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Ghandi notoriously nukes EVERYONE in Civs 2 through 4. It's become (or maybe became, but it's still all training data) a huge internet subculture.

Penny to a dollar this is a baked in training issue, through low quality Reddit trawling


This was the line that did for me, as an old school backend engineer who has accidentally deleted way more production databases than I have fingers over the years -

> We have restored from a three-month-old backup.

You were absolutely screwed anyway if that was your backup strategy - deciding to plug your entire production infrastructure into a random number generator has only accelerated the process. Sort yourself out.


In the uhh, postmodern world where we are too chicken to even run things like Postgres or Mongo on servers ourselves, and rely on "X as a service" I think people are looking at the marketing from the provider (in this case Railway) and just scanning for a bullet point. "'Automatic backups'? Check! Great, we don't have to do backups anymore, they're taking care of it."

Everyone guffawing about this probably uses RDS and trusts that the backup facility AWS provides is actually useful - and I bet it does have a saner default than auto-deleting all the backups when you delete a database. Did you explicitly check this, though? Clearly this guy will pay the price of assuming, but I can see how he must have imagined that "backups" and "will be automatically and immediately deleted..." should never be in the same sentence, unless it was like, "when XX days have passed after a DB is dropped."

When I worked for a company 10 years ago that was mistrusting of cloud anything, we had a nightly dump of the prod DB (MySQL) that, if things went really wrong, could be loaded into a new DB server, because we knew it was our responsibility because it was our server. (In our case, even our physical hardware!)


Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you.

However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than formulaic structure? Concepts over syntax maybe.

I'm from the UK. My immediate family is from Dundee and Sunderland. I had inlaws from Liverpool and Bristol. When we all got together, especially after a few drinks, at no point would an outsider think we were even speaking the same language, but we all had the same common grounding.

I agree with you that it's probably a bad way to teach formal grammar. It depends on the context though


English is my first language. However, I had an undiagnosed learning disability until college.

That said, to name one example, I do not think an understanding of adverbs versus adjectives can develop effectively if one is constantly exposed to people using adjectives as adverbs. It causes a loss of nuance that comes back to bite people, especially when it causes friction with those who know better. I remember in the 8th grade, we saw the play 1776, they were singing adverbs ending in -ly and I had no idea what the nuance was aside from the rhyming. I do not think many of my classmates did either.

The common defense of the status quo seems to be blind to the underlying problems in English education. The status quo is untenable since the issues with English literacy are now measurable.


To be generous, what this meant is either that you were below the reading level for the book or you misunderstand the core skill of reading and using style in the English language. Reading and understanding when rules are broken leads to knowing when they can be. We don't skip Shakespeare because the language is funny and archaic. Reading these authors is both a part of style and content literacy for the English language. Disclaimer: I'm not comparing them.


There is a difference between understanding a book’s contents and being able to read the book without having it rewrite your understanding of the English language such that you have no idea what is correct and incorrect because your grasp on that was tenuous in the first place. Children are expected to avoid being rewritten at stages where they are extremely impressionable and are easily rewritten and then they are blamed for it. It is fairly sadistic thing to do to children.


No, it's all a part of learning to read and understand language.

If a child is having that much trouble with it, which would be unusual at grade-level, then the book is above their level. At that point, the child should probably be screened for a delay.

How this generally works is that young people ingest these books, and by doing so their language ability increases to be able to flexibly understand (and use, if stylistically appropriate), non-standard grammatical forms.


I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.


People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/


Well colloquially "pet" itself is a past tense. Depends on the register of the language. And "wrong" is also an adverb. It would help if the educators explain when to use "wrong" vs "wrongly" vs "wrongfully" since all could be adverbs; or you could read enough to figure out the subtle differences.


I had recently looked up “wrong” to check out of curiosity, and DuckDuckGo only said it was an adjective, so I had stopped using it as an adverb. It turns out that the dictionary states it is an adverb, but you need to click to go to an actual dictionary to see that since the definition given by DuckDuckGo is only a partial definition. Thanks for making me double check.

That said, I read dozens of English books per year. I am well past the point of diminishing returns for benefits from more reading in English. Reading more books only increases my reading speed , which I have noticed is now 2 to 4 times faster than others around me.


I guess it depends. There's been a major issue in the UK for a while regarding quite a few very iconic, decades old, live music venues. Back in the day they were in less salubrious areas of town so no one really cared, but now they're prime property with very expensive flats being put up all around them.

Many of the new residents never even do so much as even visit the area before buying them, and then immediately (and sadly often successfully) put in noise complaints attempting to get the venues shut down, despite the already strict licensing laws (curfew at 10.30 at the absolute latest, no outside drinking etc).


That's the kind of situation where I think both sides are kinda right. I see what you're getting at here, but from the other side, it's reasonable for people to be bothered by loud noise where they live. If it was gonna be a problem, the real answer is that the government shouldn't have permitted housing right next to places that are gonna stay loud. Or maybe mandated stricter soundproofing requirements for flats.


Except there’s always been housing around these music venues.

The problem is the housing went from affordable housing for working class people to “investments” for rich people.


In either case, people have a right to reasonable peace and quiet where they live. That this wasn't addressed when the neighborhood was more blue collar doesn't make it okay once it's not.


Slightly on topic - anyone remember LeapMotion and is anyone aware of any current support for that? Found an original one in a drawer when I was having a clearout the other day


I have one as well! Sorry no idea what it can be used for nowadays


Agreed, and many of mine do when I'm out with the dog or on the toilet. The thing is that those are unscripted. The point that I think the OP was making was that enforced breaks on a schedule will immediately kill any form of concentration or workflow


Absolutely, it's the regimented and very frequent schedule that is the problem. Breaks are necessary, and very useful - but if that frequency is what I have to do to stay healthy with a desk job, then I guess I'll be unhealthy

Basically - movement isn't free


What works for me is that I only have a small glass of water or a coffee at my table. If I want to drink more, I have to get up and walk over to the kitchen. Early in the day this can be about about every 20-30 minutes, later it goes down to maybe 45-60 minutes. Then there are, of course, rest room breaks. So I'd say I get up and move 10-12 times a day in an unforced, natural way -- not always 8 minutes, mind, but it's about progress, not perfection.


> but if that frequency is what I have to do to stay healthy with a desk job, then I guess I'll be unhealthy

That's an interesting lifestyle choice, but don't be shocked if others refuse to follow along.


Yeah, but people who grow or sell flowers are not on the same level as the very very good engineers who develop these dystopian systems. The people in the advertising industry who make these systems could absolutely do more good for society in a different field.


And I would argue that this very quickly becomes a race to the bottom, where the viewing of mass produced trash accelerates because "that's what people want to watch" becomes "we'll flood the market with cheap mass produced bullshit" which immediately becomes "people love watching bullshit and our stats say so!"

I also don't believe for a single second, based on their past records, that Sony, or LG, or whoever, are actually properly anonymising this data


“Reality TV” is a prime example of racing to the bottom of mass produced trash.


I love Vim. I use it pretty much exclusively. I found it very funny.

So, yes.


So, given that I'm already aware that I almost certainly won't understand any answers to this question, can someone give me a idiot level baseline as to exactly what an AI chip is and how it would differ from a cpu/gpu?


The earliest Intel chips (8086) had an extra add-on to do floating point math in hardware, instead of software (8087). There’s a lot of “AI” workloads that include a lot of matrix multiplication, which the Google TPU and the Nvidia tensor cores implement in hardware instead of software.


Ah! ok - that makes sense. Thank you. So it would be a specialised chip with a load of hardcoded functions, kind of like an ASIC?


Exactly, like how a “bitcoin mining” chip would implement the SHA in hardware.

And, CPUs prioritize hiding latency with all sorts of caches, and GPUs prioritize cores and bandwidth to hide latency, so there’s different tradeoffs about memory bandwidth versus latency.


Thank you. Think we've hit the level of my "run away scared at the first sight of machine code" understanding, but I now vaguely understand what's going on.


one example of an "AI" chip might be Google's TPUs. in general it's about the optimization of calculations that are useful in the AI context.


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