tomatowurst

No implicit agreement to privacy can exist on the internet. Once you click publish, its archived.

I wanted to read what the author wrote.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...

There is no implicit agreement to privacy between the author and public. Especially when there is an effort to archive the internet.

> Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. Sorry. I’ll leave the disclaimer:

Here's the original:

Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum Computing is really cool, indeed! Having a background in Theoretical Informatics, new complexity classes (BQP and friends) are exciting to work with. Also, studying the underlying Quantum Mechanics and understanding this new concept of how physical reality might look like under the hood (there are actually multiple interpretations of that, from Probabilism to the popular Many-World-Theory) has been eye-opening.

However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with: My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff.

So there it was me, an excited PhD student driven by scientific ideals, trying to find and discuss a meaningful research question in a new field vs. the harsh reality of being the first PhD student in the project, without a PostDoc or supervisor to reach out to discuss with and to get some basic orientation from.

For quite a while, I didn’t know how to think about this situation. Of course, it is primarily my PhD thesis, so shouldn’t I try and make the best out of it? I should take some responsibility myself, right? I tried that. I read a bunch of books, watched more lectures, only to understand that the pure accumulation of knowledge does not help me finding orientation, quite the opposite. And the more I understood about Quantum Computing, the better I understood that the work that had been done in my research group before had been a rather performative act, aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though the incentives of research funding might not be entirely aligned with that (I learned about The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), after starting to write this post).

I reached out for help. I expressed my doubts and difficulties to other PhDs as well as to more experienced researchers. Interestingly, most other PhDs could very well empathize with my situation and asserted me that my expectations in a certain amount of scientific supervision were justified and that I can’t be expected to create meaningful research entirely on my own. Conversely, the higher up or more experienced somebody was, the more often I got to hear that a PhD is generally seen as something you have to endure if you want to be a successful researcher afterwards. That I have to focus on my title if I want to be a researcher. It feels weird to me that experienced scientists tend to use anecdotal evidence of their own or other people’s underwhelming supervision situation to relativize my struggles. The difference between something being seemingly common, and something being acceptable or reasonable should be obvious, I thought.

After all, I decided to quit. I might not have tried everything humanly possible to rescue my PhD, but I feel like I have already wasted much more of my personal energy than I should have. Understanding what’s going on (and daring to put words on it) took me a while and while I tried at first to create an environment that I thrive in by addressing the issues I struggle with, I felt like my supervisors became more and more defensive. Meanwhile, even though I came up with a couple of theoretical research ideas that I would have liked to seen discussed, I was asked to find something that does not require so much understanding of Quantum Computing, something “more hands-on”. Now I’m at a point where I’m burning out. I’m getting frustrated the moment I sit down at my desk, I waste too much time idling, I can barely manage to read books I’m interested in. I hate that.

However, I don’t see my frustration as a reason to not like research, quite the opposite: Six months ago I was full of motivation and curiosity: I decided to take a TA position which I’ve been enjoying, I attended physics lectures, just for fun. I rather feel like it’s the people around me who don’t enjoy being researchers. It isn’t the first time such an environment has been burning me out (in particular when I was highly motivated in the start). For the future, it would probably be the easiest to cut down on my expectations and do what I was told: Focus on my title. But I feel like in that case, I would become one of them, forever chasing after the next title without ever finding fulfillment in the present.

Paradoxically, the only way to maintain my scientific standards seems to be dropping my current PhD and trying again, some other time. It’s terrifying to hear how many PhD colleagues of mine seem to admire me for that decision, because they feel similar towards their studies. It shouldn’t be that way. Thank you all for your support, for your open ears, for your time, no matter of what you advised me to do. Don’t risk your own mental health for a title and be assured you will find my and others’ support, should you ever decide for a change.

yet for most the inconvenience of having to port over all of their profiles, history, cookies will be enough to keep them on Chrome. Most can't be bothered with installing another browser or even aware that they can import Chrome profiles into Firefox.

Even for me for some stuff I keep on Chrome since its too connected to all the business/saas/hosting logins and etc.

but what happens when its not in the interest of the business to make consensus based decisions? like what you described can quickly devolve into "how do we get everybody to keep their responsibilities unchanged and still make payroll?" vs "how do I delegate responsibilities and adjust payroll to resources that generate revenues vs expenses"?

I just have a hardtime believing this could work. Corporations reflect militant hierarchy for a reason because effective decisions often cannot be made through consensus or utilitarian drivers. Corporations thrive when they are lead by profit incentives of executives who are beholden to profit incentives of liquidity/capital lenders.

You simply do not see a "collective" trade publicly.

> The biggest challenge is growing: I'm in a 5 person co-op. In a previous life, I was in a 25-person collective which became hell to manage, as everyone wanted to be heard, but few wanted the responsibilities.

yeah but you see the problem here? without a central leadership, everybody will have equity and you can't really steer the ship anymore.

I don't know too much about reseau or how it functions but i have a lot of difficulty with say a SaaS being run like a coop. 25 developers divide equally the loot? But there will be disagreements and disproportionate equity right off the bat. How do you remove somebody who plays politics and is able to win consensus but you know its going to impact your business? How do you arbitrate disagreements over distribution or spending of resources or the manner in which they conduct operation?

can somebody explain how these organizations handle a bad actor or collusion towards bad goals?

Say somebody comes along and wants to use Oracle suddenly, what sort of measures exist to prevent that from happening, how is arbitration, enforcements and distribution of profit calculated?

The only successful corp i can think that is similar to this is Valve but it isn't quite worker owned, it seems to distribute profits more fairly.

good point and its a big reason why I haven't dived into ML because of the platform I am on is very unfriendly.

Can't do much when you get stuck on step 23 and realize Windows 10 require you to google and look for workarounds.

I'm thinking of doing a completely linux only build with powerful GPU, but this is also where things get tricky because you don't know what you really need, and its a hefty investment when you are not building a machine for fun but for experimentation with AI.

very interesting...it could be possible a handful of papers later. You would simply show it a series of sprite animations (typicall drawn from all angles), this should be able to generate texture, mesh, lighting.

so what happens to the bitfinex gang? giancarlo, ardoino, "frog", CZ, Justin Sun and Marc Andreesen?

Why is reincarnation such a difficult concept to grasp for Westerners?

what about using sqlite diff stored in dynamodb that gets synced when lambda is called? thought i saw a repo for that.

i think that has merit too reading this im reminded.

with inflation???

expect more. Japan Inc. has been running on fumes for decades. The US only started 2 years ago, and will likely last another 20~40 years of stagnation.

not sure I quite understand railway, what are they offering? Another AWS on Digitalocean? Would be nice to see exactly what the cpu core/memory/price is.

aren't cf workers very constrained? like your call has to finish within a second or two for it to make sense and I think AWS Lambda matched their price? I could be confused here.

Is there proper tutorial for people who have never used heroku? I just don't know how to use this because i dont have any experience with heroku.

I'm interesting in self-hosted AWS api compatible solutions.

Parse is also interesting. In fact I discovered that there is a whole new world outside AWS and DO. It no longer makes sense for me to run weekend projects on AWS outright, thats really for large enterprise applications.

What I would love is to be able to deploy my docker images on my "own"cloud running on a dozen droplets/VPS around the world and bill my users at the same rate that AWS is charging. I figure I would be able to undercut AWS significantly with this method.

Storing 2TB on AWS was price shock for me, makes no sense when there are dedicated servers with a ton of storage and bandwidth that I could just use instead of being "serverless".

However, I find it to be a hall of mirrors, wondering if anybody on HN has been in my shoes and how they are handling it. I guess my biggest concerns:

- uptime availability (can I promise close to AWS?)

- security (how do i harden my box/selfcloud and have peace of mind?)

- IAM type of roles/permissions (how do i emulate something like IAM for my team?)

Like the billing from AWS is getting to a point where I feel like we can use bunch of droplets behind some "selfcloud" that manages all these things for me. I'm sure a solution exists, I just often have trouble recalling their names. Dokku makes it easy to remember because it sorta rhymes with Heroku.

It's vaguely correlated because you don't value the work of others in general. This means that at some point in your life, others did not value your work and showed you that was perfectly acceptable.

Basically the achievement here is that they have produced a generic AI capable of engaging in different activities, and from here if we extrapolate, it could lead to even more refinement, wider range of activities with even more dimensions of complexity.

It's reverting to replace somebody sitting in front of a screen, not just artists and coders but literally anything you can do on a screen which also means manipulation of remote hardware in the real world.

Very possible that within our lifetime our networked OS would be able to perform much of these generalist tasks and content creation. I say OS because theres only a few companies that own the datacenters, software and hardware ecosystem to automate, and capital to invest big in a final mile innovation:

Imagine playing Battlefield 15 with realistic and chatty AI while generating Sopranos Season 9 featuring Pauli Gaultieri Jr. with crowdsourced online storyboard to 8k film, while the same AI could be used to scalp money on Google Playstore by generating ad filled free versions of existing productivity apps that it reverse engineered, while your robot maids takes out the trash, cook you a bowl of ramen and massage your shoulders?

The rise of general AI would then optimize the labor force to select candidates based on their "humaneness", no longer the cold rational analytical mind, as those fields are overrun by AI, but what it cannot bring. such "humaneness" would increasingly be mimicked with astounding accuracy that it would become impossible to distinguish what is AI and what is human.

If it can happen with DALL-E-2 and 2D images, it can happen with 3D, moving pictures, sound, music, smell, 3d positional torque (haptic and robotic), socially cohesive and realistic emotion.

We might as well be able to capture entire experiences as we learn to digitally manipulate ALL sensory inputs from vision, touch, sound, taste, etc. Maybe even imagination and mental pictures too, which could be used to fabricate and manipulate objects/vehicles in the real world.

We are being pulled towards a singularity, where we are truly no longer our minds and bodies but whatever our digital avatar of all possible senses live and contribute to a sort of Matrioshka brain.

What would the capacity of such collective knowledge, experiences add to the entropy of the universe and where will it take humanity? Some sort of lightbodies?

Anyways, just extrapolating from this point in the lifetime but future generation of humans could be very much different, socities would function completely different than what we recognize as they would be married in some shape or form of everlasting continuity or eternity.

so...anybody using it to build web apps in lieu of react?

Seems like most Ycombinator backed IPO would've have been bad bets. Once shares are floated in the public market, retailers are an after thought.

I find not only losses emotionally hard but missed opportunities seem to invoke just as more distress.

for instance, on thursday I bought a put for a stock that I didn't think was going to make earnings on Friday open.

Before the day closed the put options were at 55%.

The next day, they made earning and my same put options were trading -30% (IV crush).

So in panic and afraid of theta decay, I sell to close on Friday.

On Monday, today, I see the stock has hit my OTM strike price and had I held on to those put options I would be looking at 720% ROI, or a 7-bagger.

It really hurts when this happens. I really do not recommend trading options.

we dont know who the victim here is.

strange seeing all these old inactive accounts suddenly posting in this thread.

its like somebody actually took the time to create multiple accounts, to astroturf a given thread in the future. pretty pathetic use of time if you ask me.

I won't but whatever you were doing got you banned. I don't rely on ebay for sales, its really good for buying collectibles or selling them.

Probably not with the scale of frauds they receive. The fastest method is to auto-ban and analyze. Ebay did the right thing here, unfortunately, its popular amongst carders.

> I signed up for an eBay account.

> my account was suspended.

> Don’t use eBay.

Been on ebay since 2001 and never had issues.

There's a variety of reasons why OP was banned, email, risk management, using vpn, shared ISP where people have been doing frauds from, other reasons.

This post really shouldn't be grounds to tell people not to use ebay, many people do successfully and have for decades.

5000 IU is really too much. At best 2000, 2500 IU is good.

you nailed it, its the material UI that plays a big role. It feels like the new old.

> Turns out the master database with encrypted username/passwords got leaked and encrypted environment variables were also leaked

WTF!!!!

That alone is disastrous enough, they should be reprimanded for this. Are there I'm sure, class action lawsuits happening?

How much of an impact will this have on Salesforce? I mean imagine the data from that alone would be immensely valuable.

I don't know but I always found Google's font choice, airy cold, disconnected and vapid. Not sure why I get that response but something just feels incredibly stale and impersonal.