Yeah it's very interesting... It appears to lead itself astray: the way it looks at several situational characteristics, gives each a "throw-away" example, only to then mushing all those examples together to make a joke seems to be it's downfall in this particular case.
Also I can't help but think that if it had written out a few example jokes about animals rather than simply "thinking" about jokes, it might have come up with something better
It’s about demand isn’t it? TSMC have red hot demand, it’s not hard to understand their urgency in setting up new fabs, wherever they may be. Intel don’t have the same incentive - their incentive is to take the money (because, why wouldn’t you), build newer fabs and hope for some breakthrough in demand. The urgency is not there: being complete before there is demand could be detrimental
Yes. There used to be a saying the most expensive Fab ( or factory ) isn't the most advance Fab, but an empty Fab.
You cant built without first ensuring you can fill it, you cant fill it without first ensuring you can deliver. And Intel has failed to deliver twice with their custom foundry. Both times with Nokia and Ericsson. How the two fall for it twice is completely beyond me, but then Intel are known to have very good sales teams.
Intel will need another Apple moment that has huge demand, little margin, but willing to pay up front. On the assumption that Intel is even price competitive. The Apple modem may be it. But given the current situation with Intel as they want to lower Capital spending I am not even sure if betting on Intel is a risk Apple is willing to make. Comparing to a stable consistent relationship with TSMC.
Then Intel is going to have to wait for a very long time. At best, China is currently in a scenario similar to Japan's lost decade of 30 years or US's Great Depression. At worst, China's current deflation + massive debt seems eerily similar to Weimar Germany's early internal devaluation. China is pretty fucked.
US fully recovered from Great Depression in 1939, 2 years before entering ww2. Weimar Germany started in 1918 and ended in 1933 at the beginning of nazi Germany, 15 years later.
You can't start a war when you are truly broke, much like China is today. And China is aging super fast, unlike Germany or US during the 30s.
Being in spiraling deflation while the rest of the world suffers from inflation is a big sign of being broke.
Having debt to GDP ratio of 310% and local governments being unable to pay out salaries for many months is a big sign of being broke. (google or chatgpt the salary news, they are everywhere)
Consumer spending dropping 20% y/y in November in Beijing and Shanghai is a sign of being broke.
52,000 EV-related companies shut down in China in 2023 and an increase of 90% on the year before, where most EV companies were the targets of government subsidies, is a sign of being broke.
30% drop in revenues from land sales in 2024, which the local government derive most of its revenue on, is a sign of being broke.
China is not self sufficient; it imports 80% of consumed soybeans and other food products, and 90% of semiconductor equipments. Nor is it even remotely at the same level as Japan when Japan entered the lost decades. 600M Chinese citizens earned less than $100/month as of 2020. Recently, a scholar reported 900M Chinese citizens earned less than $400/month.
> Being in spiraling deflation while the rest of the world suffers from inflation is a big sign of being broke.
How would you handle the eloquent counterargument that spiraling deflation is not a sign of being broke? Deflation doesn't, in and of itself, signal anything except that the real value of a currency is going up.
China is one of the worlds largest creditors [0]. They may have a lot of organisational problems - I'd go as far as saying they are guaranteed to given they are quite authoritarian. But they aren't broke.
None of those metrics signal problems in and of themselves, and when put together ... they still don't. The consumer spending drop is the closest to something that might be a problem but it needs some supporting data to make a case.
Deflation by itself, sure. Deflation when coupled with huge and increasing debt to service, then you have a crippling problem. That means your ability to pay off your debt gets harder and harder as time goes on, and most of your income goes to service debt principal and interest, and not on actual income growth. China plans a record $411 billion special treatment treasury bond next year, for example, but most if not all of that is just helping local governments pay off debts.
China being the largest creditor doesn't mean much when a lot of their debt is issued to belt and road countries that can never be paid back, and will be written off in the future. It does have a large US debt holdings, but that has shrank from 1.27T (2013) to 772B (2024), and a large part of that being used for cross border transactions.
> Deflation when coupled with huge and increasing debt to service, then you have a crippling problem.
Individuals have a problem. Corporations have a problem. China may or may not have a problem. It depends on how reasonable their bankruptcy laws are. Cleaning out the system of people who aren't using capital effectively is a healthy thing to do.
And I have to say, this idea that we should focus on China's debts and dismiss their credits is suspect. I mean sure, if we ignore all the assets and income streams then they do have a problem. But that isn't reasonable. You can't ignore the strengths to make an argument they are weak.
Let me put it in another way; it's similar to the US banks during 2008, when they appeared to be healthy, holding lots of subprime loans on their books.
If we are talking about China's credit, China has a lot of subprime loans to belt and road countries that have very little income, and lot of subprime loans to their citizens, which recently a scholar reported that 900M of them make less than $400/month.
Possibly. But if the US system was a wealth-producing engine like China's has been in recent history 2008 wouldn't have been all that big a deal. They'd have bounced back in a year or two. Instead in 2008 the US made decisive moves to preserve a system that isn't generating much wealth for the US, and over the course of around 20 years they've arguably managed to give up their position as #1 global economy and are packing stadiums full of people chanting "We love Trump. We love Trump". Looks to me like it is going down in history as a major turning point for the worse.
If China has to take decisive steps to preserve whatever craziness is going on in the mainland, they're going to be preserving a system that has at least 10x-ed their wealth over the last 30 years while producing vast amounts of real capital that has catapulted their living standards up to a much more reasonable standard.
I wouldn't necessarily gamble on China because the system doing well looks unstable and could veer to disaster at any moment the central bureaucracy does something stupid. But we don't have strong evidence of a problem yet. We've got strong evidence they aren't acting like the US, but the US hasn't been setting an inspiring example in decades. As with a lot of economic problems, most of the damage from 2007 was doubling down on failing strategy rather than taking the hint that something needed to change.
And I'm not seeing evidence here that China is broke. They might muck this up, always an option, but they have all the tools they need to succeed in principle.
Tiresome take that's been repeated time and time again. China has problems like any other country larger than Luxemburg. But the conclusion that "china is fucked" sounds more like a wish than anything else to my ears. The Chinese economy is growing ~5% per year. It's got one of the worlds most well educated workforces. It's manufacturing everything from basics to high tech and very little indicates that's about to change anytime soon.
The chip technology sanctions might slow development in that area in China, but I wouldn't count on it.
It's pretty tiring responding to folks who just parrot Chinese government's official 5% numbers and never bothered look into the actual details. Like its well educated workforces being laid off at age 35, and 80% of recent graduates are unemployed or driving didi or delivering food. Or China's low end manufacturing shutting down or moving to Southeast Asia, and high end manufacturing being tariffed/sanctioned.
> On the assumption that Intel is even price competitive. The Apple modem may be it.
Which is super interesting/ironic with the entire reason for an “apple modem” is due to Intels failure there a decade ago. Bonus irony for the subsequent acquisition.
Intel wasn't able to ship a competitive modem to Qualcomm and the whole point of the acquisition was to get rid of Qualcomm and even apple hasn't gotten a shipping version of a 5g modem for six years since the first intel modem started in 2018. This was really to vertically integrate the modem in all of the relevant Apple Silicon devices and it keeps going on...
No, you have to read more of the thread to understand why I asked it.
> TSMC have red hot demand, it’s not hard to understand their urgency in setting up new fabs, wherever they may be. Intel don’t have the same incentive (...)
There was some discussion awhile back about Intel potentially fabbing ARM chips (or any other custom non-x86 chip) as a viable business in the future. I don’t know how serious they were but it sounded plausible when you think about how important it is to have an American leading edge fab, independent of the market future of the x86 ISA.
Basically what would it take for Intel to still have Apple as a customer even if Apple made their own ARM designs…
They feed into each other especially for anything that isn't a vanilla gate. Got a deeply ported SRAM with bypasses? That might fail synthesis if it is too choked by wire rules for the size of the cells so now it's banking time.
I think realistically you wouldn't port the exact same design between manufacturers. That would be a waste of money unless one manufacturer is really rinsing you.
More likely you'd switch manufacturers when you planned to switch process nodes anyway, in which case the increase in workload probably wouldn't be too bad.
There’ll always be an advantage for those who understand the problem they’re solving for sure.
The balance of traditional software components and LLM driven components in a system is an interesting topic - I wonder how the capabilities of future generations of foundation model will change that?
Certain the end state is "one model to rule them all" hence the "transitional."
Just that the pragmatic approach, today, given current LLM capabilities, is to minimize the surface area / state space that the LLM is actuating. And then gradually expand that until the whole system is just a passthrough. But starting with a passthrough kinda doesn't lead to great products in December 2024.
Development, like construction, is horribly ineffective at accurate projections.
So if it's "your turn" to have the (singular) long lived feature branch, you will run over your deadline and into someone else's start date. There will be someone you're blocking who starts pressuring you to finish or for the org to make an exception and allow 2 feature branches.
And six months later, what was good for the goose will be good for the gander and then you have 2 feature branches part of the official process. Which of course means you'll occasionally have 3. After that it's like Texas Highways. They just keep getting more lanes and traffic gets worse.
If you follow the authors advice to its logical conclusion then all changes to the code base are narrowly focussed tweaks - where does the longer term thinking come into this?
If I’m implementing a new feature, should I also disregard the need for refactoring?
A more nuanced approach is needed. You need to learn when to make changes additively and when to reshape the code to fit your new use case (and how much reshaping is required).
As an aside: I think tech debt sprints (if needed regularly) are often a sign that you aren’t developing software sustainably day to day.
I disagree, if you realize: "we need to refactor this file/module/class/etc." then it becomes a new task. Or more general, "we need to refactor the organically grown architecture": it's a new task. Working on a task should not prohibit your thinking about additional tasks, just add them to the backlog.
I suppose the same axioms of every ape that's ever existed (and really the only axioms that exist). My personal survival, my comfort, my safety, accumulation of resources to survive the lean times (even if there are no lean times), stimulation of my personal interests, and the same for my immediate 'tribe'. Since I have a slightly more developed cerebral cortex I can abstract that 'tribe' to include more than 10 or 12 people, which judging by your post you can too. And fortunate for us, because that little abstraction let us get past smashing each other with rocks, mostly.
I think the only difference between our outlooks is I don't think there's any reason that my 'tribe' shouldn't include non-biological intelligence. Why not shift your priorities to the expansion of general intelligence?
Interesting, I wouldn’t say that I’ve found it difficult to run in even a small team.
The problem I’ve always had with Airflow has been with non-cron-like use cases, for example data pipelines kicked off when some event occurs. Sensors were often an awkward fit and the HTTP API was quite immature back when I was using it
I think it’s deeper than that - these companies place product/engineering at the centre of the business, rather than at traditional companies that still see it as a cost centre.
Agree 100%. There's a race to the bottom when it comes to preparation times. One recipe says it takes 20 mins vs one that says 45 mins - which recipe are you going to choose?
Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking? Especially when you consider the shifting landscape of music over time. Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases? It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.
edit: I think it's also worth asking the question of what role race played in the degree to which an artist or group was heralded "at the time".
>Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking?
No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
>Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases?
Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...
>It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.
As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking.
And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).
> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
Is there? Can you expand on the methodology? All the somewhat objective ranking methodologies I can think of rely on data sources such as top-sellers lists, which would result in not a ranking of best albums but rather of highest selling ones. "Best" is inherently subjective in my estimation. About the best you can do for that is figure out which albums the largest number of people would consider best (but now you have absolutely massive familiarity and sampling biases to contend with).
I'm ok with the regular "cricic makes an assesment" methodology for that. Just needs critics that know their stuff (e.g. not just marketers and shallow dabblers) and who don't just pander to some fashion du jour when making a list in spite of their actual prefereneces thinking that this will make their list more sellable/controversial (and thus generating views)/etc.
Which I think was lacking here. I don't believe those are the actual tastes of those critics, them just wanting to appear like that...
You're making a subjective judgment here on the quality of these critics though. I mean it's Rolling Stone, the biggest music magazine of all time. These lists come out roughly once a decade, so a lot of consideration is going into them.
Just because you disagree with the ranking doesn't mean that they don't know their stuff or weren't rigorous about it. If you really don't like this list, show me a better one, and I'll show you a list whose editors just happen to agree with your tastes more than the editors of the Rolling Stone list does.
Rolling Stone has significantly larger worldwide circulation than all of those magazines (in some cases by an order of magnitude or more). In addition, some of the magazines you listed no longer exist, whereas Rolling Stone still does. E.g. NME ended its print publication in 2018 and Melody Maker ceased entirely in 2000.
You got any other examples of magazines you think are bigger/more relevant than Rolling Stone? Because none of these fit the bill.
>Rolling Stone has significantly larger worldwide circulation than all of those magazines (in some cases by an order of magnitude or more). In addition, some of the magazines you listed no longer exist, whereas Rolling Stone still does.
The RS is just something read by aging boomers. It hasn't been relevant since the 70s. And even then, after an initial period, it was for the politics/culture/gossip content, not the music.
The circulation is not really relevant. If you follow the music world, press, interviews, behind the scenes, biographies, etc., RS has never been influencial for actual musicians/execs/fans/etc. The other magazines mentioned, have.
NME, Melody Maker were far more relevant in the 1980-1995 period (yeah, that's UK, but UK had an unproportionate influence in US music as well. Not just in punk, post punk, new wave, and electronic music, which it close to dominated, but back to the Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Who, and so on (all British).
As for something actually influential for post-2000, that would be something like Pitchfork.
If you are saying beauty has some degree of objectivity because we share some common genetics that predisposes us to develop similarly, I understand what you're getting at, but it's still completely subjective.
Not quite what I'm saying. Beauty and goodness (being fundamentally identical) are attributes of objective reality. Subjectivity is the confusion of our limitations for the eternal truths of the universe. I hope this makes my position more clear.
I wouldn't say that I agree. I don't think a delusion of any sort is produced. If something is beautiful (which is objective), saying "it is ugly" does not make you ignorant so much as it makes you simply incorrect. Calling beauty ugly is equivalent to saying "truth is false", which i would argue is a "problematic" view to hold.
Can you make this more concrete for me? What are the concrete levels of objectivity as applied to the judgment of quality of musical albums? The thing about objectivity is you can define what you're talking about very precisely, i.e. "This angle on this triangle is 72 degrees" is an objective statement (subject only to measurement error). I'd love to see some similar statements about how we can make objective statements on the beauty or quality of music.
Sure. I replied to another comment with a longer explanation of the definition of beauty, i suggest you check it out and give me your thoughts.
to be brief, beauty is a transcendental. thus, it exists independently of the individual, and further, exists independently of the material universe. thus, a claim like "this angle is 72 degrees" does not have an analog in metaphysical space because the object does not exist in an empirically measurable space. think of it this way: can you measure beauty, truth, or goodness with calipers? the notion is ridiculous because these ideas exist in metaphysical space, not in a material space. the definition of beauty converges on the conditions of integrity, harmony, and clarity. Does the music have integrity? Is it complete and whole? Or is it incomplete? Is the harmonious (think about this in terms past musical theory...)? Is it proportional? Does it exhibit symmetry (imo this is not limiting)? Or does it sew discord and disharmony? Is it asymmetric and poorly proportioned? Is it clear? Is processing fluency (ease to which information is processed) high?
A more interesting question to ask is: is this music in accordance with natural/divine law?
So, you can get an objective statement on beauty by understanding beauty as true, good, and virtuous. It is objectively complete, harmonious, and clear. It is the ideal to which art strives. Therefore, when something is in accordance with the nature of beauty, we can say objectively it is beautiful. We can make an antithetical statement to this if something (say the music) is in discord with the nature of beauty.
This is an interesting point of view that I hadn't considered before. Thank you for making this argument. How do you square your ideas with musical genres like dubstep, likely not the best example but the one that springs to mind, that lack some or all of these features and are still beloved by a subset of the population?
Would the variance in taste not imply that beauty itself is subjective?
Thanks for the kind response. I would say that variance in taste or popularity does not imply beauty at all. Something can be popular but not beautiful. Just because something is popular does not make it beautiful. People liking lots of different things does not imply that all these things are beautiful or that beauty is subjective, relative or meaningless.
> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
I wouldn't disagree with that, I'm sure all of the various versions of this list by RS are "somewhat objective"
> Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...
That's an interesting point - but look at the last decade: western society has been going through some turmoil, change is happening faster in some areas
> As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking.
>
> And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).
I think Marvin Gaye is more relevant to modern tastes (and therefore universal tastes) than the Beatles, for example. But yes, that doesn't explain all, or even most, of the shift in the rankings.
>No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".
What objective criteria do you think should be used to do the ranking? Number of chord progressions used? Variety of instruments on the album? Lingual diversity? Or maybe the inverse of one of these criteria would be better? Point being, even choosing an evaluation criteria is subjective.
The only semi-objective criteria I can think of would be the number of other albums/musicians it influenced - but this is basically a meta-ranking.
Aside, for the record, I wouldn't have Sgt Pepper anywhere near my top ten "greatest albums", but What's Goin On and Pet Sounds can stay.
A good critic does a subjective assessment, but also understands things like the place of a work within the larger history of the medium, it's relative importance, how influential it has been, several skills involved (not necessarily technical "playing" skill - skills in e.g. emotional resonanse or expression or production, etc are good to judge too), and so on.
And whetever the fashion of 2010-2020, they wouldn't put "Let's Get In On" as the #1 in a 500 Greatest Albums of all time list.
This looks more like a too-little-too-late "let's have RS show some hypocritical allegiance with the black movement and the whole hoopla in 2020" calculated ranking, than actual consideration of the relative merits of the work.
Beauty is the canonical example of a subjective criterion. There's even a well-known phrase about this you've probably heard: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", a phrase so old and time-tested that it predates Christianity by several centuries.
It's hard to even make sense of what you're saying because you're using words in exactly the opposite manner that everyone else uses them and thus only offering up contradictions, which are by definition already false.
I disagree. Beauty is a transcendental attribute of being. As such, it is not contingent upon cultural diversity, religious doctrine, or personal ideology, but is an objective property of all that exists.
For one thing, it captured a place/era almost perfectly (as agreed by tons of people in that place/era - including fellow musicians).
Second, it has the height of maturity of what was considered the most important band of all time (and close to such as seen by both the critics and commercial success).
Third, it unarguably has considerable skill in several areas (melody, harmony, orchestration, playing, etc).
Fourth, it was largely influencial.
Fifth, most experts (critics, rock musicians, etc) agreed so for half a century.
Those things are enough to call it beautiful in mind book.
Just because we can't measure something (e.g. beauty here) with some technical instrument doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or people can't agree on it.
i was going for an explanation of how art and aesthetics are not purely subjective. and how one could arrive at the statement "semi-objective ranking". so im not arguing "Sgt. Pepper is beautiful" im arguing "there is objectivity in art therefore some art is better than other art" thus implying some form of objective "ranking". nonetheless, ill try to answer what makes something (in this case music) beautiful. there are many different explanations that converge on similar concepts/ideas.
in many traditions, ranging from Chinese philosophy to the ancient Greeks, beauty is associated with goodness, virtue, and truth. particularly of the Greeks, there was an emphasis on its relation to mathematics, namely proportion and symmetry. aesthetic considerations like symmetry/asymmetry, simplicity/complexity are utilized in mathematics, physics and cosmology to define truth (or lack thereof).
the Thomistic view is that:
A) beauty is a transcendental (a Platonic view)
and B)that there are 3 conditions:
1. integritas (wholeness, integrity, perfection)
2. consonatia (harmony and proportion)
3. claritas (radiance/clarity that makes apparent the form to the mind, analogous to processing fluency)
The definition of beauty thus converges on the idea that: something is beautiful when it is harmonious, complete, and clear. something beautiful is virtuous, good and true. you could also argue this as "in accordance with natural order" as the natural order is complete, clear, and harmonious (and thus beautiful). you could go further with this idea and argue that beauty is "of God" or "in accordance with God" or "in accordance with the Logos". but that is a different argument for a different time.
art is the field of human interest whose ideal is beauty. therefore, it follows that beautiful art is complete (has integrity, wholeness), is harmonious (perhaps in accordance with natural world i.e. proportions such as golden ratio, etc. this is not limiting), and is clear (the form is readily made apparent to the mind, i.e. high processing fluency, the information is easily processed)
Does Sgt. Pepper fit this criteria? Is it beautiful?
Also I can't help but think that if it had written out a few example jokes about animals rather than simply "thinking" about jokes, it might have come up with something better