I have been thinking about the difference between 'consumption' and 'creation' style hobbies lately. Spending time drinking different coffee beans, or collecting sneakers, I would call 'consumptive'. Writing a software package, or knitting would be creative. I find that its useful to me to keep a balance between these in my life.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D
I agree with this wholeheartedly! Even something a small as fixing up some horrific diverged orphaned git history can help me on a hobby project. And the fact that I see the commands that, or the way a containerfile/caddyfile is written, helps me learn along the way. Not as good as a textbook, but like the author I'm reading a textbook for <this thing over here> not <that boring infra stuff>.
I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc. Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
> A possibly complementary take is that maybe mediums also just... have shelf lives? Like, if there's been no innovation in radio dramas or still life paintings of flowers or superhero comics over the past thirty years, it's not because we as a culture have lost the collective spark, you know?
I think this is a useful point! I was chatting to a french individual in aus recently, about the lack of culture in Brisbane. He responded that there was lots of great ballet, opera, ... - they used the word 'culture' for what I might call 'high culture'. I think this is indicative of the above point: a boomer has a certain concept of what culture is, from their experiences. A zoomer who interacts mostly with a digital world has a very different concept.
There's just not that much IP in a UI like that. Every day we get articles on here that you can make an agent in 200 LOCs, Yegge's gas town in 2 weeks, etc. Training the model is the hard part, and what justifies a large valuation (350B for anthropic, c.f. 7B for jetbrains).
I guess one issue is that you pay $200/month whether you use it or not. Potentially this could be better for Anthropic. What was not necessarily foreseeable (ok maybe it was) back when that started was that users have invented all kinds of ways to supervise their agents to be as efficient as possible. If they control the client, you can't do that.
Unsure of the other competition, but I can vouch for synthetic.new's subscription for GLM (+ other open models). Note quite as accurate as Anthropic's models but good enough for basically everything I do.
IDK if Anthropic wants to offer a service at below cost, I don't think they should gate keep which client you access that service over. Or in other terms, I won't use a service that locks me into a client I don't like.
> My very personal opinion is bureaucracy, fat bureaucracy, damned bureaucracy, expensive bureaucracy: believing you can have a better world by regulations IS stupid, and so on... the whole idea of an elite who is elite 'cause is using it's brain, while out there other need to be forced 'cause they are no (so should just obey and not use their brain) is stupid.
> E.g. In the UK there is no ID card, you can live your whole life with no ID of any sort: yes, you need an ID (the passport) to go outside indeed: your address is stated by your electricity bill, or bank account address, and that is more that enough ... and it works! This while in other EU countries (much less civilized I would add), police can force you to a police station if you do not have the national ID in your pocket... and, beside this, this ID even expire (!)
These sound like aesthetic arguments, and you can make those decisions as a nation whether you're in the EU or not.
> There's an entire parallel scientific corpus most western researches never see.
Most of the scientific corpus (I would wager >99%) is not read by anyone. At least in physics, all the stuff you want to read is in english, in the journals that your global community cares about. I'm not sure (in physics) that you're ever going to find anything useful here. From my brief look around I see a lot of junk (similar to the arXiv).
My usual method for keeping up to date on the arXiv is to use their API (rss feed with search query in url) for terms I care about, but usually on click on papers by groups I value. Unless I see papers for those groups on chinarxiv.org (and I didn't find any from the good Chinese groups), I don't think it's worth it.
Anyway, keen to hear if anyone else finds something useful here.
Statistical algorithms always make more concrete assumptions of the signal. DFT / Fourier transforms are great as they are a direct mathematical operation, that maps neatly to (basic) equations. There's a lot you can do, and easily grok, with FTs. Once you get statistical, a lot of things are harder :)
If you want pure performance, and understand the underlying statistical processes, then sure I totally agree with you.
This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D