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You have to put on some very narrow lenses to argue that "most" serious software is written for the JVM. Operating systems, compilers, browsers, databases, planes, cars, the transaction processing for at least one major payment processor, major cloud services, etc predominantly use other languages.

I don't think there's any single language that most serious software is written in.


C, C++, and C# are obviously also major players in "serious software", but you can estimate the volume of software through the number of people involved (e.g. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...). If Java doesn't have an outright majority, it has an obvious plurality. And again, there aren't many alternatives.

The stones don't get tired, but the humans running the visitor center and keeping the tourists in line do. Operating a highly visited historical site like Stonehenge takes significantly more work than people realize.

It's a bit annoying getting frontier models to even work on IOCCC code because of "safety", but even if you get around that LLMs just aren't very good at it. Obfuscating code involves a level of creativity and deviousness that LLMs struggle to meet.

Keep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with.

That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.


I'm not sure that's a great takeaway. Lots of problems are undecidable and have reasonably effective solutions in practice (e.g. finding bugs -> testing, static analysis, etc). Mind you, I don't expect we'll find anything like that for transformers, but there's a surprisingly large gap between what's possible in general and what's possible in the cases we care about.

requires

No, this is in the same ballpark as ideas like big-O notation. The paper is saying that transformers can recognize a language with exponentially fewer symbols than other kinds of systems, i.e. they're more succinct.

It's exactly as related to real models as computer science is to real computers.


You might not be aware, but Baumgartner has a generally negative reputation in the conservator community. From what I understand as a non-expert, he's overly aggressive with his swabbing/varnishing and he's taken power tools directly to an artwork numerous times. The former isn't obvious to me either.

I've read that. I'm not part of the conservator community, I just really enjoy the videos.

If you spend any amount of time listening to people complain about what is or isn't taught, you'll quickly discover that most things they hate aren't taught and the things they wish were taught are, at least in some form. Much of the rest is based on either outdated or misunderstood knowledge/beliefs.

My kid was given a hacky political axis test in school. Then all the kids were lined up in a row based upon the test results and the teacher then grilled the kids on the right side as to why. This is happening in a public school funded by taxes. Gaslighting parents about their own children's experiences isn't a great idea.

PS I know this is one event, it was also part of a consistent pattern of similar events. The school administrators had no problem admitting this in public and were proud of it.


If it's not clear, my post was about school curricula.

They very much understood their situation. That was the means of control. Their incomes were directly defined by agricultural productivity, and their expenses largely controlled by the shogun. Daimyo couldn't meaningfully communicate with each other, easily intermarry, or form alliances. They were forced to maintain huge retinues and lavish estates, and the shogun could bankrupt them or kill their family at any point.

The shogunate needed to do some balancing along the way (including the introduction of metallic currency), but the government had enough levers to keep the samurai in line, right up until they couldn't.


To add on to this, the wives and heirs of daimyo had to live semi-permanently in the capital, which gave the shogun a powerful leverage over his subordinates. Any murmuring of an uprising would result in his family (and heirs) being killed. Nor was there freedom of movement across domains; this had to be granted by the shogun, preventing daimyo from easily communicating and organising.

Approximately 50-75% of a daimyo's budget went towards maintenance and boarding costs for when they were in attendance at the shogun's court. "Commerce" was considered a lowly profession not befitting a proud samurai. Most of their wealth was obtained through their right to collect agricultural taxes, which was granted to them by the daimyo.

While the samurai were a caste descended from warriors, after hundreds of years of peace they had largely become "sword-wearing bureaucrats". They weren't all that competent or experienced in warfare. They carried swords and practiced martial arts, but this was just as much a LARP (to use a modern phrase): a means of connecting to their martial heritage.


Pantasy, Cobi, Funwhole, megabloks, etc. There's tons of alt bricks at nearly any reasonable price point. But you're still not going to find these sorts of multi-thousand piece sets for <$100 because it takes at least a few cents to produce a dimensionally accurate, quality controlled bit of plastic.

But thats because they limit production to control prices, producing mass volume accurate plastic was never the bottleneck.

These are remarkably close to the raw cost of materials and tooling. The Sagrada Familia model is a 12k piece set for $800, ~$0.07/piece. Phantasy has an unlicensed Opera set (85019) [0] with 3.5k pieces for $190, $0.05/piece. That's straight up cheap. They're not limiting production to control prices. High quality injection molding (in multiple colors no less!) is hard. 2 cents over 12k pieces does add up to a nice bit of change for Lego though.

[0] https://pantasy.com/products/pantasy-the-opera-85019


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