I like to take [not very good] landscape photos. The reality is (at least for someone whose not very good) landscape photography often involves getting to specific places at weird times (often before dawn or exactly at dinner time) setting up your camera, and staring through the viewfinder for an hour or so, and snapping off shots as lighting and conditions slightly change.
While I often enjoy this experience, this just is not compatible with hanging out with people who aren’t into it. Your friends/partners will hate you. Your kids just will not stand for it in anyway.
I’ve gotten some photos I like doing this (when my friends/family were not present), but coming home from a family vacation, the photos I enjoy more are almost always the random snapshots of my kids taken in 2 seconds on my iPhone.
Not a lawyer, but treason charges in the US are pretty rare -- there's been one person charged with Treason since 1954. Even the Rosenbergs weren't charged with Treason.
NotebookLM podcasts are like a caricature of a real podcast. Every little verbal technique or narrative style that might be used by a normal podcaster in a subtle way is taken to an extreme.
The last one I listened to one host would repeat a keyword or phrase the other host had just said for emphasis — except they did incessantly — with multiple words in every sentence for many sentences in a row.
Although I 100% agree, there is still a place for it. We place generated conversations with our case studies, and have receive good positive feedback so far, especially from the non-technical crowd. See example https://resonancy.io/case-studies/flava-process-digitization
Of course one can invest more in better authenticity but for what it is, I believe it is a good bang for effort..
Also, if you listen to it for a while, and get over the initial cringe, it becomes enjoyable, at least for me. Some visitors even asked if it was Ai generated. lol
Excited and frightened about the future where its more a real. This was a cool comparison I came across recently [2]
Interestingly I saw today the Descripts Avatars are made to sound and look non-realistic on purpose to avoid I guess all kind of issues, but they claim they want to leave something authentic on the table for real content. Which I think is a good move..
Yeah it was incredible in the beginning because it was so novel. Now it's just annoying. Half of the dialogue is repeated and it takes forever to get a point across. Never used NLM, but I wonder if that's something that can be tuned out?
> NotebookLM podcasts are like a caricature of a real podcast. Every little verbal technique or narrative style that might be used by a normal podcaster in a subtle way is taken to an extreme.
I was a very casual GeoGuessr player for a few months — and I found it pretty remarkable how quickly (and without a lot of dedicated study time) you could learn a lot of tells of specific regions — and get reasonably good (certainly not pro good or anything, but good enough to the hit right country ~80% of the time).
Another thing is how many areas of the world have surprisingly distinct looks. In one of my early games, before I knew much about anything, I was dropped a trail in the woods. I’ve spent a fair amount of time hiking in Northern New England — and I could just tell immediately that’s where I was just from vibes (i.e. the look of the trees and the rocks) — not something I would have guessed I would have been able to recognize.
I went to watch the Minecraft movie, and when the scene where they arrive outside their new house came on I was like... that feels so much like New Zealand. Then a few weeks later I went to visit my mum in Huntly, and she was like "oh yeah, they filmed part of it in Huntly!".
Interestingly, it's actually codified in US law that the metric system is the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" -- however it wasn't a mandatory change so most industries didn't make the change, nor did the government.
Auth providers (like Okta for example) often do the geo-blocking at level 7 -- because if you know the login being used, you can then lock the account that is being accessed from a blocked region.
You probably don’t want to optimize for the SLA credit making up for a significant part of your lost revenue — because that would mean when things are operating normally, you don’t have much of a profit margin.
SLA’s are generally more helpful for getting out of long term contracts with unreliable vendors than actually making up for revenue lost during an outage.
SLA credits are an incentive for the service provider not making up for lost revenue from the outage.
If you have 100% SLA credit under 99% availability you can't aford to be less than 99% available and I know that your SLA means something to you, not just an aspirational bullet point.
Basically every tech company likes to say they are selling pickaxes, but basically no VC funded company matches that model. To actually come out ahead selling pickaxes you had to pocket a profit on each one you sold.
If you sell your pickaxes at a loss to gain market share, or pour all of your revenue into rapid pickaxe store expansion, you’re going to be just as broke as prospectors when the boom goes bust.
I have experience in technology and biomedical research.
IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine.
And they got caught by the system already... You can't just snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again.
The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure board in 5 years, and there's basically no grant money for replication and no prestige at all.
What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'?
Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University".
And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.
Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford’s presidency and remained on the faculty. His case was far worse in my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and resulted in the misdirection of further millions downstream. Everyone knew Gay’s work was useless BS, it just also turned out to contain plagiarism.
A second topic which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s management and oversight of his scientific laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices, resulting in at least five publications in prominent journals now requiring retraction or correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.
Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something incredibly difficult to do.
There need to be checks against people in positions of great wealth, power, and influence because people cannot be trusted to self-regulate and Do the Right Thing when large sums of money are on the table. "Self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."
> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution
... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.
More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.
Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.
People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down? Fire some university president heads who've been caught or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.
The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are massively cutting back the number of admissions they're taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting up their labs because they can't get research started quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity or because a few high placed people faked some data?
China has been building nuclear successfully and worked out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it all down" approach would work for academia.
Despite how things could be structured better, in medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing much worse.
It would help further a good-faith discussion if you were first more precise in defining what you mean. Please be specific with your premise and what you would do to fix the flaws you see.
Maybe start with the part where you say "science and medicine are stagnant", therefore "we should burn it all down and start over". This is how misinterpretations and assumptions start and does not benefit mutual intellectual understanding.
This approach has an abysmal track record historically and I expect history will repeat itself here. Burning complex systems down is many orders of magnitude easier than building them up, and much less fun for the people who like burning things down. So the predictable effect is that blunt wide-scale destruction almost always makes things worse.
Yes Academia and government could be vastly more efficient. Almost everyone agrees on that and a lot of work has been put into improving things. But doing that in a way that's net good requires patience and competence, traits the current people running the government openly disdain.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding extremely high titles at both institutions, which would ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a professor at Harvard.
They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.
Claudine Gay was Harvard's president. Harvard receives >$2B from the federal government each year, including $100Ms in NIH funding. What does it say about an organization when the choose a charlatan and plagiarist to lead it? Why should taxpayer's give that organization a single dime?
"Academia is all rotten! Here are my 2 cherry-picked examples!"
Of course, burning these institutions down and running them like businesses will work well. After all, we all know fraud doesn't happen in business, and if it did, the market would soon sort that out, right?
While I often enjoy this experience, this just is not compatible with hanging out with people who aren’t into it. Your friends/partners will hate you. Your kids just will not stand for it in anyway.
I’ve gotten some photos I like doing this (when my friends/family were not present), but coming home from a family vacation, the photos I enjoy more are almost always the random snapshots of my kids taken in 2 seconds on my iPhone.
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