Because the world has hacks outside of tech and a life outside tech. Most of the interesting articles on HN are things like today's lost city in egypt, not oh look lols my llm performs well.
A friend - female, white, blonde - while in india on a business trip had to deal with inapprorpaite behavior including individuals visibly touching themselves inappropriately...not my jam.
I nearly triple majored (or a minor) because I took Lit classes for fun when doing my Bachelors. Due to the impacted nature of that school now, I don't think it would be possible to duplicate what I did. Sometimes, for me, having a bit of structure helps focus on an interest - undergrad it was literature (beyond other courses, work, and being social - not sleeping much was I guess helpful at the time).
When I spent about 8 years living in a remote area with a lot of old mines, etc. exploring rocks, having a mining claim, etc was interesting and it was not directly related to work. So, trying Geology made some sense because I had an interest.
Yes the near Lit minor and my second Bachelors (chemistry) were literally for fun - but there was a roundedness to not just staring at computers all the time.
Different people have different interests and approaches.
Also costs when I was doing the initial schooling wasn't as bad as it is now (a TAing job, working in a lab, and maybe some part time tech support) covered most bills. Rent, tuition, and other expenses were under 10k for the year - even at a UC - yes this was awhile ago. My step-daughter is looking at closer to $30k a year (give or take) for a CSU.
We will be hopping over to Italy/France/or Croatia in the next year or so. Work will not be the motivator, but we both have options.
In the states during late covid, I thought the downtime would be good to do a second masters in something unrelated to working in software. I chose a remote program with a univeristy here in the states, I did the first year, but it reminded me that studying - especially a program unrelated to anything you have currently done - is actually not easy.
I chose Geology. I have BS/BA in Comp Eng and Chemistry and an MS in Comp Eng. So this was personal interest.
Revisiting math I hadn't used in awhile was the easy part. Making the time, while working, reminded my why I also ended up ABD (all but dissertation - toward PHD) post masters. Sometimes your brain needs to relax.
Glad it worked for you. And the European Universities are significantly cheaper than Universities in the states (this was a state univerisity which is - per state - considered a step above a state school. For instance a UC vs a CSU in california).
The model is the important part, a huffman code or adaptive huffman or other sorts of encoders would be much better on a dataset based on the model. You need the model to also decode. And on a dataset of sufficient size, embedding the model and the benefit of it's memorization of the file can be offset.
A non-general compression algorithm (model - I don't mean a distinct llm, but "modeling data") targeted at a specific dataset will always do better than a general algorithm.
The reason I mentioned the "encoder" doesn't matter - arithmetic coding, for the data it is presented, will beat huffman/adaptive huffman every day, but it's the model that is where the real "compression" comes into play.
I've implemented enough "coders" over the years, including arithmetic for both commercial and research purposes (was a student of Glen Langdon).
I liked the mid-2000s, gigaom and techcrunch actually had articles worth reading (not all, TC got sorta gossipy rag at one point). Om's were generally well thought out.
While not directly a zine, I'm liking some of the small format game publications (mostly modules and add ons) in the Shadowdark / OSR / MOthership ecosystem. Something small, concise and easy to take with you.
I've played with crypto enough to be amused, like you I like some of the tech - especially the Hedera eco-system. Dabbling in crypto helped me help the wife start a plant store we had for a couple of years. It's always been a hobby. I think things like decentralized IDs (DID) - while not directly crypto related, often land in tech discussions of such - and the like could likely be useful for some of the AI related identity work going on at the identity level.
Some nice loss harvesting in the past will help with some other financial moves down the road. I'm definitely checking in now and then, but mostly see it as background noise.
While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
Google AI responses are generally crap and annoying. I've gone back to DDG or if I need some context - very specific guidance for claude/chatgpt. Goodle's AI is generally inadequate or wrong without significant clarification.
My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.
That statement can be made regardless of state. I'm pretty sure the costs charged to insurance companies are because of "agreed rates". Sometimes people with shitty insurance negotiate with the provider for the "cash rate". This isn't about the uninsured, it's about the way the system of middle men is setup.