It’s been barely two generations since the death camps. My grandma, who is still alive, can tell you stories of seeing trains take half her village away.
Intergenerational trauma is a real psychological phenomenon.
A „hilarious anxiety” is an incredibly naive world view.
I have an insatiable appetite for non-fiction - history, geography, politics, etc which I'm fairly certain can be traced back to a series of educational picture books I devoured as a child.
Each would survey some broad topic, for example Ancient Egypt. It would be full of detailed drawings/illustrations and accompanying text snippets. "What did the inside of a pyramid look like?", "How did the Ancient Egyptians use chariots?", and so on.
Mum would always buy me a new one every other week. The topics were diverse & broad, and so never got boring.
A bonus was when a subject I had read in these books happened to come up at school :-)
To be honest I wish the Attention paper never came out.
All of this AI/LLM stuff is exasperating. I don't think I can stomach to hear another MBA talk about "leveraging AI" in their next startup/product initiative.
Cool, better autocomplete in my IDE is handy. But that's about it. I'd trade that back in a heart beat if I didn't have to have awful chatbots shoved in my face every time I open a webpage.
I’ve had plenty of productive “water cooler” conversations. Especially with people from other teams, as we don’t interact with each other much. Cross pollinating ideas in a large organisation is conducive to spontaneous creativity.
However, neither of our statements are very useful as they are just anecdotes, a result of our personal experiences.
An auto incrementing integer (for internal use) and a string (for external) will be enough for the vast majority of use cases, is simple to understand, and works well.
I remember when Google first started getting popular and how much of a leap it was compared to what was the mainstream at the time. Almost overnight the old 'search engines' felt deprecated.
I'm getting the same feeling again. I don't think we've seen "the next Google", just yet. But the foundations for one are in place.
If it were that easy people would not be paying for it.