Regarding sniffing out "networker"s. At one of the first "networking" events I attended, I spoke for a bit with a particular person. An hour or two later, we ended up in the same circle and he proceeded to rattle off from memory everything I had told him about myself. I think he had meant to show off how well he was listening or something... it was more than a little off-putting.
Can you be a little more specific about what you consider gross? I only read the article because of your comment; I got curious. Most of it just seems like common courtesy, and a few fairly standard body language tricks.
The idea that everyone in the party is quietly evaluating you and making up a story in their head
The forced body language
The weird conversation starters
Like all this stuff is forced and artificial and the goal is you're trying to build a relationship with someone for the implicit purpose of getting something out of them. None of this is genuine social connection, it's just a performance to try and increase your own status.
This reminds me of part of some novel I read a while ago. Something about a newly turned noble learning how to act like a noble. Organizing parties and knowing who exactly to invite and how to receive them, having his butler tell him a few important things about a person before going to talk to them, when and how to ask ladies for a dance, conforming to certain unspoken rules of etiquette, and the list goes on.
I almost felt the exhaustion just from reading.
All just superficial interactions to keep up the social standing, presenting yourself as special and useful to associate with while not actually making any meaningful connection with anyone.
That's the feeling I got from reading that scene as well as whenever I hear about this networking stuff.
Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Edward Fesser
I stumbled across this completely by accident while doing research for a history of science class I was designing years ago. It took... a while... to stop saying "but why does this matter!" every two seconds while reading it, but eventually I was able to open my mind to metaphysics as a discipline and get it into my head exactly what he was talking about, and why it was useful. After that, it was smooth sailing. I owe a lot to this book.
Feser's very good at explaining Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics clearly. His _Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide_ is a good introduction.
The point of Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics it not that it's useful for building things; it isn't, which is why the early moderns mostly abandoned it. But physics and the quantitative/mechanistic view of the world that it fosters is an abstraction from reality--an extremely useful and productive one, granted, but still an abstraction. It leaves things out that Thomistic metaphysics retains; and while Aristotelian science has been left in the dust, his metaphysics still has important things to say.
Modern philosophy embraced the mechanistic view of the world with Descartes, leading to a number of philosophical problems (the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, how to account for qualia and consciousness, and so forth) that are amply accounted for in the older philosophy.
Leibniz wrote "I have often said: 'Aurum latere in stercore illo scholastico barbarico'; {there is gold hidden in all that barbaric scholastic crap} and I wish that some skillful man could be found, versed in this Irish and Spanish philosophy, who would have the inclination and ability to extract what is good from it. I am sure his work would be rewarded with many beautiful and important truths".
I'm not pasting the walltext full quote, but there's also in it mention of Perennis quaedam philosophia. The first one? Don't have the book in digital, for the full quote in Spanish, Google sent me here: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/Vico.2020.i34.03.
These days, I personally haven't had any issues with odd scanners or printers and getting them to work. Years ago it was nightmarish, but now it tends to be a lot easier than Windows in my experience. My scanner still doesn't work in Windows (granted: I haven't sunk more than about 25 minutes into trying to get it to work), but it works just fine on Linux (with zero effort).
> In both cases, asking for forgiveness (dereferencing a null pointer and then recovering) instead of permission (checking if the pointer is null before dereferencing it) is an optimization. Comparing all pointers with null would slow down execution when the pointer isn’t null, i.e. in the majority of cases. In contrast, signal handling is zero-cost until the signal is generated, which happens exceedingly rarely in well-written programs.
At least from a C/C++ perspective, I can't help but feel like this isn't great advice. There isn't a "null dereference" signal that gets sent--it's just a standard SIGSEGV that cannot be distinguished easily from other memory access violations (memprotect, buffer overflows, etc). In principle I suppose you could write a fairly sophisticated signal handler that accounts for this--but at the end of the day it must replace the pointer with a not null one, as the memory read will be immediately retried when the handler returns. You'll get stuck in an infinite loop (READ, throw SIGSEGV, handler doesn't resolve the issue, READ, throw SIGSEGV, &c.) unless you do something to the value of that pointer.
All this to avoid the cost of an if-statement that almost always has the same result (not null), which is perfect conditions for the CPU branch predictor.
I'm not saying that it is definitely better to just do the check. But without any data to suggest that it is actually more performant, I don't really buy this.
EDIT: Actually, this is made a bit worse by the fact that dereferencing nullptr is undefined behavior. Most implementations set the nullptr to 0 and mark that page as unreadable, but that isn't a sure thing. The author says as much later in this article, which makes the above point even weirder.
Privet. Freakin' privet. I have spent countless hours trying to eradicate the descendants of a privet hedge that my great grandfather planted a hundred years ago; they've been taking over the nearby forest.
Not to mention that the cost per search in terms of compute and energy is so much smaller for web search than for running an LLM. I forget the exact numbers now, but it was orders of magnitude as I recall.
Search engines are just cheaper to run. I don't know that there's a good, long term model for a free LLM-based search replacement because of how much higher the operating costs are, ad supported or not.
These are great reasons why this business will be hard, but given how ChatGPT and Perplexity are making inroads into search traffic, you can't deny it's an experience consumers prefer.
I agree that there’s interest in it. I found ChatGPT and AI search very convenient in some situations where I used them. Other times they hallucinated. I have no idea, though, what customers prefer until I see large-scale surveys by companies not pushing A.I..
It could also become a differentiator allowing multiple suppliers. On one hand, you have people doing search for quality results. Other search engines include the AI results. The user could choose between them on a job by job basis or the search provider might, like !G in DDG, allow 3rd-party AI search as an option.
The bigger problem I have is with scale for the dollar. Search companies with their own indexes already mostly failed. There’s a few using Bing. It’s down to just three or four with their own index. Massive consolidation of power. If GPU’s and AI search cost massively more, wouldn’t that problem further increase?
That's an interesting positive spin on what is clearly a cost-cutting feature. I'm on the unlimited search tier, so it hasn't really been a big deal, but it's worth noting that clicking the "more results" button charges your account for an additional search too. Or at least it used to.
domainofheraclius.info