Alternatively, things that are not insightful can feel insightful to some people, because they triggered some different, tangentially related thoughts than what was being communicated — i.e., the reader substituted their own insight for the author's.
Or because the author has enough authority that they are granted a presumption of insightfulness by default, even (or perhaps especially) when the concrete insight that's allegedly being communicated remains unclear.
It really is important to understand the failure modes that the durability model accounts for and what it doesn't. It only accounts for "normal" failures, like an HDD reaching end of life.
For example, you mention Backblaze. Backblaze has public posts about their durability model. They claim to use 17:20 Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. That means there are 20 shards of a blob, and you can lose 3 of them and still reconstruct the blob.
Think about that for a second. If they store 4 shards in a datacenter, that means that a loss of that one datacenter is sufficient to lose the blob, forever. That entails that blobs are sharded across a minimum of 7 data centers, or the loss of one data center might mean permanent data loss. Which one do you think is true? (In fact it's pretty clear from Backblaze's public posts that they don't shard across data centers at all, only across racks within a data center.)
Now, AWS's availability guarantee — not their durability guarantee — entails that they use a less cost-effective erasure coding ratio. S3 is designed so that your blob is available even if a whole AZ goes down, and it's well known that most AWS regions have only 3 AZs. Therefore, if you tolerate the same number of shards lost to HDD failure as Backblaze in your durability model (3), then you might need 17:30 erasure coding to get the same durability and the required availability. That means S3 is storing way more physical bytes than Backblaze — 1.76x the logical size of the blob, instead of Backblaze's 1.18x. That's more expensive, but it also gives you better availability.
Which is also why One Zone S3 is cheaper — if you don't care about the availability guarantee, S3 can do what Backblaze does and save 33% on physical bytes, and they pass on 40–50% of those savings to the customer (this is fairer than it sounds — there's more overhead than physical storage bytes).
But here's the thing. AWS has more redundancy built in than Backblaze because they make availability guarantees in addition to durability guarantees. BUT the durability model is the same, which is why Backblaze can claim equivalent durability to S3. S3 in fact has better durability — they can survive the permanent loss of an AZ without necessarily losing blobs stored there (with the exception of One Zone blobs), and Backblaze cannot. But that's not actually a factor of the durability model, which is just taking into account normal events like HDD failure. Instead, S3 has durability that's more resilient to AZ loss because of their availability model. It's a side effect that isn't actually part of the durability promise!
As far as I'm aware Backblaze stores data only within a single datacenter (for a given region). This likely made sense in their original business model of being "offsite" copy of data.
But it very much breaks down for B2 where they're now storing original data. I hope they rethink this model. You do get what you pay for. There's a reason they're cheap.
Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).
"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).
This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.
> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.
How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?
Banner blindness has been studied since a few years after ad banners were invented and advertisers started getting pissy they didn't magically triple their revenue, heh
The implicit assumption is that these AI-company jobs were recently created and indicate the start of a trend.
Chalmers is stating that there's more demand for philosophers with the right sort of training to work at AI companies (whatever that is) than there are philosophers with that training. (I don't really believe this, but that's what he says.)
He's making this claim for two reasons: (1) to respond to the argument (not directly stated in the article, but quite commonly understood to be sound in the profession field) that it's unwise to get a PhD in philosophy because there are not enough jobs and (2) to suggest that if you do want to get a PhD in philosophy and use it professionally, you'd be wise to study with Chalmers at NYU in order to get placed into these tech-industry jobs.
I came up an academic philosopher, before I switched careers. When you're surrounded by academic philosophers, you become very used to argument as a default form of interaction. People expect that they'll be asked to give reasons for their assertions, and that those reasons will be scrutinized and challenged.
And it's great! You can learn a ton from having these arguments with smart, engaged interlocutors. It's not that ego doesn't come into it at all. Often, the "loser" of the argument -- and there isn't always one! -- won't admit they're wrong, and at some point will just bow out and live to fight another day. But the point is that everyone agrees they need reasons for their beliefs, and rebuttals to strong objections, and if they lack those they need to go find them. So the arguments serve to help you find those gaps. People argue because they want to be right, but being right is hard. So you work at it. You aren't just trying to assert dominance, you're trying to prove -- to yourself, first and foremost -- that you have the right beliefs! And if you can't, you might even change your mind.
Leaving that world was eye-opening, because I still expected people to feel a powerful need to justify their beliefs. But most people don't, and they take the mere act of asking for justification to be a personal attack. This cost me relationships with people until I really learned the lesson.
There are so many reasons for this. Most people have a real job and want to meet friends in the evening, not challengers. Debating someone with your rules in mind that the others didn't learn also feels like slapping someone who's unarmed. It's even less fun on the receiving end. In jobs, there's now something riding on arguments; In academia you just debate the death sentence or the draft and call it a day. At work if you accept this kid of argument and lose, are you expected to spend the next months implementing someone's else's idea you don't like? In any case, most arguments are futile, since the position you're arguing for is kind of arbitrary and pulling arguments out of a hat doesn't really improve them.
Given how often it's been mentioned here, it's likely that this is an urban legend that people are pretending to have first-hand knowledge of for karma. In a trade that's supposed to be led by people trained in sciences, no less!
(A more charitable interpretation would be that aforementioned CTO was making a joke that didn't land.)
or its so old, people would make the joke and interns would repeat it unwittingly. no one has to consciously be lying for this type of meme to continue spreading.
Funny, I'm just doing my normal coding workflow with Claude Code, and after every change that compiles it keeps suggesting that we're at a good stopping point, and should pick up again tomorrow.
It's done this before, but usually doesn't. I bet they're giving it some kind of throttling signal due to high load from today's announcement.
it found nothing so this is not very ecnomical and i guues they dont want subs to use it we are likely just training fodder canno n for their real enterprise customers using the api
Hate to be the one to drag AI into every conversation, but I recently switched to arch linux and it's been delightful -- largely because of Claude. I have leaned on Claude heavily to diagnose and resolve issues that I probably could have theoretically solved on my own, but which also probably would have made me switch back if I didn't have help to resolve them quickly.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
I think Arch is a great general purpose distribution because it doesn't try to hide anything from the user - all the details are right out in the open. That and excellent community documentation.
I'm a lifelong Arch user (btw) but I would also call out Manjaro as a less full-contact way of using Arch. It's got a slow and stable release cycle, it's fairly reliable because it stays behind the bleeding edge like Debian does.
But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.
Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience
Or because the author has enough authority that they are granted a presumption of insightfulness by default, even (or perhaps especially) when the concrete insight that's allegedly being communicated remains unclear.
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