Europe needs chip fabs _owned by the state_. Look at what China is doing with immersion lithography. Europe could be doing the same thing, but with state of the art ASML technology, securing both digital sovereignty for hardware and all the downstream technologies that build on it (such as AI).
How much he worked has nothing to do with what he is earning - there are people working three jobs out there who barely make ends meet. The page illustrates the absurd level of inequality our society has reached, a level that pure numbers are useless at illutrating.
I can see this working reasonably for text that you can understand without referring to figures, and for texts for which there is external content available that such a conversation could be based on. For a new, say, math paper, without prose interspersed, I’d be surprised if the generated conversation will be worth much. On the other hand, that is a corner case and, personally, I suspect I will be using this for the many texts where all I need is a presentation of the material that is easy to listen to.
I am still waiting for companies to realize that offices in the pre-pandemic sense are a completely unnecessary expense, a drag on productivity and a competitive disadvantage for the organizations that keep clinging on to this idea. It's easy to talk about the importance of meeting face-to-face, when you ignore the opportunity cost of enabling this versus scaling down to more up-to-date spaces that make things like workshops, larger meetings and pair programming truly comfortable, and reinvesting the savings into higher salaries and other benefits. Are the management teams in our industry just waiting for someone to pull the trigger, or are they hoping that no-one will do so, and that everyone will just forget that the pandemic taught us how meaningless commuting to work is?
While the importance of getting enough good sleep has recently become mainstream, we are still living in a culture where just striking a balance between work and a personal life is an unattainable goal for many people. We should really be talking about work/life/sleep balance, since excelling at the former two easily come at the cost of the latter. As the article highlights, sleep seems like a facet that is important to optimize above most others.
A pathetic example of the ideological myopia that plagues Europe these days. States have provided services to their inhabitants since prehistory, and the notion that this infrastructure does not need financing is as healthy as a corporation that thinks it does not need to invest to succeed. At best, this strategy of living off of investments made by previous generations is doomed to underperform compared to states that take an active role in their own development.
Thank you! I will try to apply both of your suggestions when I get back to work from vacation :) looking forward to your articles, I think the topic has a lot of potential.
I would be interested in some advice on how to support the sales team without doing their job for them. Our managers have lately started talking a lot about “focusing on the value we bring to the client” and so on, and while that is surely a crucial perspective to be aware of, there are perspectives that the sales team are not expected to be aware of that are the technical team’s responsibility and I would like to strike a balance there. Are there some things you are now aware of that you wish your engineer colleagues would have shared with the sales team, for example?
The point is that you have a lot of influence over outcomes. There are mountains of evidence to support that fact, with comparatively easy and accessible interventions ranging from abstaining from smoking, to eating healthy food, to getting exercise. As with everything else in life, though, what you are doing by living healthily is turning the probabilities in your favor. That means that someone with unlucky genetic predispositions, or with an undiagnosed infection/deficiency/toxin exposure etc, might develop cancer despite doing everything in their power to avoid it, while a lucky bon-vivant smoker/drinker/junk foodie might just roll those dice favorably enough times to die of other causes. The point is that you should live your life based on the expected outcome of your actions, rather than on specific example cases, which may be outliers not representative of what you might expect if you follow their lead.
If we focus only on the benefits, her are two basic but distinguishing features that make it a very pleasant and productive language in my experience:
- knowing through the type systems that a function’s result depends only on its parameters makes testing more reliable
- the syntax and type inference makes it possible to write down many algorithms extremely tersely, which is also helpful in getting the implementation right