A specific version of the problem has been solved. But not the broader, harder version. The article explains that fairly clearly.
I’m very anti AI and OpenAI, and do think it’s a pretty interesting finding! Very likely not worth their spend, but interesting and novel nonetheless the less
Well, presumably AI lowers the bar for entry so more people (and very specifically people with revolutionary ideas, but without corresponding implementation skills) could get in on the action.
How many people with revolutionary ideas actually worth anything have genuinely failed to find someone to help them build it?
I think that if they're unable to sell their idea well enough to find a co-founder odds are the idea would die on the vine whether or not they're able to implement it.
https://chatgpt.com/ is a good starting point. Enable voice control and ask the robot to draw a pelican riding a bicycle. Much wow, very revolutionary. More to come.
That's an empirical question. And you also need to justify why your country in particular should finance that.
For the kind of research where benefits accrue to the inventor (or her employer) and others can be excluded so that the benefits don't 'spill over', then private companies can fund it.
For the kind of research that spills over, you can just let the tax payers of that other country foot the bill. Eg the US can free-ride on Chinese research, and if having mathematicians in the population is good, the US can offer green cards to whatever has a math degree from a good enough university.
There might be some intermediate research that has just enough spill over that a company won't do it, but a country might, should be a rare creature. And differently sized countries should have different sweet spots: some companies are bigger than some countries after all. But I don't think we see different countries select the research (mathematical or otherwise) with an eye towards exactly tailoring spill over.
I used to operate several dozen 10G/25G/40G/100G taps which fed a series of tools in the DC at a regional healthcare back in the day.
80% of the relevant outcome was typically to get a true-to-the-wire sniffer capture (switch mirrors won't always mirror 100% of packets for various reasons) for troubleshooting performance of whatever the complaint of the day from the server team was.
19% was for feeding a security monitoring systems which looked for abnormal flow patterns to let us know a server was compromised.
1% was for the call recording system compliance requirement for the emergency department.
0% was because I was a cool superspy tasked by the government to siphon info to them or trying to sell medical records on the black market or something. I mean, you can try to something nefarious with such tools... but one could say the same about a generic server, SAN, application, etc as well. People are just used to understanding what those would typically be used for so they don't assume it must be for the scary thing they've heard about.
That said, it doesn't rule it out either. But again, the concern shouldn't be sourcing from their usage of normal infrastructure tools it should be sourcing from... well, all of the user analytics Google very publicly does directly in the server.
It's super common and very useful for security systems to work like this. Instead of putting something in-line that might choke on a burst of traffic you put it off to the side and send it a firehose of packets it may or may not be able to handle. If it falls over, no problem.
Downdetector also doesn't have a motivation to lie.
I've yet to find a status page that wasn't lying about the actual status.
Also 97% up is bullshit for the 3% of people who are offline.
Saucelabs was doubly bad for this because I'm absolutely certain based on traces that they had some sort of demux bug where they would send events from their tunnel to the wrong job. I could see it in the logs that a test timeout was often the cause of an event firing that was looking for something that never happened, because the event immediately preceding it in the script was never fired. Which meant it was either dropped or went somewhere it shouldn't.
Then it stopped one day and there was nothing in their release notes about it. Lies compounded by further lies.
That's just the most memorable example I have. Stuff like this happens all the time and with many services it plays out the same. There's a perverse incentive not to be transparent about problems with the service, so the status pages play down the intensity of the situation.
Isnt downdetector just people reporting its down though? Its useful for sure but not actually hooking into any officialy API or anything. Great for when the status page also goes down but surely a lag time
Do they do alerts ? Been also using UpDog (based on DataDog) which actually has been quite good. They have a single status page for many services who integrate their products
I go to status pages to find out if 1) I’m crazy, 2) if our IT fucked up DNS.
Every service I’ve ever paid for or someone paid for on my behalf has gaslit me about their status page because it’s impolitic and bad for sales to update the page before you know what’s going on, just because some users are reporting issues.
So a third party doesn’t have to deal with VPs kneecapping the engineers’ access to the status page. Or some services can’t update the status page when the site is hard down because they are so obsessed with keeping it up that they have no mitigations when they are down.
I was the one at my biggest gig that had to push to get static 404 and 500 pages uploaded to S3 so we could show something for vanity URLs even if customer ID lookup was down. And then a customer noticed they hadn’t updated since they changed their contact info and I found the job was timing out without an alert or deployment failure for five months. Five. Months. The guy who wrote it had quit, and he didn’t follow my advice on copying a batch job I’d poured way too much effort into. The damned thing was timing out after 50 minutes. I followed my own advice and got it to 4.5 minutes. Almost all of that time delta was waiting for fanout calls, which were pounding the shit out of consumer facing services. 90% of the calls he was making didn’t need to be made.
Which I also think is overblown. The one thing that people can actually agree on is that dynamically setting sticker prices is bad, but nobody actually does this. There's less consensus on whether coupons (targeted or otherwise) are okay, even though they have the exact same effect (ie. $10 w/ $2 targeted coupon vs a Dynamic Price™ of $8).
Oh you're right. And if I enable "ask to keep changes when closing documents," it asks me if I want to "revert changes" when I quit, not "delete." That even survives a force-quit, so on-disk the file was autosaved, but it still remembers that the changes are in an uncommitted state.
Weird thing is with the setting disabled, quitting TextEdit with multiple new docs open asks if I want to "delete and quit," but Numbers only lets me "save and quit." Even if I press that, Numbers reopens those in a still-uncommitted state. So from all the CSVs I've opened in Numbers and messed with, I have literally 100 pending docs and can only get rid of them by clicking through every single one.
If they spent about 10 GWh solving the problem (was it solved?) then that is much much more than 500 lifetimes of a human brain working.
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