blaesus

May I ask what you used Gemma 31B for? Last time I try it wasn't bad but then it wasn't particularly good either.

"Summarization of what a search engine would return" is good enough for many of my purposes though. Good for breaking into new grounds, finding unknown unknowns, brainstorming etc.

Couldn't enjoy it at all. One of the first scenes shows MI6 officers, during WWII, making plans on a post-1991 world map, with reunified Germany and independent Baltic countries, etc. Kills immersion for me immediately, along with the gender politics every few minutes in a history show. Maybe I'm old fashioned.

Random note: Subaru China published their new BRZ today, which is distinguished by its boxer engine, with (somewhat) symmetric pistons.

I quit a YC-funded start-up based in Shanghai in 2016 to be nomadic for nearly a year. Stayed in 10 countries around the Pacific (Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, US, Canada etc.).

My primary take-away from the the journey is that my wanderlust is finally satisfied. After a year, I stopped moving because, travelling isn't that fun at that point. I want to build large things and have long-term relationships, which is difficult when you are a rolling-stone.

I would certainly encourage my kids to do it when they've got the opportunity. But it's likely that I wouldn't do it myself in at least a decade.

The company has an account on Bilibili[0], where its Chinese name is specified as 鲸鲮. 鲸, romanised as Jing, means "whales" (the animal). So JingOS would be "WhaleOS".

(鲮, romanised as Ling, is another water animal known as "mud carp".)

[https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Za4y1n7pY]

Used to work in a newspaper in Hong Kong and we have a statue of Guan Yu as well...

Anecdotally, the triad worships Guan Yu with black shoes while the police worships him with red shoes.

Preview can modify images. There's a button with a pencil icon that toggles a toolbar for simple image editing, such as adding lines, shapes, or texts.

My parents (who grew up in rural China in 1960s) love to talk about chopping firewood or collecting mushrooms in the forests, alone or with their siblings, when they were 8 or 10 or something. They often give me parenting advices like "don't worry about the kids; they just need one more pair of chopsticks" (as in you feed the kids and they'll take care of themselves).

French and Castilian and friends are standardized against some spoken variant. And spoken languages inevitably change over time.

Latin is standardized against the writings of the classical authors, and to a lesser degree, the medieval authors. These authors, being dead, can't change.

Caesar is dead; Romans are no more. Their opinions matter not; what matters is whether we and the future generation consider these authors to have spoken in the same tongue.

Indeed, about 29% of English vocabulary came from French; yet another 29% are directly from Latin[0].

Take your comment as example: excluding the Anglo-Saxon words, 5 are directly from Latin and 2 from French:

Latin words: Latin, Latinus vocabulary, vocabulum directly, directus via, via erudite, eruditus

French words: French useful

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...

Latin is "dead" and that's its advantage.

English is well "alive", and living implies mutation. In 500 years, our children would be reading our English as we read Shakespeare (that is, with difficulty); and in 1000 years, our English would become what Beowulf looks like today (that is, you can't recognize a word).

Latin doesn't change. Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's Latin, which is the Latin used in Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis and Winnie ille Pu.

What is dead may never die. The "English" as we know it will die. Latin will not.

Superheroes are so...conservative. Nothing ever changes. If you want to change the game then you're probably the villain, who is to be stopped by the superheroes, who don't really have a plan themselves.

Batman has huge wealth and advanced technologies and the best way he can come up with to fight crimes is beating the "criminals" up himself, rather than contributing his power to improve the economy (or run for an office to change policies or whatever) to prevent people from having to commit crimes. No wonder there're always more crimes for Batman to fight...

Especially the "Angevin Empire"[0], when Kings of England also ruled large portions of Kingdom of France.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angevin_Empire

I am Chinese living in China. Nationalism is on the rise lately in China, not just for domestic reasons, but also as an reaction to nationalistic moves from "the West" like this one. It's a recurring theme, not just in governmental propaganda, but also in daily conversations, that "the West" would talk about fairness and justice then commit blatant discrimination and double standards.

As a founder of a tech company based in China, I benefit from US companies blocking Chinese (and Russian) engineers; still I am saddened by this. I hope they could come up with more intelligent policies to protect their OPSEC.

Went to Shanghai Expo 2010. Honestly it's a rather uninspiring event.

Exhibitions were primarily organised by countries, which tend to be more particular about some specific culture than visionary about the future.

The theme was "Better city, better life" (subtly different than the Chinese version, which was "Cities make life better"). Technologies demonstrated are far from cutting edge, something like internet-connected air conditioners and large touch-screens.

I think either the Danes or the Dutch put some bikes in their exhibition, which you can ride and feel what it's like to ride in their cities, which is rather fun (a precursor to the current VR hype perhaps?).

`zh-CN` and `zh-TW` are generally just old-school ways to say "simplified Chinese" and "Traditional Chinese" (two similar writing systems). The confusion comes in as the Chinese language family has multiple dialects and variants, and there are multiple writing systems.

The current practice is really a dimension-reduction, where a N×2 matrix [(CN, TW, HK, SG, MY...) × (simplified, traditional)] collapsed into a 2×1 vector (TW, CN).

The language labels should have been `zh-hans` and `zh-hant` if one means to differentiate the writing systems, and not the underlying linguistic variants.

According to Beijing government, Taiwan absolutely exists, it's just that it is not a sovereign state. Hong Kong has been handed over to China for more than twenty years and people in Hong Kong continue to use zh-HK – Beijing government seems to be OK with that.

Writing formulae are like design patterns. They give us names to think and talk about structures, but too often become dogmata.

Former journalist here. This structure is also known as "inverted pyramid"[0]. CIA has a book[1] that details the process to apply the structure recursively to build an article.

Beware of the potential pitfalls of "stating the key first":

1. The key point might be complex and requires a build up – rushing to the point could confuse your readers;

2. What's "most important" depends on the reader and if you write for a wide audience, it is not always obvious;

3. If you design your writing to be "modular", readers could be more likely to abandon your work prematurely;

4. Sometimes the most important detail is that you are taking the time and being patient to communicate, and making a point with little context could alienate;

5. You could feel lazy and not control the complexity of your article because "I already made it easy for the readers to skim and skip!".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

[1] https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.scip.org/resource/resmgr/White_Pap...

Immux | https://www.immux.com | Systems Software Engineer | Remote | Full time

We are building a fast and easy-to-use immutable database engine and a computing service that provide first-class citizen support for functional programming, versioned and auditable data operations, and automatic maintenance and tuning.

As a systems engineer, you will be responsible for designing and implementing our database and computing engines.

Stack: Rust + TypeScript.

Seed round from a NASDAQ-listed finance company. Salary + options.

The whole team (of 2) is remote.

Contact: join@immux.com (Andy Shu, Founder/CEO).

Please tell us about your previous projects that demonstrate your engineering capabilities. We are especially interested in experiences with building lower stacks of computing systems, such as databases, virtual machines, compilers, operating systems, and file systems.

Immux | https://www.immux.com | Systems Software Engineer | Remote | Full time

We are building a fast and easy-to-use immutable database engine and a computing service that provide first-class citizen support for functional programming, versioned and auditable data operations, and automatic maintenance and tuning.

We intend to make immutable storage systems the norm in a decade. Join us to design and implement computing infrastructure for the next generation.

Stack: Rust + TypeScript.

Seed round from a NASDAQ-listed finance company. Salary + options.

The whole team works remotely.

Contact: shu@immux.com (Andy Shu, Founder/CEO), preferably with resume and GitHub link.

(If you haven't written Rust but is interested and learns fast, feel free to get in touch!)

Thanks. I hate to say this but I worked on my machine...

Immux | https://immux.com | Systems Software Engineer | Remote | Full time

Immux is building an immutable database and a computing service that provide first-class citizen support for functional programming, versioned and auditable data operations, and automatic maintenance and tuning.

We are looking for engineers to design and build the database and computing systems.

Seed round from a NASDAQ-listed finance company. Salary + Equity. The whole team (uh, really the two of us) are remote. Stack: Rust and TypeScript.

Get in touch: shu@immux.com

(For anyone who's interested in the direction we are working towards. It's perfectly fine if you haven't written Rust or built databases before.)

By the way, Chinese "barrage" (弹幕） video/livestream sites (think YouTube, but comments fly over the pictures of the videos like bullets, hence the name), including Bilibili (listed on Nasdaq), Acfun and Douyu, blocked the barrage-comment functionality from around May 30 to June 6. YouTube-style static comments are still allowed though.

Before perhaps 19th century, marriages had little to do with love but everything to do with social status and wealth.

Yes.

Many Chinese developers are not fluent English users though. There's a "Chinese StackOverflow" called segmentfault.com, and I often see people asking fellow developers in WeChat groups.

Source: Am Chinese in China

The Anki card viewer is very customisable, because it's actually a web browser (on Mac it's an old Safari). Most pre-modern CSS and JavaScript work. Data can be stored in card fields, and inserted into JavaScript tag like old-school template-based web development.