Academia, at its core, is just not a capitalistic pursuit. Any attempts to turn it into one will inevitably pervert it.
Readit Newsrcbdev commented on Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pseudolus
rcbdev commented on Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry cryonceaweek.com... · Posted by u/johnnymaroney
the fact that it doesn't open in russia makes me happy, to be honest
Yes, of course. Russians are, in fact, not people and do not deserve to view Western sites, media or actually any web service hosted by Western nations.
What kind of a take is this? If you strategically block an entire nation from viewing our sites and media, you're handing the state-run media there more power.
This is great but as usual, the specifics on 'how to execute' are highly culture-dependent. Some of the ways he proposes to talk to decision makers would cause them to be seen as unserious or disingenuous where I'm from.
For example, hitting senior people with 3-4 questions via Chat or, godforbid, sending them a Word Document with questions would not get you taken very seriously here.
Subtlety is key. Less is more.
Dead Comment
rcbdev commented on The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality english.elpais.com/cultur... · Posted by u/geox
Then from a purely rational and self-interested citizenry would hold any economic agents on the hook for future cleanups of land, water or air.
Thankfully, the citizenry is irrational and self-interested, which enables an entire cottage industry of sheisters, marketers and psychologists, which then engineer our attention spans and purchasing decisions.
rcbdev commented on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024) michaelbastos.com/blog/wh... · Posted by u/mbastos
As a self taught developer who has spent most of their career in the big corporate world surrounded by computer science graduates my experience is this:
The self taught developer will eventually figure it out, if they are intelligent enough to approach the given problem.
The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory. Of course this varies by personality, so this is probably only true for about 85% of the computer science graduates. They cannot proceed in the face of high uncertainty.
What that ultimately means is that the computer science graduate is way more compatible in the big corporate world where they are an interchangeable cog that can be replaced at any moment. They operate in a world on known patterns just like their peers. The self taught developer, however, is constantly innovating and doing things in somewhat original ways because they have learned to not waste their personal time on unnecessary repetition, and that cavalier lone gunman attitude scares the shit out of people. Yet, those self-taught people tend to deliver vastly superior results.
Most developers don’t seem to care about superior code. They care about retaining employment and lowering anxiety in the manner that emphasizes least disruption.
Sadly, I've made the different observation that (in my country, where university is free and academic degrees are worth their weight in gold) most developers who never went to university think of themselves as the lone gunman while lacking basics after 7+ years of experience.
Bonus points if most of their experience is in nebulous freelancing. One of them admitted once that they didn't earn anything in his 2 years of "freelancing" on his CV.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Good engineers are exceedingly hard to find in my country, much more so than in California.
rcbdev commented on The upcoming GPT-3 moment for RL mechanize.work/blog/the-u... · Posted by u/jxmorris12
A few things that this made me think about:
1) If only there was a cryptocurrency tied to training AI models and make crypto grinding useful than maths that solve no real-world problem external to the token creation itself.
2) Larger and larger AI models, you start to get more hallucinations, maybe we should focus on dedicated highly tuned models for dedicated aspects and have a higher up conductor model that knows what to farm out to which models and from there combine and send out further requests to other models etc to come to a result. Certainly, the need for highly tuned niche models, after all, language recognition as an example, a model that could identify the language, local dialect and accent, that would then use a language model tuned better for that speaker it is recognising. That approach feels like the way over one large model that does it all itself.
I remember mining something called Gridcoin over a decade ago. It's a cryptocurrency tied to the BOINC project and rewards providing computing power to science.
I have sadly lost access to my wallet since.
rcbdev commented on U.S. will review social media for foreign student visa applications npr.org/2025/06/19/g-s1-7... · Posted by u/BeetleB
I spent considerable time in the U.S. on a J visa, so did my partner.
We both agree that we would have not chosen to visit under the current visa regime, and I assume many others agree with our sentiment.
Are you trying to downplay the compute required to train and run inference on these large language models by stringing together some contrived comparison to the now 'uncool' Blockchain technology? That would be absurd.