With these serialization libraries, do any of them have a facility that allows you to specify a wire format and an application format, with recipes for converting one to the other?
I haven't used these very seriously but a problem I had a while back was that that the wire format was not what the applications wanted to use, but a good application format was to space-inefficient for wire.
As far as I could see there was not a great way to do this. You could rewrite wire<->app converter in every app, or have a converter program and now you essentially have two wire formats and need to put this extra program and data movement into workflows, or write a library and maintain bindings for all your languages.
The way to do this starts with not hard-wiring the code generation step.
Instead, make codegen a function of BOTH a data schema object and a code template (eg expressed in Jinja2 template language - or ZeroMQ GSL where I first saw this approach). The codegen stage is then simply the application of the template to the data schema to produce a code artifact.
The templates are written assuming the data schema is provided following a meta-schema (eg JSON Schema for a data schema in JSON). One can develop, eg per-language templates to produce serialization code or intra-language converters between serialization forms (on wire) and application friendly forms. The extra effort to develop a template for a particular target is amortized as it will work across all data schemas that adhere to a common meta-schema.
The "codegen" stage can of course be given non "code" templates to produce, eg, reference documentation about the data schema in different formats like HTML, text, nroff/man, etc.
If you care about network bandwidth you can compress before sending, as virtually all web applications do. Then you don't need to worry much about the space efficiency of the application format.
Of the wire format you mean? I compress it and still need to care about the space efficiency of the wire format beyond that. Compression ratio does improve a lot when not doing our own, end result is significantly larger. Also it becomes also significantly slower because more data to process which is possibly the bigger problem.
It's probably not like most web application, it's hardware data loggers that produce about hundreds of millions to billions of events per second (each with minimum about 4 bytes of wire format and maximum roughly 500 bytes).
Have you read the requirements? Business visas or ESTA waivers have never allowed "work", there is nothing sudden about it. You can attend conferences and trade shows and have meetings. You can not "work" though.
I'm not an immigration lawyer so I don't know exactly what the requirements cover and what they don't. You are not allowed to "engage in active employment", but I have been permitted in paid for by my employer to attend meetings with company colleagues which is apparently okay.
I imagine a Korean engineer or project manager visiting to meet colleagues and inspect the site should be okay on a business visa or waiver. One who was there working on plans or overseeing construction might not be. You would hope the company had carefully checked these things.
Yes. But things really are different now. I think there was some expectation of checks and balances kicking in if things went really crazy and they didn't. So the trust factor is in the freezer right now, pretty much all over Europe. Yes, people still trade, yes, there is still traffic back and forth. But it is now because you have to, not because you want to. Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.
We were told that things really were different then too. And they were different by definition because they weren't the same, but that is not really evidence of anything. We were promised he colluded with Putin to hack the election and would become a dictator, that WWIII would be started, economy would be ruined, international trade would be stopped, undesirable citizens would be put into camps, etc. He really did not need courts or legislature on your side for that if you can control the military and a sizable portion of the country is on your side too. So that all turned out to be another cry wolf situation.
Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.
> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.
No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -
"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."
But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.
Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.
> While the stuff LLMs is giving us is incorrect information, it’s still information that the sighted world won’t or refuses to give us.
I don't understand what's going on here. He's angry at us horrible sighteds for refusing to give them incorrect information? Or because we refuse to tell them when their LLMs give them incorrect information? Or he thinks that we're refusing to give them correct information which makes it okay that the LLM is giving them incorrect information?
> > I fully predict that blind people will be advocating to make actual LLM platforms accessible
> Absolutely. The LLM platforms indeed very much should be accessible. I don't think anyone would have beef with that.
AIs I have used have fairly basic interfaces - input some text or an image and get back some text or an image - is that not something that accessibility tools can already do? Or do they mean something else by "actual LLM platform"? This isn't a rhetorical question, I don't know much about interfaces for the blind.
Oh no, cause screen readers are dumb things. If you don't send them an announcement, through live regions or accessibility announcements on Android or iOS, they will not know that a response has been received. So, the user will just sit there and have to tap and tap to see when a response comes in. This is especially frustrating with streaming responses where you're not sure when streaming has completed. Gemini for Android is awful at this when typing to it while using TalkBack. No announcements. Claude on web and Android also do nothing, and on iOS it at least places focus, accidentally I suspect, at the beginning of the response. chatGPT on iOS and web are great; it tells me when a response is being generated and reads it out when it's done. On iOS, it sends each line to VoiceOver as it's being generated. AI companies, and companies in general, need to understand that not all blind people talk to their devices.
dang, I was hoping that with the impossibly simple interface chatGPT has and the basically unlimited budget they have, they would have done a bit better for accessibility. shameful
I've been having trouble figuring out how best to implement a streaming text display interface in a way that's certain to work well with screenreaders.
In some languages, pronunciation(a+b) == pronunciation(a) + pronunciation(b). Polish mostly belongs to this category, for example. For these, it's enough to go token-by-token.
For English, it is not that simple, as e.g. the "uni" in "university" sounds completely different to the "uni" in "uninteresting."
In English, even going word-by-word isn't enough, as words like "read" or "live" have multiple pronunciations, and speech synthesizers rely on the surrounding context to choose which one to use. This means you probably need to go by sentence.
Then you have the problem of what to do with code, tables, headings etc. While screen readers can announce roles as you navigate text, they cannot do so when announcing the contents of the live region, so if that's something you want, you'de need to build a micro screen-reader of sorts.
Attitude to Linux and open source was not really a problem for Ballmer IMO. Microsoft had vast revenues locked in to their software in PC and business servers. In the regulatory environment in which they were permitted to operate, it made a lot of sense to try to keep competitors out. A cohort of geeks hated Microsoft's attitude, but I'd be surprised if it did much to their bottom line. But Linux and OSS are just a tools, easily adopted when the winds change.
Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years.
I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.
> If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.
Hmm, it's not that I couldn't believe it was Obama, but this is like a 2nd-hand appeal to authority. I would be interested in a bit more data to see why this is.
> Why? Because policy was stable during Obama.
Now of course we can see there was a record period of near all-time high high oil prices from 2011 to 2014 which corresponds to US employment boom in the sector. Was that the Obama good times that oil and gas experts would refer to? That started to crash in 2015 though, and petroleum industry employment with it. Was that crash due to Obama policy or just global drop in oil prices behind taht?
Some might argue the high oil prices of 2011-2014 years are related to Obama's presidency, but it would probably be less about stable trade policy and more like references to the Arab Spring, peak of ISIS, capitulation to Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.
Now the 2015 oil crash is something I could talk a lot about. I'll try not to turn this into a wall of text.
In Obama's last term he faced a hostile Congress and wanted to pass some wind and solar rebates [2]. The deal he made with the Republican controlled Congress was to lift the ban on exporting crude oil in exchange for the renewable subsidies. This happened in 2015.
So why were crude oil exports banned? This happened about 40 years earlier during the OPEC oil crisis. As an aside, net crude oil exports stand at about ~3M barrels per day. Pretty much all production increases since have been for the export market. US domestic oil consumption has remained relatively stable, despite population increases.
In 2015, OPEC in general and Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market by ramping up production. You can see this here [3]. Saudi Arabia in particular increased production by ~1M bpd in a short period of time. A lot of people think this was to crush the fracking industry, which was heavily in debt. I personally don't buy this explanation because as soon as the price recovers, someone else will buy their assets out of bankruptcy and you're back when you started.
I think it was punishment for lifting the crude oil export ban.
A whole bunch of oil producers and services companies did file for bankruptcy [4] and this whole incident set the stage for what later happened in 2017-2018 and 2020 where Trump basically screwed the energy sector multiple times.
> Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.
Yes around 2012 it started to rise, but that was a long way into his first term. Although if you're just going by production, it has been and is far higher after Obama's presidency. So I'm not sure what we make of that. And as you say, the crash happened during his term too.
So I think any kind of careful stable energy policy is really over selling it, yes the industry did well under him for a period of several years, but that looks more like being "lucky" with disastrous Middle East and North Africa interventions and destabilization (not all initiated by Obama of course) coming to a head, along with the birds of "the 1980s called" attitude toward Russia coming home to roost, which drove up oil prices to sustained near record highs that did it. And it wasn't just the prices, but the general attitude from energy companies and consumers that oil production must be diversified away from OPEC and Russia.
Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,
> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all. Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.
* Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in.
* Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive
* Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out
This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them only an academic paper with dozens of pages of facts and figures would have had the effect that my above deck would have had.
Yeah, a slide like that would have been fine; fundamentally the slide is exactly like an academic paper in that some of the most interesting implications are just banal statements of the numbers in the data and qualifiers. In fact, the slide is much better than the academic paper... it doesn't contain much in the way of irrelevant data and qualifiers.
In practice Tufte and bloggers and commenters are retconning messages engineers not possessing foreknowledge of what was going to happen didn't wish to convey. The slide isn't supposed to say "no reentry" not because engineers don't know how to say no using PowerPoint, but because what the engineers are actually saying by selecting those points for consideration is "damage is theoretically possible but not in our simulations which test data suggests are actually on the conservative side; the test data is only at a very small scale though". If they'd dumbed it down, the slide would have said "it could go wrong but the limited data we've got suggests it won't"
I'm basically with you and let's be clear, I know nothing about the domain. But the word "limited" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. Maybe a diagram showing relative size of the biggest foam chunk they'd tested vs. the size of the actual one would have been useful.
Agree. Though to be honest I still think a paper with an executive summary that said "Don't go forward etc" would have probably been even better. Then the powerpoint slides can be illustrations of how far outside the testing data this is, simulations of possible damage, and other, you know, useful stuff.
The person I was replying to said they had no idea how it had anything to do with PowerPoint. The article quotes the report as identifying over-use of it as one of the problems that contributed to the communication break down.
I'm not making the argument and I'm not interested in engaging with this quibbling, I'm just explaining how the article said the expert who conducted the investigation found a problem with their use of PowerPoint. If you have a problem with that conclusion, then take it up with the investigation report, not me. I would be fascinated to see you provide a rebuttal of it.
The engineer in question was probably trained by the organization to leave decision-making to management. In organizations like that you refrain from statements that sound like decisions.
Saying “more testing must be done before deciding to re-enter” would be equally valid.
Would it be better if you sent them a PDF document instead? There seems to be an assumption here that if you send the stakeholders a larger volume of information they will take the time to read it. Is that a valid assumption?
Memos and reports also ask the author to try to explain things clearly and at length, a PowerPoint, even a technical one is usually figures and bullet points
Are you asking me what I (a layperson having no knowledge of the organizations or projects) think, or are you asking me to look up the recommendations in the report that found over use of PowerPoint to have contributed to the communication problems at NASA for you?
Feynman communicated the problem with the Challenger disaster using a rubber band and a glass of ice water.
I don't think PowerPoint is the problem in and of itself, but rather its use as a crutch to compensate for poor communication. Of course, even among scientists, few can count themselves at Feynman's level in terms of communication skills. Maybe this is a skill that NASA scientists need to brush up on, perhaps with Pluralsight courses or something? lol
And that's underselling it. Of the 550 tons of payload launched in Q1 this year, 478 of them were launched by SpaceX. More than 10x more than China's space agency. More than 5x the rest of the world's governments and corporations (including the US government and other US companies) combined.
Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically.
Reddit and HN are among the highest quality sources of training text and are probably weighted very heavily as "probably human" in the mainstream models.
Any source of text with huge amounts of automated and community moderation will be better quality than, say, Twitter.
That depends heavily on the subreddits you browse. There absolutely are places with high quality content, though it feels like they are getting sparser and sparser.
Not in that sense; high quality in the sense that there are a lot of actual, real people posting there, and those people tend to come from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds.
Perhaps on the smaller subreddits, but have a look at /r/all on any given day and it's obvious that real people, and diverse backgrounds, it is not. Every single subreddit that goes above a certain activity threshold collapses into the exact same state of astroturfed, mass-produced political slop targeted towards low IQ people.
Although I'm sure @stinkbeatle was joking, I should clarify that most LLMs are trained on books and online articles written by professional writers. That's why they tend to have a rich vocabulary and use things like hyphens.
I agree, HN is an amazing community with brilliant people and top quality content, but it's not enough to train an LLM.
Last thing. An LLM is just a tool, it can clean up your writing the same way a photo app can enhance your pictures. It took a while for people to accept that grandma's photos looked professional because they had filters. Same will happen with text. With ChatGPT, anyone can write like a journalist. We're just not used to grandma texting like one, yet :)
I haven't used these very seriously but a problem I had a while back was that that the wire format was not what the applications wanted to use, but a good application format was to space-inefficient for wire.
As far as I could see there was not a great way to do this. You could rewrite wire<->app converter in every app, or have a converter program and now you essentially have two wire formats and need to put this extra program and data movement into workflows, or write a library and maintain bindings for all your languages.
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