hard to (honestly) argue that this isn’t the case. “Think critically…” but only about the cliché punching bags of academia: capitalism, Western culture, American foreign policy, The Patriarchy, etc. I didn’t witness any college classes that encouraged us to think critically about socialism, or think critically about Islam, or think critically about non-Western countries’ foreign policy aims, or think critically about third-wave feminism’s impact on society. Instead, even questioning any of those sacred cows usually brands you as “far right” and professors sometimes even get fired for making others “feel unsafe” if they even try.

Note: you can still be an avowed and serious leftist and have my respect if you allow your ideas to be questioned, hold yourself to a standard of proof, and tolerate dissent. What I’m criticizing is the way especially in universities, people jump right to “You’re a Nazi/fascist and the only acceptable response is to shut you down and eject you from the community” if someone doesn’t embrace all the same political dogma as you.

Thank you for getting it.

The essay https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html captures the problem perfectly. I think that Paul Graham was completely correct when he said:

"I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them."

Those on the left have been trying to advance their power through creating new taboos that cement their position. But they've misjudged. As a result Trump, by simply speaking to the resulting pain points, has been put on a potential course towards dictator. (Note, he doesn't have to do anything about it - just name the pain.) Will he succeed? Probably not, but he's certainly making a try of it.

Very few on the left are willing to engage in the self-reflection to realize how they have contributed to Trump's rise. It should be obvious - if Trump is an existential threat then you should reach out to people you dislike, who dislike Trump more than you. But no. We've been doubling down on ideological purity. And the horrible result is in the (currently partially demolished) White House.

"Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle"

100% agree. But this seems to be standard now for most political dialog. Either one group will call you a racist or the other group will call you communist. Or maybe antisemitic.

Hiring earlier career folks isn’t about maximizing their productivity.

It’s also about an influx of new ideas, different lenses to view problems, and connections to people like them, amongst a number of other reasons.

This is a compute memory trade, not compression vs. turobquant? Lemma 1 is something like, "forward pass is deterministic because it's deterministic" which means the input tokens were always the lower bound...which isn't caching? Smells tautological. What am I missing?

Well yeah, I just wrote it as a lemma, but it's basically close to tautological. Its only job is to formally ground the entropy argument that follows it. The interesting claim is what comes after: because KV vectors are deterministic functions of tokens, and because the model is a near-optimal predictor of its own distribution, the conditional entropy of each new KV vector given all previous ones is bounded by token-level perplexity. TurboQuant compresses against the marginal distribution of each vector in isolation -- that's the gap.

And yes, it's a compute/memory tradeoff, all caching is. The claim is just that the memory floor is much lower than anyone had formally established. Whether the compute cost of getting there is worth it is a fair open question the paper doesn't settle. But what if it is? Caching is the thread running through most of my work, and I intend to find out.

They aren't - they'd have led with that. (note: I use arch and am legally obligated to tell you).

HN used to provide a really high signal to noise ratio for me, but it's degrading pretty quickly. There are new accounts below saying "hey I just learned what RTOS means, thanks!"

I reflexively reload HN many times per day, but I'm wondering if I need a walled garden with some sort of curation of individuals - which sucks - to get the signal level I want.

This probably isn't just an HN problem (GH's model is broken now). It's so cheap to make software that the previous process of releasing something new associated with a person is probably outdated. AI knows what sounds impressive too. So now we're drowning in software releases and attributing software to a person is meaningless.

I wish HN upvote data was public, I feel like I could build some kind of improved algorithm that reduces the vote weight of people who upvote slop.

This site is very much drowning in all the slop. It's over half of posts now I think, not just the "Show HN" posts. Those are 100% slop, as are all the non-show-hn new project announcements.

All the moderators have done is drop Show HN posts by newish accounts. It fixed nothing. I have to hope they have some ambitious plan along the lines of what you suggest.

I've noticed a gigantic uptick in text messages and phone calls where people try to bypass the call screening. It may get to the point where I'll only want to see comms from people in an allowlist.

I don't answer the phone from anyone I don't know. If it is something important, they'll find a way to reach me.

Unfortunately when you are on the job search every call can be important

Same, except for when I’m expecting a delivery, then I tend to answer calls from unknown numbers.

My standard response in such cases is “Hello unknown number, who are you and why should I not immediately hang up?”.

The response “Am I speaking to…” gets cut off with “Nope, you answer my questions first”. If they _must_ speak to Mr [MySurname] I claim to be my PA and that they aren't talking to him(me) without convincing me they aren't a junk call first. If I have a few minutes to spare, it can be quite an entertaining little game keeping them on the line so they can't be conning someone more vulnerable. Unfortunately must junk calls these days are either initially automated or the humans are wise to people like me being a waste of their time so they hang up cutting that fun short.

I solved this by renting small office that has reception and they handle deliveries. They are not far and so if I get something I get a text and then I collect when is convenient for me. I really hate waiting for couriers to ring, so it's a massive stress relief.

That’s also what I want to do. I currently have my office/lab at home and waiting for deliveries to come is very stressful as I basically have to be ready to answer the door at any time, which can be many hours.

I usually answer unknown numbers if they are from my own country only. And then i open with a sound like 'huh??' so they cannot do the voice cloning. if no one says anything then hang up. usually its robocalls using crappy TTS but there are crews with more advanced capabilities out there.

Stork.JS is a really well written piece of software, though.

devs have really got to start using NSA style naming conventions where they use the Joycean compound with random stuff that sounds cool e.g. BANNANADAIQUIRI or FOXACID.

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: About 10 years I moved into leadership roles (VP Eng) and while I continued to write code for POCs, it hasn't been my primary role for quite some time. DDIA has been a book I pull out often when guiding leaders and members of my teams when it comes to building distributed systems. I'm writing more code these days because I can, and I still reference DDIA and have the second edition preordered.