It's a controversial observation, but it is very true. I work with AI models and have to read recently published research to work with the latest developments in the field.
Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject. So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility. Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just to have a paper to publish.
Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of published research does not push any boundaries or discover anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.
I would argue that a lot of the research published in the social sciences also falls under this category. It is there so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this point even further.
Popular "debate" in the news cycle, scientific authority based on crude subjective judgment, interests of capital.
This sort of viral bad science is something you would expect from reddit but not from hackernews. I suspect this site is becoming more like the former.
To be clear, I'm not making claims on whether or not remote work is more or less creative.
Just highlighting the point that bad science that fits a certain popular trend in online media gets clicks and engagement.
Comments like yours get little to no engagement because it actually addresses the article and is not an empty anecdotal debate for entertainment.
What makes this site intellectually engaging is that it is text-focused and doesn't host porn. It is much better at being what reddit wanted to be, but I think it it is "crossing the chasm" which is a term I learned here.
I think it is time to log off for good and get back to work. This sort of thing enough of a reason. Do not want to waste life scrolling.
The final stage of gentrification is the buying up of homes as pure investment properties by corporate and financial entities.
This is why housing is unafforable in LA, greedy landlords, especially the corporate variety. It's why the streets are filled with homeless in the largest cities of California.
First, it's white collar workers replacing blue collar workers. Then, it's vast numbers of empty homes and homeless people side-by-side.
This is what happens when the wealth gap grows without ceasing, the financial industry is the largest in the world.
It is not wholly bad to see my home state of Texas ascend as a tech hub, but California is still a part of the USA.
In many countries, corporate investment of residential homes is illegal. I still care about California, and if you guys want to keep it from steering towards a dystopian technocratic nightmare, you need to reign in corporate real estate investing and monopolistic practices from tech employers.
What is the point of a high SF tech salary if living expenses just do not make logical sense? What about the blue collar workers who make the city run? It's materialistic and self-cannabilizing. Billionaires among record-breaking homeless populations.
Don't think the liberal party is that different from the conservative party, both are beholden to the wealthy class. No matter the ruling party, it takes everyday people working together to make a real change. Real communities working together to solve problems.
People solve problems, politicians are just puppets for corporate interest. We are the people. Stand up for your rights and challenge authority, or it will just keep going this direction.
It's not just Stanford, Harvard and Yale did the same.
Schools like NYU and MIT stood out for not doing this sort of thing, and it goes back for hundreds of years to Europe.
I have worked in finance for years, people don't know that the largest banking giants like JP Morgan also refused to hire Jewish people.
I'm a faithful Christian, and discrimination is discrimination. You can be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, you can be any race or religion, and this should not impede your opportunity to succeed in America.
It's not only hateful, it's just dumb. You are limiting yourself. This good ol boys club can hold a monopoly on say liberal arts or business, but MIT is the leading research institution on the planet. You know, hard science that has the most immediate and effective impact.
It's like a process of natural selection where prejudiced people build structures not on merit, but on the exclusive privilege of prejudice, meaning they naturally fall behind unless they force themselves to adapt like in this case.
The future belongs to people who understand that a bright mind is a bright mind, no matter what prejudices people have. Asian students are now being treated in this way by the same institutions, but it's not helping anyone.
Maybe if the exclusive club of ultra-wealthy elite WASPs can't compete with the changing world, then it doesn't deserve to cling onto power. I see nothing threatening about succeeding alongside people of all walks of life, because I choose to succeed on my merit and not on the circumstances of my birth. I respect success, and I don't need a special privilege to reach it myself.
In my eyes and in the eyes of the people who dream of a better world, the future looks bright. In the eyes of the wealthy elite and their racist imperial structure, we are a threat to their treasured status quo. I see no issue with this, and I am excited to see what the future holds.
I am a writer and I love books, but I just don't want to work with Amazon or give them money for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post.
This is exactly the kind of tool I need to fill my shelves with great books without having to deal with Amazon. Very clean and efficient software that serves a useful purpose, it is deserving of success.
If you look at the 2-10 year spread US treasury bond rates, there is a massive yield curve inversion. Historically, this inversion has been a very consistent metric for predicting incoming recessions.
The current inversion hasn't been since the early 2000s and ensuing recession, which was characterized by the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the attacks of September 11th.
The dotcom bubble is attributed to venture capital funding, and the crash took out a lot of companies and hit others like Amazon pretty hard. Economic crisis is inevitable, it's built into the business cycle.
Following this logic, the next companies on the chopping block would be tech once again. This time, likely the "unicorns" that are the darlings of VC investors. Additionally, it's kind of an open secret that FAANG stock valuations are a bit disconnected from reality.
When you are on the edge of consumer tech, a lot of stock investors don't even understand how your business model functions and what gives it such a high valuation, and they don't really care as long as the price goes up. It's a darker side of the culture, as the trend is to splurge with VC millions and cash out at the zenith then move on to the next thing. History shows it's not sustainable.
Mesopotamian history is fascinating and deserves a lot more attention. It is the oldest root of human civilization itself and gives us insight into the most fundamental aspects of what civilization is today.
War is not the only means of conquest. Vietnam was manufacturing and drinking Coca-Cola in the 1960s, and as mentioned here, Germanic religion was interwoven with Christian culture during the Roman conquest of Europe.
One interesting and obscure connection is the origin of the words "hell" and "hall", as "hall" means "covered place" and "valhalla" means "hall of the dead" from Old Norse.
However, the original Hebrew and Greek is often "גֵּיהִנּוֹם" or "γέεννα" meaning "the valley of Hinnom." This is a physical place near Jerusalem where bodies denied a proper burial were burned, and some suggest it was even a region where human sacrifices took place.
You may be very surprised at what you find when you look into the origins of things that are taken for granted. Everything has some sort of origin, and historical roots can run very deep. Without looking at things on a deeper level, you are at the mercy of the surface-level understanding from your surrounding culture.
Corporations aren't democracies, they are government-regulated entities designed to turn a profit. Historically, working people have fought and even died en masse against corporate power in order secure the basic rights that we take for granted today.
If you can't see the struggle of power between working people, their communities, and their environments with corporate greed, I suggest reading up on the history of labor struggles or major criminal suits surrounding environmental regulation.
I used to work in marketing, corporations tell people what they want and they are very effective at it. If you think people are greedy for wanting things like a home they can afford or to not have their farmland and groundwater poisoned by fracking, then there is a serious disconnect with humanity as a whole.
That is really the defining characteristic of the ideology of the wealthy ruling class, total disconnect from the needs and realities of the everyday person in exchange for a desire to seek profit. Even worse is trying to shift the blame onto the victims of said irresponsible profit-seeking behavior.
Unless you are a member of that class, defending them or their ideology won't win you any brownie points. You can succeed in business without crossing these lines, but many people want more than just success and are willing to cross all the lines.
Things like child labor, regime changes, massive global tax evasion schemes, war profiteering, and destruction of natural resources are really indefensible, no matter how you try to twist it. If the government can't prevent these things on behalf of the people, then it has failed and needs replacing. That's my last word on the matter.
Wow, that completely changes my perception of history.
There are two competing theories on the initial population of the Americas. The first was a land bridge theory which suggests hunter-gatherers tracked mammoths across the once-frozen Bering Strait bridge of modern Russia/Alaska, but a newer and more popular theory is that Polynesian peoples arrived by boat navigation.
Apparently, sweet potatoes arrived in Polynesia around 1,200 and 1,300 AD, which gives a lot of credit to the idea that the first human inhabitants of the Americas arrived by boat from Polynesia.
Here in the Southeastern United States, we have the world's largest biodiversity of freshwater fish and a vast amount of wetlands and unpolluted fresh water systems.
The region has been growing economically and companies like 3M have poisoned a major river with industrial pollution. Corporations like HP, Oracle, and other SV giants have moved to the South due to lower taxes, cost of living, fewer regulations, and looser labor laws.
Better environmental regulation is necessary to protect our lands and waters, all across the country and even the planet. Water is far more vital than money, and arable land feeds the world.
If the whole world is developing, environmental protections have to evolve alongside it. Big business will always push at the limit, and even sometimes cross the line with the consequence being a large fine and firing a few scapegoats.
It really is a struggle between the will of the people and corporate greed at its core. Short-term profits vs long-term survival of the human race. Declining fish populations upset ecosystems, communities, and food supply. These large entities are more focused on driving quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.
If you look at what's happening in Guam, it is has even become a matter of national security recognized by the military. Issues like these, as mentioned here elsewhere, are more important than saber rattling with China. These things get set on the backburner if fear and greed push us into another global war.
I agree, but with programmers in particular it's seen as a badge of honor and sometimes even as an expectation from employers to just "eat, sleep, and code" all the time. We have things like "the crunch" or hackathons, but the dark side to it is the lack of labor laws surrounding computer work.
In fact, computer programmers have special exemptions under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
The FLSA guarantees minimum wage and 1.5x overtime pay for workers in the USA. In other words, if you are a computer programmer in the US, your employer can legally work you overtime/weekends without 1.5x pay like other workers.
Of course, the US also has the highest-paying programming jobs, and it has the most software developers by a very wide margin as America invented software engineering. This unique position in the labor market has caused the rights of computer programmers in the workplace to be largely overlooked.
It's often in retrospect as well. It can take time for the impact of certain innovations to unfold, and it often begins with a small group of people. The breadth of human innovation is now so wide that a scientist/engineer from the 1950s simply doesn't have the same scope of problems and areas of study to work on.
That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.
Pure mathematics doesn't always have an immediately known use, but it has historically been at the core of science. In the words of Carl Friedrich Gauss:
"Mathematics is the queen of the sciences."
While there are often cash prizes and prestige for solving great mathematical problems, it is also studied simply for the beauty of mathematics and for the desire to make new discoveries.
For example, algorithms eventually found their way into computers, number theory became essential to cryptography, set theory gave us fields and therefore quantum mechanics and modern electronics. Mathematicians create theories and proofs just for the sake of mathematics.
Pythagoras might have been seen as strange by his ancient contemporaries for spending his time calculating the area of squares along the sides of right triangles, but his theorems have proven essential to the progress of humanity
Strangely enough, soap bubble geometry has been a subject of interest in analog computing. Some suggest that soap films are more efficient than computers in some cases for finding proofs about surface systems. Topology has wide-reaching application from computing and electronics to physics and game theory.
Only slightly related, but "pawpaw" is often used in the Southern United States as a nickname for grandpa.
Reading this article was pretty surreal and funny with this in mind. Everyone rushing to buy and eat their pawpaws for their mango and banana like flavor.
I wonder if you could cultivate it on a larger scale, the demand is there. Or maybe they are more like truffles and need to be foraged.
Interesting article, now I have to try it. On a similar note, people take for granted the fact that tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, and blueberries all originated in the Americas.
Imagine ancient Rome without the tomato. Some things are so commonplace that we forget their origins.
I firmly believe that people should take at least one day of the week to not work at all. My code is very buggy and sloppy when I'm completely exhausted, even my grammar and ability to organize ideas falls apart.
For many people it's traditionally Sunday or Saturday, but even if you don't observe a day of rest religiously, it is still very practical. If you are involved with intellectual work like coding, switching your brain to just relax and enjoy life at least one day a week will refresh your focus and drive.
Alan Perlis said to understand a program you must become both the machine and the program, and he also admits that programming is an unnatural act. Programming is essentially forcing your mind to think like a machine, and you can't do this all the time or it will burn you out.
Don't neglect your mental wellbeing, take care of yourself! If you want to be productive, this will help you in the long run. The servers will keep running if you take a bit of time off, people aren't built for 24/7 uptime.
I think the most practical use in consumer cases would be a portable replacement for desktop and mobile displays. Using everyday apps for desktop and mobile that are already established, as well as interesting AR apps for entertainment and productivity.
As with a lot of cutting-edge tech, it seems the most immediately useful application is beyond consumer tech in the world of military tech. Being able to send critical information to soldiers in the field and integrate with weapons technology has been a major focus of AR since its early inception. Early HUDs have their roots in fighter jets.
If you think about it, a lot of things we credit to the high tech industry had their beginnings in low-key and often confidential military research, from the internet to computers themselves. Although, an app for motorcyclists that displays speed, engine, and navigation data in your field of view would be seriously bad*ss and successful if it worked in a clean and functional way.
As with a lot of emerging tech, its usefulness often depends on the ingenuity of early pioneers. People thought the internet was a useless, passing trend as late as the 1990s.
Imagine silently controlling a fully-featured AR displayed system with a brain-to-computer interface and zero peripherals like some Ghost in the Shell futuristic tech. That would be pretty awesome and legitimately useful.
Long reply from a young programmer that recognizes this trend and what it implies:
Alan Perlis says you can measure the perspective of a programmer based on their thoughts on the continued vitality of Fortran. Many universities are now going full Java and lowering standards on fundamentals for financial reasons, this is a bit alarming.
If you really want to stand out, spend serious time on fundamentals. Learn to develop and deploy clean, efficient software from scratch without relying heavily on external resources that add said bloat.
A huge trend in software right now is low-code/no-code tools. These tools can replace programmers that don't have a deep enough grasp of fundamentals to compete. A very small percentage of the world population knows how to code, so these tools are becoming massively popular.
This is what separates the programmer that can quickly throw together a basic CRUD app and a programmer that can develop a successful programming language from scratch. If you can make sense of the Linux kernel and you have the drive to constantly learn new tech, it doesn't matter too much what trends come and go.
If you just want to ride the wave and think just having a CS degree or knowing how to code will guarantee you an easy life, it will be a rude awakening when the industry keeps moving forward and economic crises trim the fat from the cyclicly overvalued and monopolistic world that is software development.
This is the duality of being a programmer. Yes, you can teach yourself many useful things and acquire powerful skills relatively quickly, but if you stop learning and challenging yourself, then you are liable to be left behind.
A lot of popular web apps seem to decay in this way. The founding developers create an excellent site, it becomes a huge cash cow, then the organization becomes bloated and more focused on extracting more out of existing value than creating new value or building on the original principles.
Medium didn't always have a paywall, and I am thankful to the random users here that post archive links to bypass paywalls, I even installed a browser extension for it thanks to this site. Facebook is starting to lose users for the first time in history, despite a rebranding.
This website really doesn't have that issue as far as I can tell, and people seem receptive to promoting your software if it is actually useful. There doesn't appear to be such a heavy censorship of hacker-related material that conflicts with corporate interest, like the aforementioned paywall bypass links.
In other words, if it ain't broke don't fix it lol
Most of the world's oceans remain unexplored. Underwater cave systems in particular have a lot of uncharted territory. It's dangerous work, but explorers are still finding new caves and naming them.
Underwater robotics makes this task a lot easier. It's interesting to think that most of the planet's surface is abyssal plain, the largest habitat on Earth, flat surfaces on the sea floor beyond the reach of sunlight.
Ocean exploration really sparks curiosity. We are in such a rush to leave our beloved blue planet and send people to uncharted frontiers, but we still have an unfinished frontier right below our noses. Marine exploration also coincides with environmental preservation, as oceans are made of the most vital, life-giving resource on the planet.
Something interesting you learn in SCUBA diving is that sound waves travel faster in water than in air. This makes it difficult for humans to discern the source of audio while underwater, but machines like this seem to emulate the sonar capabilities of underwater creatures.
Always fascinated by what the minds at MIT are working on.
Very strong feelings lol, coincidentally that's how many Westerners think of every country outside the USA and Europe.
Doesn't change the fact that Android has the largest market share worldwide in both hardware and software.
Expensive doesn't mean quality, and a lot of developers don't want to work with a company that makes billions on child labor and similar practices. Apple has plenty of useless apps, but like anything else, users filter the best apps. Besides, developers today often deploy identical apps on multiple platforms.
This pretentious attitude is very isolating, I am just glad that ad-blocking and privacy is an option I have as a user. Additionally, I don't have to shell out for huge margins on overpriced gadgets to feed a tech monopoly that violates basic human rights for profits.
That's the last comment I'll write, because there are already enough Android/iOS flame wars polluting the internet. You had your word, I had mine, that's as civil as I can be.
Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject. So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility. Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just to have a paper to publish.
Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of published research does not push any boundaries or discover anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.
I would argue that a lot of the research published in the social sciences also falls under this category. It is there so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this point even further.