I've been happy with Fastmail for 10 years, though they're Australian and not European. Might look into a European alternative at some point but so far I've had no reason to switch.
Had missed this suggestion completely. So, the totally-not-racist-don't-be-so-sensitive-you-silly-snowflake president's solution is "how about ethnic cleansing?".
I was recently in Bosnia and as a consequence read up on the balkan conflict, this quote (about the srebnica massacre) stuck with me:
People are not little stones or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that. ... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr. Krajišnik and Mr. Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide.
Kinda seems like a huge mistake to devaluate nvidia because of deepseek. Deepseek has proven that LLMs can be run much more cheaply than previously thought, the nvidia cards can now do much more than previously thought possible. What am I missing?
I'm not familiar with Quanta from before, but what a fantastic article. It explains the problem and the history in an engaging way that manages to be approachable to us without an academic background in CS while still retaining some academic substance. Very informative!
Seems this is a common thing. Found this and also Claude (the LLM) tells me it goes very far back and kinda got very big around Reagan's time. Allegedly Obama had some restrictions on his first term, but these were lifted on second term, but I haven't bothered to verify that.
However, the answer is yes. Just that it seems to be nothing new.
They didn't make a video about it because they thought it was a problem for creators, not a problem for consumers.
Which is true. Influencers are great at making their thing your thing, because that's kind of their job, and we've seen it many times before. Just look at all the outrage about the YouTube algorithm and such, it doesn't matter to anyone except influencers but somehow it's made to be everybody's business.
This feels very similar. Scummy business practice, good on them for suing, but to the rest of us it should only be a curiosity.
Isn't this kinda what the controversy around the ElastiSearch licensing change was about? I think people have had similar frustrations with HashiCorp software, but I don't know the details.
I think you're spot on with LLMs being mostly trained on these kinds of tasks. Can't say I'm an expert in how to build a training set, but I imagine it's quite easy to do with these kinds of problems because it's easy to classify a solution as correct or incorrect. This is in contrast to larger problems which are less guided by algorithmic efficiency and more by sound design/architecture.
Still, I think it's quite impressive. You don't have to go very far back in time to have top of the line LLMs unable to solve these kinds of problems.
Also there is no big consequence if they don't and it's probably possible to bruteforce (which is how many programming tasks have been solved).
Usually with AoC part 1 is brute-forceable, but part 2 is not. Very often part 1 is to find the 100th number, and part 2 is to find the 1 000 000 000 000th number or something. Last year, out of curiosity, I had a brute-force solution for one problem that successfully completed on ~90% of the input. Solution was multi-threaded and running on a 16 core CPU for about 20 days before I gave up. But the LLMs this year (not sure if this was a problem last year) are in the top list of fastest users to solve the problems.
I hardly see it changed to be honest. I work in the field too and I can imagine LLMs being good at producing decent boilerplate straight out of documentation, but nothing more complex than that.
I think one of the top lists on advent of code this year is a cheater that fully automated the solutions using LLMs. Not sure which LLM though, I use LLMs quite a bit and ChatGPT 4o frequently tells me nonsense like "perhaps subtracting by zero is affecting your results" (issues I thought were already gone in GPT 4, but I guess not, Sonnet 3.5 does a bit better in this regard).
Also not an issue if you're in the rich part of the world, or just one that has a lot of water. Fortunately I don't think water is gonna be what makes Russia invade, don't know what their supply looks like but I can't imagine it's not enough.
Was dying to see some good news, finally.