As a point of interest, the English do have a sort of stiff upper lip thing going on since forever. It's normal in English upper class families to send kids to boarding school. This was partly enabled by empire, but seems to have persisted. I have English friends who think nothing of living on another continent to their children.
On the mental bearings of extreme travelers, I used to do some long distance (multi-week) cycle touring and offered accommodation to others through platforms for this purpose while living in China. They say you have to be half-mad to get in to cycle touring in the first place. Some of these people were very much in a weird mental place. After a bad experience with a German woman I stopped participating in these systems. Some of them would turn up broke with no shoes really in need of help. A subset of the people who finish go on to become motivational speakers. Most of them probably wind up happy, but grizzled and impoverished with more physical than mental health.
If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n
Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
Until they are replaced with dust, pollution, hair, animals, leaf litter, aggressive plants, seismic events, pollen, skin particles, birdshit, fallen logs, slime mold, etc.
While documenting a build path is nice, IMHO renting hardware nobody can afford from VC-backed cloud providers using cold hard cash to produce clones of legacy tech using toy datasets under the guise of education is propping up the AI bubble and primarily helping institutional shareholders in those AI bubble companies, particularly their hardware supplier NVidia. Personally I do not see this as helping people or humanity.
This would sit better with me if the repo included a first tier use case for local execution, non-NVidia hardware reference, etc.
"This would sit better with me if the repo included a first tier use case for local execution, non-NVidia hardware reference, etc."
This is a pretty disheartening way to respond to something like this. Someone puts a great deal of effort into giving something interesting away for free, and is told "you should have also done THIS work for free as well in order for me to value your contribution".
It is an objective and transparent response based on free software world norms. Feel free to interpret differently and to be disheartened. Hell, many of us are disheartened by the AI VC political theater we are seeing right now: experienced programmers, artists, lawyers, perhaps much of humanity. Let's stick to objective elements of the discussion, not emotional opine.
It is amusing to note the dichotomy between the clearly compassionate, empathetic and altruistic perspective displayed here and the comically overstated framing of helping humanity.
I think you got your proportions slightly wrong there. This will be contributing as much to an AI bubble as a kid tinkering around with combustion is contribution to global warming.
Not really. Anything that guy does sets the tone for an extended cacophony of fans and followers. It would be a sad day when nobody critically assesses the motivations, effects and framing of those moves. I question the claim this move helps humanity and stand by the assessment it's just more feeding an unfree ecosystem which equates to propping up the bubble.
Interesting. In season, we often have Channel-billed Cuckoos[0] fly past here in Sydney. The other birds chase them out. First you hear a cacophony of bleating, and then you look up and see a chain of 5-10 angry birds of multiple species chasing the cuckoos away. Next time I see that I'll think of this paper. I think if you had just asked an aboriginal person, or anyone that actually has an awareness of nature, this was common knowledge. It never occurred to me to articulate it as an evolutionary trans-species vocalization with reference to linguistic development, though. I guess now we can prove that inter-species coordination through vocalization has evolved separately to that of primates, which intellectually should help to keep us humble. That said, monosyllabic bleating is hardly Chekhov.
Theoretically, yes. However, in practice, no. One of the great wins of packetization is that your infrastructure becomes generic in the sense that it is application-independent, allowing all subsequent improvements in eg. compression protocols to be applied retroactively. Therefore, if you would apply for example a variable bit rate, modern CODEC to the voice streams it's likely you would fit substantially more than a naïve set of voice channels on the raw PRI. The main costs are not in overhead, but enhanced session setup and round-trip latency and increased processing overheads at the edges. However, modern electronics offer embedded solutions making this ~free and a few ms are tolerable. IIRC voice is fine at <200ms latency, more or less, though less is obviously better.
The philosophical battle was centralist vs decentralised, for-purpose vs generic infrastructure, single-mode vs. multi-mode network applications, circuit-switched guaranteed QoS vs. best-effort packets, waterfall vs. iterative development and investment. Packets won for general purpose networking, because the nature of physics and bureaucracy meant the cost and time savings for operators and users were substantial.
Using a different codec can improve call-carrying capacity of any compatible link, for sure. But that's wiggling a different variable: Packetization-vs-not is a whole different game than g.711u vs g.723 is.
And I agree, completely: There's very good reasons for packet-switched networks having won over TDM technologies like PRI, with IP to tie it altogether. What we've arrived at is beautifully generic in that the packets themselves don't care at all about what combination of lower layers were used to get them from A to B. However it gets there, it's just IP. That's really neat.
Latency-wise, I'm a little torn: With the latency involved in a normal phone call on my normal cell phone today, I find that I "talk over" people on phone calls more than I did decades ago in the TDM days. The pacing is very different than it was.
Sometimes, when the echo cancellation fails at some level, I can hear myself echo from the far end of a call.
That echo is annoying, but I mention it because it is something that lets me hear the latency of the call. It's often on the order of 500ms RTT...which is quite a lot. We never had latency like that in the TDM days for domestic calls.
(Historically, in TDM world: The voice data always arrived at the right time and there was also always a place to put it at the right time. It was real-time instead of best-effort, so there just wasn't any utility to having any large buffers along the way: The timing was either resolutely correct or it didn't work at all. Things are a lot mushier today.)
Hi Erik. Frankly, I wonder if this is an elaborate joke since there are some serious concerns in terms of CVP ("wait two seconds and retry"), in terms of gatekeeping potential nobody will sleepwalk in to ("we solve two the second wait with our CoinbaseCoin, get an enterprise subscription!"), or in terms of the inherent lack of openness in HTTP these days (client/server, HTTPS identity chains, DNS, gatekeepers like CloudFlare). For thoughts on a more open protocol without these drawbacks see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... Sincerely, architect of a predecessor exchange (founder asked me not to continue work on open protocols).
As a point of interest, the English do have a sort of stiff upper lip thing going on since forever. It's normal in English upper class families to send kids to boarding school. This was partly enabled by empire, but seems to have persisted. I have English friends who think nothing of living on another continent to their children.
On the mental bearings of extreme travelers, I used to do some long distance (multi-week) cycle touring and offered accommodation to others through platforms for this purpose while living in China. They say you have to be half-mad to get in to cycle touring in the first place. Some of these people were very much in a weird mental place. After a bad experience with a German woman I stopped participating in these systems. Some of them would turn up broke with no shoes really in need of help. A subset of the people who finish go on to become motivational speakers. Most of them probably wind up happy, but grizzled and impoverished with more physical than mental health.
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