It must feel like meritocracy. Like when ranking, particularly in strict order, is not the norm - so Terrence Tao doesn't see himself "on top" of anything. Moreover it must imply some solid grounding and a good understanding of how someone's actions are not expected to be correlated with their reputation. This is especially the case where getting the results is a personal or strictly team effort, not a popularity contest.
It can be unexpeted for anyone that's operating in the regular business, corporate, VC and general academic landscape where politics rule while meritocracy is a feel good motivator while popularity is the real coin.
Love this! I’ve been mostly doing my hobbies as work for 20 years, but I’ve been having a blast getting back to deep pure math and PL research in the last 6-12 months which absolutely topped everything. It’s fully targeted towards my business goals which is ideal for me as I need a concrete problem to solve when learning. I’m 40 and this has been intellectually more productive than anything else I’ve done (feels like x times more than what I remember).
It’s exciting and inspiring to see others doing it later in life as I wish I could keep doing it too.
The thing with intuition vs arithmetic is that intuition sums up both conscious and unconscious knowledge. Often there’s more, deeper that happens unconsciously. So, in reality, a strong intuition may be fooled by otherwise simplistic arithmetic that fails to represent the essence of the intuition.
That is not to say that if your intuition results in incorrect arithmetic/logic it would make any sense to stick to it :))
perhaps the problem is you're trying to fit computer in the wrong level of abstraction or projecting your position wrt to it incorrectly.
E.g. a computer may or may not be programmable for processes that live inside the computer.
This said, the compute abstraction is a logical gadget. Logical in the sense that it aims for consistency at a mininmum.
A logical gadget is a computer, by Curry-Howard correspondence.
This is a broad enough framework to explain why what you're debating against is the case: given that philosophy bridges language to logic and provies the framework for all sciences, seeing nature as compute is like saying there's a logic to nature.
So yes, everything is compute. Everything more detailed that that, turing machines, digits, whether it's it from bit or not is a separate matter of debate that may or may not be required.
The utility is relative to the purpose. If everything is compute that you don't know how to program, and that's all you want to do - sure that's useless.
If you what you want is a powerful analysis framework, that's gold.
If you know how to abstract your way forward with that framework that too.
So arguing that the distinction is useless because it's universal, is like saying logic is useless because it's universal.
It's a bit disingenuous to slap 11 9s in the first phrase of something called MemoryDB and drop "durability" after, implied by the otherwise boring durability of S3.
This said, it's not bad. I'd keep in mind that the paper is one thing and putting your money where your mouth is means having an SLA for latency. So far, Google's BigTable is the only service with a read latency SLA.
SLAs with public cloud providers don't mean what people think they mean (not saying you do, but i bet a lot of other readers do).
SLAs just mean "if you can prove that we didn't meet our SLA, we'll give you a refund, and by refund we mean some % of your bill for some duration".
It's not nothing - it's obviously $$s, and so teams get measured and have goals about improving their availability and latency.
But most customers don't seek out those refunds, and so there is no real pressure connected between the SLA and their true performance (which is often much BETTER than the SLAs, but not because of the SLAs)
> there is no real pressure connected between the SLA and their true performance
I'm not sure I understand this. Regardless of the refund, if a provider cuts enough corners with SLAs, won't the customers eventually raise a stink about it and make use of the (thankfully robust) competition? Plus there's the support overhead of tracking the performance and issuing the refund, which might exceed the cost of the refund itself.
I think to most people an SLA is an indicator that a company is serious about this aspect of the product's performance. Serious enough to write it into long term contracts and align its incentives to fulfill it.
Oh definitely. Well the problem with not drinking water before bed is that, then I wake up due to thirst. Which was originally why I started drinking more water (I still chronically drink too little water every day) and then caused waking up for toilet visit.
If you're waking up thirsty then that might be a symptom that you're mouth breathing at night. Have you tried video recording yourself at night to check?
That's an interesting point! Nope haven't recorded myself, I rarely wake up being dry in my mouth, if that's an indication, nor do I snore a lot or have the tendency to mouth breathe.
I would think (?) I would notice if I mouth breathe excessively, sine I hurt my throat while sleeping when I catched covid, and then I could only mouth breathe for several days due tapped nose. Noticeable difference
But recording / asking SO to check could be a good thing. Thanks for the suggestion!
It can be unexpeted for anyone that's operating in the regular business, corporate, VC and general academic landscape where politics rule while meritocracy is a feel good motivator while popularity is the real coin.