They are a (relatively) recent part of the production pipeline. Before introducing horseshoe crab blood, they used to inject rabbits and wait a couple of weeks. Now the wait has been reduced to minutes - which reduces storage costs and increases certainty.
You expect every blog post to find the earliest relevant paper to cite, just so one could look at the year (without reading said paper - which would have made clear that the connection isn’t recent) to assess novelty? I don’t think that’s reasonable.
It’s a blog post. If it was, say, a peer reviewed paper by Hinton or LeCunn that fails to cite Schmidhuber, that would be reasonable criticism in my opinion. (Spoiler: they fail to cite him)
Why would blog posts not be subject to such criticism?
Either the author knew of prior work that argues the same thing and they ignored it, or they didn't know. And if one writes a 1000+ word article premised on this idea, wouldn't one be presumed to know at least in which century the idea originated from?
Arguably these kind of blog posts should be more subject to such criticisms, because the blog posts purport to "teach" the general public about a concept in an authoritative tone (or at least the author seems to pose as knowledgeable in the subject), while for academic papers, everyone who actually reads the paper knows where the ideas came from anyway and it's mainly an issue of attribution (and maybe about fairly distributing the citation count...)
> Why would blog posts not be subject to such criticism?
You're asking why casual comments from amateurs made for fun on the internet shouldn't be held to the same standard as those made by funded career academic experts writing for other experts over months and meant as part of the permanent record of the field?
Personally, I think that's a bit like asking why a friend having you over for dinner isn't always an elegant 7-course meal with wine pairings. I guess you can expect that if you want, but to me it sounds like a child expecting to go to Disney every day: ignoring the economic realities of the situation is a recipe for eternal disappointment.
This is why I hate online arguments. I didn't say earliest, but to give a pointer to the general era, and make it clear how standard the concepts are. They are part of undergrad, it's basic things. I'm not asking for a deep lit review. But modern exposition to anything related to Ai / ML / stats have extreme recency bias and young'uns are led to believe there was nothing before the transformer paper.
I guess it depends on the actual goal of the post. Education? Point people to background. Surely if you have a deep understanding of the subject, you have favored references.
If it's not education, where people are supposed to know everything, who is the audience? If the audience is supposed to know all of the background, then the post is not saying something original to the audience.
I agree the quality of the text itself is good. But I knew the background and I left (well, actually began) already agreeing.
I am happy and want people to write and share stuff. I think it's a really good exercise if only for the author. To be clear, I think the post itself is good except for the gap I mentioned in my original post, which in the grand scheme of things may seem like a nitpick. But if the same type of content makes it to the front page often without me understanding who the audience actually is, I am also allowed to wonder why out loud.
If the blog were about calculus, and stated that an elegant proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus could be found in such and such undergraduate textbook, would you be upset that the citation wasn't to either Newton's or Leibniz' work?
I would want them to point to point to what they think is the best resource. (Assuming the point is educating or explaining something to the reader.) Which, If everyone followed, would automatically point back to newton/leibnez.
At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
It’s been years since, but I bought on Amazon a bag of 8 different ends that work everywhere in the world.
It wasn’t from Apple, but it’s basically a plastic shape and 2 or 3 (depending on end) metal parts - it’s hard to get wrong, and easy to test before use.
Indeed, they don't contribute to labeling. The self driving companies figured out long ago that machine learning is way too expensive. Instead, Google is using its large network of willing humans to inform automated driving decisions in real time.
So the next time you're asked to click the pictures with the bicycles or traffic lights? Please do so before it's too late.
I still pay for snooty, and the reason for that is that when a disk goes bad (not if; when) I pop its tray out, replace the disk, pop the tray with the disk back in, click a couple of widgets, and that’s it. I know it will be rebuilt properly.
(And I know I have to do that, because when the disk fails it beeps and lights a led near the bad disk)
It’s easy to build a NAS such as the one described in this article, but in the long run, data loss is significantly more likely.
Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.
That is kind of exactly how zfs works though. The guide isn't complete, sure, but "rebuilding" the array is just replace the disk and run a single zfs command.
That’s comforting to know; that wasn’t true in the past for ext4 over lvm (is it true now?).
But what is that command? And how do you know which disk has gone bad?
I am sure I can get an answer from Google / Claude / ChatGPT, but a guide is incomplete without it - and the failure report should be active like a beep or flashing hardware light - I typically log into my NAS only a few times a year. A motd or other banner isn’t sufficient.
I used to look after storage arrays for VFX places.
everytime I saw lvm I inwardly sighed. The docs were terrible, almost as bad as MDADM. snapshots were for a long time unrecoverable. You'd then have to work out what pattern of LV you had, was it a suprise raid0? or a misaligned raid1?
zfs is a night and day compared to LVM/mdadm, two tools, rich help, the man pages are reasonably good, and once you understand zfs vs zpool, you're usually good to go.
man zfs, man zpool, cron, your mta of choice (I like dma) :)
schedule a zpool scrub every month, send an email if it finds errors. zpool status will show the errored drive. zpool replace will initiate the drive replacement.
ZFS handles drive failures more robustly than anything else. There's a reason synology uses mdadm under BTRFS instead of the built-in BTRFS RAID features, and mdadm operates at the device level. That means that to replace a drive, mdadm has to rebuild the entire drive while zfs will only rebuild what's actually in use.
> Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.
By using /dev/disk/by-id when adding them to the pool - and looking at the physical label on the disk itself. All disks I ever worked with had that ID printed somewhere on there.
To be fair, the "beeps and lights a led" part is very important in case of a dead disk in an array. The only time, I disrupted a service in production for longer than a few hours was when I didn't get the email of a degraded raid 1 array and the second disk died a few weeks later.
APL / K / J (and friends) evaluate things "left-of-right" (could be thought of as "right-to-left"), that is 1+23-4 is parsed 1+(2(3-4)) - there is no operator precedence. It is weird at first, but refreshingly simple and effective once you manage to overcome indoctrination you received since elementary school.
Well maybe it's just the stuff I do but even if you do something like 'address + offset * scale'
I still want to group that to make it obvious
'address + (offset * scale)'
The former technically works but it's less obvious. And that's a dead simple example
'address + offset << scale' is notionally the same but << has a lower precedence in c than + so you get the opposite behaviour so it's better to just bracket it out of habit.
I never find that I'm adding 3 random numbers. I'm adding 2 random numbers to make a meaningful value, then adding another number so a lot of the time I do 'foo + (bar + baz)'
Maybe if you're into pure mathematics you have a different take, but in my experience it's often the case that you end up bracketing most mathmatical operations for readability anyway
What you seem to be saying is “I want no precedence or associativity - I just want explicit parentheses everywhere” which is a fine choice. But not a common one.
The reason APL made that choice (and its descendants followed) is that it had many tens of operators. There’s no intuitive or otherwise accepted order among them. Which means it’s either all parentheses (like you seem to prefer) or a simple rule (left-of-right). There’s basically no other solution.
Forth and Lisp also dropped precedence and associativity rules, each in their own way.
My guess would be because too many users held out with Win10, are not really a potential income stream, and MS would rather keep them MS customers than Linux or Mac (their next machine might be a Neo rather than Win11 these days).
The cost to Microsoft is essentially zero if they ate already committed to these security updates (and they are, at least for the LTSC branch and some government contracts)
But there are other options.