opportune

That, or an advanced civilization. I kind of buy “high energy particles are type 1 civilizations’ pollution” more than “there exists gravitational pockets arranged in a manner capable of accelerating single protons to contain as much energy as a baseball”.

Ever since Forbes pivoted to basically being a hosted blogging platform I've felt their business, both directly and for contributors, is leveraging their historical brand and whatever benefits it confers for SEO and PR

For Wirecard, Russia had a vested interest in influencing payment policies and happenings in the EU to help them with sanctions (probably at both a national level to keep trade moving, and at a personal level given that Russia's political elite bore the brunt of early sanctions). They were probably proactively engaging with him extensively from high levels.

Seleznev was just a big fish in the general area of "russian fraud and cybercrime abroad." I doubt the state had a personal interest in him like it did with Marsalek. Russia just generally has a policy of allowing Russian nationals to commit cybercrime abroad (as long as it doesn't affect them domestically) probably because it brings in foreign currency, keeps people employed and encourages development of those kinds of skills, and keeps hackers busy so they don't commit domestic cybercrime or do bad things to the government.

That said, Seleznev is directly cited as a factor from Russian media in the arrest of some FSB bigwigs per https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/report-arr.... To me, if he were personally benefitting from direct help from the FSB like Marsalek this would not be retroactive to begin with, and that it took like 3y to accuse an FSB agent of helping the CIA with him (after the same agent got caught helping catch other hackers) also suggests this was less of a strategic priority and more of a "getting our hackers arrested is bad for business" thing.

For one, the fact-checking against the AIT per the preprint is "Duplications highlighted by ImageTwin.ai were evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate by80 one reviewer (the author)". Not a great way to reduce false-positives given the conflict of interest (more free scans for the author!) and the fact he'd already reviewed most of the offenders.

Also, the article says the AIT missed four papers the author flagged. But in the preprint the category with "At least one inappropriate duplication was identified during the manual review, none were highlighted by the ImageTwin.ai software" has 34 members. Per the author's results text, out of 715 papers with images, the author caught 34 inappropriate duplications the AIT missed, the AIT caught 57 inappropriate duplications that the author subsequently agreed were bad, and they both caught 24 together. But these numbers disagree with the venn diagram shown in figure 3 and referenced in the conclusion, which the Nature article also references. So... am I missing something or is that inconsistent? And were there any AIT flagged papers that the author disagreed were problematic or not?

AIT charges a pretty non-trivial amount per scan, at high volume it's still >$2 before you get to custom pricing [1]. It was "only" 2-3x faster than the researcher, and at least per the article it still needs to be checked for false positives. Taking some normal researcher pay and reasonable estimates for the rate at which they can review papers, it seems like the AIT is pretty damn expensive and might be priced competitively to "research intern".

This technology has existed for a really long time in the form of reverse image search. Google launched it in 2011, later neutered it (probably not profitable enough), but Yandex still has a pretty good one since 2014 [2]. Overall this seems like a pretty sloppy preprint with an obvious conflict of interest, and a tool that doesn't have any apparent innovation beyond commercializing a probably-underserved vertical.

[0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.03.556099v2

[1] https://imagetwin.ai/pricing/

[2] https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2014/06/19/yandexs-sibir-r...

per https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=100.00&year1=2... (latest data available is August 2023) we've had 3.67% inflation from August 2022 to August 2023

So the inflation adjusted "drops" of 163->161 and 161->156 were nominally increases from 157.23->161 and 155.30->156 respectively, which were less than inflation. Given that inflation is uneven and also that the headline is much more alarming as-is than "after adjusting for inflation" (A huge portion of hourly and less-privileged salary workers get 0% nominal raises every year, just not often in tech) it seems like a whole lot of nothing.

That is to say, if we were to actually start assessing patients’ ability to metabolize warfarin we’d have to confront the fact that a huge number of bad clinical outcomes in the recent past stemmed from not doing this.

Here’s an article I found in 30s of searching (granted, I already knew Warfarin was hugely affected by CYP2D6) stating that equivalent maintenance doses of Warfarin can vary by a factor of >10 (from 0.5mg to 7mg) based on the CYP2D6 phenotype of the patient.

The biggest problem is dealing with the “transition” of the population pyramid. Public pensions and such usually don’t account for the shape - namely the ratio of economically productive people to economically unproductive (dependents and retirees) - changing. Most likely, whichever generation gets to be retirees along the demographic transition from positive population growth to neutral population growth will get a free ride in the form of lower taxes/contributions in their productive years relative to what they consume in their retirement years. This is kinda sorta happening with Boomers in many developed countries although it’s greatly mitigated in eg the US by immigration.

Kafka is overkill for the vast majority of users, including many in FAANG, and at companies in FAANG that I’ve been at, usually either an internal async queue or a bespoke solution for the problem is used instead. But more importantly, async queueing via Kafka-like technology itself is way over-applied. Polling a single node RDBMs with a horizontally scaling cache in front of it is a fine way to propagate eg config changes at massive scale. And many of the “real-time ingestion” use cases that people love using Kafka for are much better off simply being synchronous, with engineering effort instead focused on the ability to rapidly scale consumers up and down.

Wealth is also a much more durable measure than income, as very high incomes for many people don’t happen until mid or late career, or they may be one-offs (like from an IPO).

You can be in the top 1% of CA as eg a dual income family in South Bay both working lowish status roles like “senior/staff engineer” or “line manager”. That’s solidly upper middle class in practice until they accumulate wealth. There’s a world of difference between that and how a family with $15m in assets can live

1. You cannot just use Kafka for free. It will take dev time to set up itself, dev time to code sources and sinks, dev time to handle commonly glossed over but utterly important details like idempotency, retries, duplicate messages, consumed-but-not-committed (or whatever the term is in Kafka world) network interruptions or restarts of consumers.

2. You cannot just continue to use Kafka for free. Running it has an operational cost; this is mitigated using it as a PAAS but not fully solved as you’ll still need to twiddle configurations and scramble to deal with things like “We had no idea we’d need to handle idempotency or use deadletter queues, fixed it, but now need to deal with old data before our fix”.

3. There are many ways you can implement async producer:consumer patterns that are less complex and less costly than Kafka. For example, you can write data to S3. Or you can store records in a regular RDBMS. Kafka isn’t worth it unless you really need “real-time” ingestion but can’t/won’t/shouldn’t implement an actually-real time (synchronous) system instead, like if you get large spikes and are ok with ingestion going from O(seconds) to O(minutes) when that happens.

4. There’s a good chance you don’t need an async queue at all. If consumers can horizontally scale quickly (like with Lambda) why not synchronously invoke them over HTTP/RPC and only use async queues (or a file, etc) for messages that fail multiple retries? Since external users usually aren’t directly writing to your Kafka topic, and thus you have a degree control over your ingestion and consumption, why not just combine the two services (since you can experience data loss from external world to ingestion service anyway, and in fact this is a pretty likely source of failures, your queue may not even be solving the problem you think it is). If you don’t need ordering or partition and are using queues for eg config update propagation, why not just synchronously update consumers or implement basic polling in your consumers?

5. A lot of Kafka/Confluent “features” like retries or logging you can get with so many other tools and services but for some reason these can be the actual selling point more so than the fact it’s an async queue (that also has these features).

Yes, in a FAANG design interview where it only costs you 5seconds to say “and we’ll use an async queue like Kafka between these components to handle variable load and partially consumed data” it’s a great tool that saves you a lot of time. And when you pretend integration and maintenance costs don’t exist, and don’t even know what idempotency means, and are sitting across from some slick Confluent salesperson telling you Kafka can be THE database of everything your company does with all these nice features, it sounds great to midwit managers and hasbeen architecture astronauts. In reality? The dumb unsexy alternatives probably solve your actual problem more simply

Personally, I’d have loved to be a part of the Academia of the mid 20th century. But my exposure to research 10 years ago (thankfully, before committing to a PhD) quickly taught me that it’d be extremely unfulfilling, difficult, and poorly compensated compared to private industry. It would be cool to be a tenured professor I guess, but the coolness and prestige of that title is riding the coattails of the past when academia was less of a slog.

I get to work on novel CS problems (distributed systems) in my FAANG job without having to publish X papers per year while I progress on the actual meaty problems, for a lot more pay. It’s just strictly better IMO. I’d rather take 3 years from beginning to end to finish something new I’m actually proud of that’ll be used by hundred of millions of people, than be forced to publish papers very few people will read at a regular cadence or lose my job.

I could be wrong but I think it’s: To serve a read from a replica in region X, where the write replica is in region Y s.t. there is a partition between X and Y, I’m pretty sure in the normal case X does not need to wait for Y to tell it to let the read go. Instead Y locks X on-write to implement consistency. So in the case of a partition X still does not wait for Y to execute a read, but writes become unavailable.

I can buy that excuse in SF which has a lot of poor exurban car commuters by necessity, but NYC has a much bigger public transit network and parking is even more scarce and expensive in Manhattan than in SF (so unless you’re just taking a shortcut through Manhattan, which this is intentionally penalizing, you’re going to be paying a lot for parking anyway and are probably already wealthy).

Also, I think there’s some fallacious reasoning going on here as if congestion pricing by itself will not help unless timed to exactly coincide with other projects completing. It can as long there’s slack in the system (there is) and it doesn’t need those other projects to be done before it starts helping.

The MTA certainly overpays for projects but that is a much easier problem to point out than to fix. It ties into a huge and longstanding corruption/graft scheme, that has in practice a lot of public support, that you can’t just fix overnight.

Honestly fuck these journalists, this is life saving technology and if they hold us back because they can’t bully local government into making it easier for them to bully SDC, they have blood on their hands.

1. Gives a place to plug and train the 1P search engine (Bing) or a place to sell access to a search provider (Apple wrt Google)

2. Pretty easy but flashy feature that doesn’t require any real creativity or delivery risks but is flashy enough to get people promoted.

3. Probably user research shows that computer novices are confused by the difference between a file and web search box.

Don’t underestimate the confluence of these three things: it’s easy to justify as good for the (highly technically inexperienced) user, good for the business, and a solid path to a title bump for all involved.

I guess they had to scramble to hire some PR firm to spin their plans to Solano County residents and had to come up with something. But completely glossing over what they actually intend to do - attract techies and technology jobs - seems kind of like an insult to the intelligence of the people this is addressed to.