belfalas

I visited Japan some years back and loved this aspect of the culture as well. An Australian ski guide (this was a winter visit) explained it like so: "the Japanese attitude is to want to do a good job by default. Tipping implies that a good job is only done because of pay. The Japanese see quality service as intrinsically valuable in itself."

Like others in the thread, I have a telescope and it's a wonderful experience pointing it skyward while it's still light out and the moon is visible. Then I can really see all the craters and "pock marks" on the surface. (My telescope isn't good enough to be able to see anything during a full moon, it all just becomes washed out.)

You could start today by going on Omegle and carving out a niche as someone who wants thoughtful, reasoned, and substantive discussion.

"Mr. President - we must not allow an LLM gap!"

A piece of guidance that helped me a lot was this: "when looking at boxes and lines, the junior architect looks at the boxes - the experienced architect looks at the lines."

I went to high school in a fairly affluent area and I promise you this is not true. If you have money and know how to talk to your doctor, you can get whatever you want. No questions asked.

You can even get prescription methamphetamine - and Walgreens will stock generic for it!

Maybe it's just me getting older but it seems like this has always been true across cultures and history. People like to believe that once they get power, they will act differently than the ones who came before. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, they end up being just like the people they replaced, if not worse.

Every once in a while you get an exception but that's why we remember those people - because they were the exception.

Similarly for iCloud Drive / Dropbox, what they charge you for is storage, not the ability to look things up.

Search is a feature of the index / overall data catalog.

From what I recall a MSFT executive made a similar comment to Google that search was not a product (which turned out to be true).

I also think Bloom County deserves to be on the list of all-time greats.

And sorry bud, but the whole "operating independently" thing...I don't buy it. I've worked for too many companies that were owned by someone else and purported to operate independently. It's just a flat-out lie.

We have always been hybrid cloud and I don't see that that would change in the future. Honestly the future will probably be what was always predicted: have a set of "core origin" servers that are on-prem and then a cloud membrane around that.

On-prem might still mean using a vendor for the actual care and feeding of hardware, there's no money in us running our own datacenters.

(I'm just a programmer so it's fascinating to me to consider how actual brain scientists model consciousness in their work.)

What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?

The quote from the lama is excellent as well and a very common type of expression that Dzogchen masters make.