udev

I appreciate the author's intention to help.

But I can't but be annoyed by his stance that "I am at Cambridge", therefore the way I prefer things to be formulated is the correct, universally accepted way.

What's wrong with honest, no-nonsense recommendation letters? Why is flattering and positive language a requirement?

I am sure the author knows how to differentiate "you are doing brilliant work" coming from his mother vs coming from the leading researcher in his field, and interprets each version accordingly.

Similarly, what stops him interpreting "this is a good, promising, student" differently, depending of where it comes from?

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And I agree on another point with the author, yes it is "excruciating" to read recommendation letters, and also, it is "excruciating" and soul-crushing to write them if you are not used to telling white lies, and it is also "excruciating" as a student to deal with getting one, especially in institutions where the professor-to-student power distance is much higher that in western universities.

Have mercy, my dude!

If you really follow Italian politics you'd know it's been like that for 200+ years -- that's how the place operates. And with all that going on they managed to create a world-class automotive industry, ship-building industry, industrial equipment industry, etc.

I have the feeling you are talking about Italy through the lens of western media, and not through first-hand knowledge or experience.

Industrially, Italy is much more like South Korea than Greece or Spain.

I read about 800 pages of his writing ("Better Angels ..." book) and there were passages of absolute beauty, like the part about Alan Turing.

The Andrei Rublev bell scene is forever embedded in me.

Every time I am working on something complex I ask myself: will it "ring" in the end?

From what I can see this is a patent application for the dehumidification part only, which can be added to a pre-existing HVAC system.

The website claims the system can eliminate the compressor and refrigerant completely.

Not sure if they have a separate patent for that.

Sounds like the notion of a condenser coil (a very real device) violates your understanding of thermodynamics.

I recommend you look up how heat-pumps work: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy-efficiency/energy-star-canada...

I am rusty on my thermodynamics, but could this cycle be reversed for heat-pumps?

In the summer dehumidify air for more efficient cooling.

In the winter humidify the air for more efficient heating?

This would be a win-win-win because where I live summers a hot and humid, and winters are dry, and my heat-pump dries the air even more.

From what I understand, the desiccant releases water under slight pressure from vacuum pump, which presumably is less than the energy saved by using the desiccant in the first place.

Overcooked is an amazing game for all ages.

Here in Canada some provinces did use lock-downs (even with curfews) and some didn't, and comparisons made between them show that lock-down was one of the least effective measures.

I am sure similar data exists for US states, EU countries, etc.

Click-bait titles are now an art form in itself. Nothing against the work being discussed.

One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people.

Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people.

They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration.

They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship (hunger, lack of medication, being separated from children in hospital, being separated from sick parents, etc).

Of course none of that is true.

For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.

We have to compensate for human imperfection, the same way a good engineer takes into consideration the imperfection of the materials, imperfection of signals, numerical imperfections in algorithms, etc.

I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating.

Financial Times for news (ft.com)

Various sub-reddits for other types of news and info (e.g. r/soccer)

Not a web routine, but general routine: I try to make time to read books.

I read it as in researched found zero-day vulnerability to Antikythera mechanism.

Too bad they didn't feature a software developer in the video.

The way you posed the question implies that the West and Russia are in a employer-employee type relationship, with Russia being the subservient employee, where the boss can fire, replace, demote, etc, and them have little to no control over such events.

I think this is a poor analogy.

(For context: I despise this aggressive Russian government.)

Yes, for very precise, comprehensive text descriptions of problems.

It will take a far-far more advanced AI to write such descriptions for real-world problems.

Writing requirements for a project is difficult work, and not for technical reasons, but for human reasons (people don't know what they want exactly, people have trouble imagining things they haven't seen yet, people are irrational, people might want something that is different from what they need, etc.)

In this regard, we are safe for a few more decades at least.

I am thinking whether this result can create a type of loop that can self-optimize.

We have AI to generate reasonable code from text problem description.

Now what if the problem description text is to generate such a system in the first place?

Would it be possible to close the loop, so to speak, so that over many iterations:

- text description is improved

- output code is improved

Would it be possible to create something that converges to something better?

Indeed, a wonderland where it is OK for a 2 trillion dollar company to take 5 years to fix vulnerabilities that put in danger many of its users worldwide.

Before Facebook filed, was there precedent for their TOS?

What if Facebook never filed? Would Apple never be able to act on this?

If they would have acted, why didn't they do it before Facebook?

Apple knows since at least 2016 of NSO activities on their devices and servers, while selling this image of privacy competence.

This long period of inaction, from 2016 to now is unacceptable.

I am all for Hanlon's razor.

But it reads to me as: Apple legal team has to act because Facebook suit (and the info made public) makes it impossible to say that "Apple was not aware" of such and such details.

To me it is much easier to believe the above, compared to your "Apple is only now seeing this info, and only now is aware, and only now can act".

The amount of time that Apple sat on this is telling.

First reports on NSO activity are from 2016, Facebook filed in 2019, Apple iOS 14.8 fix released in Sept 2021.

Only when the constant negative news about NSO started chipping at their reputation, did they decide to make this symbolic (and ultimately ineffective) move.

I am a Windows user since 3.11 (so 25+ years).

I am yet to see a single instance when a troubleshooting wizard was not a complete waste of time.

I think you might be operating with a romanticized definition of what a genius is.

In fact a common definition of (higher) intelligence is the ability to see patterns (abstractions, properties, laws) in an otherwise random looking world.

Think of Darwin looking at birds, animals, vegetation, and being able to come up with something like the Laws of Natural Selection. Even today 99.999% of people would not see those patterns.

Think of Kepler looking at random movement of stars and planets on the sky and being able to come up with the Laws of Planetary Motion. Same thing, today 99.999% of people would not see those patterns.

On a much lower scale, the character in this text displayed a similar ability to see in otherwise random looking objects new properties, arrangements, and applications.

I think you are judging here based on the small scale of his achievement (rolling table, who cares, $50 at Home Depot could make better, right?) but you are failing to consider for the absolute-zero (or close to it) in resources that the guy had at his disposal.

For example an achievement like this: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/09/06/... , in my opinion, has to be amplified in our eyes to compensate for the difference in resources availability in a typical bio-tech-lab in say US, and what was available here.

Should've named it JackSON5.

Is Woodpunk a thing?

It also reminds me of how some of Leonardo da Vinci's contraptions look like when they create them in real life (some museums do that).

Catherine Zeta-Jones to receive a 'takedown' any minute now.

I am blocked on finding a good (defined below) way to determine whether a product description A and product description B refer to the same product.

Imagine that a product description is a n-dimensional vector like:

  ( manufacturerName, modelName, width, height, length, color, ...)

Now imagine you have a file with m such vectors (where m is in millions), and that not all fields in the vectors are reliable info (typos, missing info, plain wrong, etc).

What is a good way to determine which product descriptions refer to the same product.

Is this even a good approach? What is state of the art? Are there simpler ways?

Here is what I mean by good:

  - robust to typos, missing info, wrong info
  - efficient since both m and n are large
  - updateable (e.g. if classification was done, and 10k new descriptins are added, how to efficiently update and avoid full recomputation)