Agree that AI is a force multiplier in small-cap and a better search at best in large-cap due to internal bureaucracy.
The bigger question (that remains to be seen and played out) is whether AI will be a forcing function towards small-cap. If smaller companies can build the same products as larger companies with fewer people then they can compete on price and win, hollowing out the revenue base of large-cap companies and leading to their downfall due to the dwindling workforce not having the culture to adapt. Of course reality is more complicated (moats, larger companies making too-good-to-be-true offers to acquire smaller competitors to prevent the emergence of genuine competition, boys-club who-you-know-not-what-you-know corruption via lawfare ...) so, yeah, remains to be seen.
> 120Hz refresh rate would be nice to have, but there is no display I’m aware of that meets the macOS pixel density requirement while also providing faster refresh rates.
Is this still true, meaning, is the new Studio Display XDR the only option that is also Retina/HiDPI and also 120Hz? I've seen a lot of commentary dumping on the price, but if they're really the only option then they can charge whatever Apple Tax they want.
Several 5K 27" 120hz+ monitors were announced at CES earlier this year, likely all using the same panel as the new Studio Display. Apparently MSI is shooting for about $900.
This is Netflix, they have thousands of engineers. So you have two approaches to solve the problem: either write enforced policy-as-code to prevent people from deploying images with too-high layer count (and pray they never need to rollback to an image from before the policy was written), thus incurring political alignment costs around the new policy and forcing non-compliant teams to adapt (which is time not spent on features); or, solve the problem entirely at the infrastructure level.
It's hardly surprising that companies consider infrastructure-level solutions to be better.
Hypothetically, the amount of money that could be negotiated away is something like the sum of net incomes of US pharma/med device/insurance/healthcare, which is something like $100 billion annually. which sounds like a lot but it's only about 2% of annual $5+ trillion spend. You can't negotiate prices to be lower than the associated costs, the companies will just close up shop instead of being forced to take a loss.
At the end of the day, the fundamental drivers of high healthcare costs are (a) high labor costs of high-skilled doctors, pharmaceutical researchers, etc. (b) high cost of procuring land and construction of new hospitals in major metro areas. The first requires you to fix education first so that doctors etc. do not need to take out and later pay back what can now easily exceed $500k in combined tuition and living expenses. The second is politically unpalatable.
> Is it this MBA idea that management itself is a profession
I don't think that you can take somebody with a finance background, take them straight out of their MBA, and drop them in an EM position. That's a bad fit. Good EMs need to come from software engineering backgrounds, mostly for the reasons you cite.
But management truly is a different profession with a different set of skills and a different set of challenges.
Even on the IC track, there's languages and frameworks that I touched early in my career (e.g. Java/Spring) and haven't touched in, I don't know, a decade, and I have not been keeping up with whatever is most recent best practice there. If I were to go into an IC role for one of those frameworks, I might as well be going into an IC role for a language I haven't learned before, ever. I expect someone who has been working with that language on a daily basis to really, really know it - having the standard library practically memorized, knowing common pitfalls, doing a lot of stuff from muscle memory, someone who you give them a PR that "looks OK" and they start reading and immediately can say "well that's just not even remotely idiomatic".
EMs are almost guaranteed to lose that touch because their day job is talking to people, not writing code. That's not to say that they couldn't go back to the IC track and start to sharpen those skills again, but EMs with FOMO who try to stay in the code are spending that time not talking to people. The lack of focus makes them bad EMs.
No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence.
Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”
I know little about theology and philosophy but I’ve interviewed enough people with master’s degrees to be able to say that there a very large differences between skilled degree holders and average degree holders, at least in my field.
The selection process for Seminary and becoming Ordained is much more rigorous and difficult than a credentialing exercise that you pay for. I share your cynicism about masters programs, but I don't think it's applicable here. Funnily enough, my favorite professor in college was one of my math professors who was also a Catholic Priest and would say Mass on the weekends at the nearby chapel. Extremely hostile to using technology to teach us, except in very narrow circumstances, and I am all the better for it and so is everyone who had him. We have a much firmer grasp of the theory because he made us write it down (a lot). There are few things more rewarding in life than feeling that "click" in your brain that unlocks a new permanent level of understanding.
The crux of all religions. The only comparatevely harmless religions are the ones who don't claim that gods demand absolute obedience, but their orders are spoken through a chosen few; otherwise they're just a form of primitive government.
There is a difference however, of faith based on evidence vs. faith based in no evidence. Without getting into too much details here since it is not the avenue, Islamic faith is strictly based on evidence.
Naturalistic religions, so called "paganism", also worshipped living beings or natural phenomena like a particularly big tree, a mountain, a forest, the Sun, etc. Some of these didn't demand obedience nor spoke through a ruling elite. Bonus points for worshipping things that could be verified as real.
No, "faith" is actually an integral component of "the Christian faith".
Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.
> You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.
>> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.
So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the other. Hence, my question whether this was some kind of a bad attempt at humor or whether something was meant by it.
(FWIW, authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please. This is blind faith which is irrational. This is why we can speak of preambula fidei. There must be reasons for faith. When a friend tells you something about his inner life that you cannot know directly, you may believe him given an ensemble of evidence and reasons that cannot prove his claim definitively, but are nonetheless very supportive of it. Furthermore, the claim makes sense of what you do know about him.)
But part of the faith is faith that God can communicate through imperfect mortal vessels.
> Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”
> The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Like, that's the whole deal about all of the prophets, popes, priesthood in general. They are all mortal and imperfect, but God still speaks through them.
> authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please
But he's not talking about an arbitrary faith. He's talking about faith in the capacity of priests -- clearly a relevant subject. And there are, indeed, _preambula fidei_ here: that the priest was taught in seminary, that the priest was approved by the Church, that the priest (through the bishop who ordained them) participates in a line of apostolic succession going back to Jesus, etc.
What you've written is simply an intellectual jumble. What does faith (the theological virtue) and acceptance of the apostolic succession have to do with "faith" in the capacity of priests, here, as competent homilists?
99% of the jokes I've made throughout my life don't land. For better or worse, if I find something amusing I impulsively share it.
In this case, I thought it should be obvious that OP must have faith in priests, given that they're Catholic, which requires faith as a prereq.
If you read my comment as a slight against Catholicism, I can understand, but I wouldn't feel comfortable publicly joking about any religion other than my own. If that's the case, you're in good company, with the multitude of nuns who've admonished me for similar offhand comments spanning 20 years of Catholic education from pre-k to college, this is old hat for me.
God willing, I'll mature or start telling better jokes some day.
Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.
Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!
all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.
Honestly she should have changed parishes. St Rita’s is in an affluent part of Dallas. One of the priests is a former Anglican(?) with wife and children who obtained a special dispensation.
I heard a lot of bad phone it in homilies too. Today one of my favorite priests is from Benin. He serves the Francophone community but also celebrates mass in English and Spanish. He is at Mary Immaculate in Farmers Branch. He is more traditional and gives the Catholic interpretation of the day’s readings and how it applies today.
American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.
For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.
(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)
The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.
(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)
Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).
The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.
> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
There's a subtle irony of this rule, which is that in order to stay in compliance with this law a savvy Priest tends to weave more sophisticated moral teachings into their Homilies that make it very obvious what or who they are advocating for or against without explicitly naming them.
Unfortunately, those laws are not currently enforced.
I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons.
The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the historical record is overflowing with examples. I'd argue that a religious body endorsing a state is every bit as potentially destructive. The government is at its best when it is neutral on the subject of faith and crafts policy in evidence-based ways that people of all (or at least most) faiths can agree upon. In this situation, there is no reason for a religious organization to promote such a government because their interests are orthogonal. They can cooperate, but there is a clear line between that and acting subservient, or declaring some sort of 'divine mandate' has been bequeathed upon a government institution or official.
The modern period where we take great pains to excise religion from the public sphere is not the historical norm. The norm is that many - if not most - political, and indeed geopolitical, events throughout history had religion woven into them. It is not difficult to find examples of this throughout European history and pre-history. I know you are making a statement on what you feel "ought to be", but I assure you this "ought" is not the usual course of business in world history. A solid quarter of people today live under regimes where politics and religion are deliberately intertwined, a historical aberration.
American religions are more like American Indian tribal nations. They have independent jurisdiction and their income is not subject to taxation. Whether or not they engage in politics is completely their prerogative and has no bearing on their tax exempt status. It’s like saying the Navajo nation can’t engage in politics or else they would lose their tax exemption.
Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.
When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.
That's fine. It's different when it's telling people how to vote.
Some people buy lottery tickets specifically because of who they benefit, which is very different than going to Vegas or certain forms of investment. (IE, uneducated investment is often just gambling.)
I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.
That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff.
When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill")
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
Catholicism is different in every country, I would imagine that a church in a secular place such as France would contain itself a bit, because there's no societal expectation that anyone should follow its religion, and therefore the priests have to put in effort into making people stay.
In Poland, where I grew up, the Church still holds a lot of power and prestige, and priests consider themselves to have authority over people's lives. Leaving the church is seen as more of a childish rebellion, and I would often hear mocking remarks about non-believers in homilies.
It also varies inside countries. Some priests are simply more demure than others. The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain, but many low level employees that still talk to commoners do realize that these views are going to put off more people than they attract in developed countries. So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy radicalists and a silent majority that wants absolutely nothing to do with them.
Have you seen the current pope? He's a big step back from the last one. And the reason for this is the cardinals who wanted back, because they were never fully on board anyway. Then again what would you expect from a group where average age is significantly older than even US congress.
The current pope is a little more traditional, but it’s hard not to be more traditional than Francis. However, the cardinals as a whole are more or less on board with the previous pope’s agenda, American bishops a little less so, and many American priests much less so. Outside of America, you may be right (the brewing rebellion in Germany being an extreme counter example).
I would say that the burden of proof is yours first.
But since you asked...
> The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain
Where are these "radical conservative" bishops? They're anything but "radical". If anything, they tend toward a soft middle that is very slow to act. Indeed, that's one of the gripes "radtrad" types tend to have. They would prefer more bishops were made in their own image.
Instead, we see bishops aggressively curtailing more traditional expressions of the faith, while permitting plenty of liturgical abuse of, shall we say, a decidedly "untraditional" stripe.
> So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy radicalists and a silent majority that wants absolutely nothing to do with them.
You can't be serious. If anything characterizes the post-Vatican II Church, it has been the greater influence of "progressive" and "modernist" elements, some of them quite radical. Only in relatively recent times are we seeing a growing, younger crop returning to traditional forms. You can expect that the Church will look more traditional within a generation or two.
Your claim reminds me of those who clamored to make the Church more "relevant". They claimed that if the Church didn't do so, it would lose the youth and imperil the future of the Church.
Instead, what we saw was the reverse. As the Church became more "relevant" - which is to say, more concerned with the temporal and the temporary, conforming to the times instead of shaping men and the times - it became less appealing to the youth. It should be obvious in retrospect. What people desire from the Church is the eternal and the transcendent, not more of the same that you can get elsewhere and in bulk.
So, all that "relevance" produces is a large exit of the youth from the Church. Attend a "progressive" parish and you'll see plenty of empty pews with a few aging boomers. Go to a more traditional parish, and you see the pews brimming with families. These are not isolated cases. These are broad trends.
If you do see a swing toward the traditional, it is not because "crazy radicalist conservative" bishops are concentrating those elements, but because of a process of natural selection. "Relevance", it turns out, is dysgenic. And as the traditional element increases and becomes more visible, so does the visibility of its substance, which is what attracts converts and reverts.
So.. you basically agree, you just don't like the wording because you somehow felt personally attacked? Given your reasoning I suspect you work(ed) for the church in some capacity or are at least deeply involved. But it'll be quite obvious to anyone reading this that it is not exactly an objective opinion.
This is just a sad comment. Please stick to the merit and substance instead of reaching for bizarre speculation about my motives. And no, I do not work or have ever worked for the Church. I am an observer with an above average knowledge of what is occurring in the Church. The idea that I am necessarily less objective for that reason, and less than an ignorant outsider, is ridiculous and fallacious.
And for your information, my motive is correctness. I get annoyed by confidently expressed, ignorant claims posing as knowledge, especially when it is unfair to the accused party.
> So.. you basically agree, you just don't like the wording
No. I disagree with your reasoning, which I took the time to explain in detail and which you seem to have completely ignored.
The last time I attended a mass (Spain) it was about some people in the village that were not helping the church enough (with an activity they had to do but also I think there was some money involved) but it was a bit cryptic, so only the ones that were directed the message to could fully understand it.
Catholics have more then just one book. They have whole libraries of theology and tradition way larger then just a bible. And large lists of saints to refer to.
Evangelical would be closer to one book thing, altrought it would still ve a stretch.
I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.
I can assure you that their experience wasn't in any way exceptional. It may be different in the US as Catholicism is in the minority in there (~20%), while GP's experience is from a place absolutely dominated by it (>90%).
European Protestantism and American Protestantism differ in substantial ways. Crudely, European Protestantism went the way of Hegelian dialectics and evolving beyond the Christianity of the Bible. American (conservative) Protestantism largely reacted against that. I think both groups are largely held together by politics today though their politics differ in the expected ways.
Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.
Homilies are not the core of Catholic mass, the Eucharist is. Protestant churches put more emphasis on the sermon, not sure if it’s all Protestant churches or just “Evangelical” ones
> doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence
I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.
> Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.
That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.
Catholic priests are forbidden from revealing anything they learn in confession under ANY circumstances. If someone comes in and confesses to a crime or that they are planning a crime, the priest can advise them to go to the police, they can counsel them that they may be in danger of hellfire if they do not, but they absolutely cannot tell anyone. The Catholic Church takes this very seriously. It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.
The Catholic Church is made up of people and people do all kinds of things and make all kinds of choices in life. As others have pointed out, it's very possible to talk about the struggles of your community without calling out Bob in the third row.
When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.
By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.
Sermon manuals were popular among Catholic priests from the time the printing press started to spread in Europe, and remained so into the middle of the 20th Century.
A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday.
The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.
You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details.
I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.
If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.
I agree with the Pope’s point. Priests should not hand pastoral judgment to a model. BibleGuided has church management tools plus optional AI help for drafting and organizing, with the priest making the final call.
For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends.
We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.
The pope, ostensibly the person you believe to be the representative of god on earth, has said that your product is garbage and here you are rationalizing it.
Very few priests take vows of silence. The standard vows are chastity, obedience and poverty. Even highly contemplative orders like Trappists don’t make a vow of silence - they practice something called monastic silence but it’s not a vow.
The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.
Confession was originally often made in public. Confessional secrecy is more about making it easier for people to freely confess their sins, free of the fear of retribution or shame, very much like why we have doctor-patient confidentiality enshrined in law today. I would imagine confessional secrecy arose very quickly, even if the norm wasn't private confession.
The first reference I could find for confessional secrecy was from a 4th century book written by the 3rd/4th century Persian bishop, Aphraates. In Demonstration VII, On Penance, he councils priests to keep a penitent's confessions secret, "lest he be exposed by his enemies and those who know him. .... If they reveal them to anyone, the whole army will suffer an adverse reputation."
Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mo... That's a Syriac to Latin translation. I used Google Translate for Latin to English. There's at least one partial English translation of that book online, but I found their translation more confusing.
Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context".
There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.
Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.
At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.
At some point, at least if businesses want to have AI “Agents” act as employees, then it needs to cease being stateless.
There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time.
With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought.
There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.
Let me be more clear then. Not only will there be many priests sharing private information about their local congregation, there will also be priests who continue to directly abuse people in their communities. Sharing private information is extremely mild in comparison.
How is it off topic? The entire basis of solatic's comment is the assumption that priests would not break the rules. A track record of breaking the rules is reason to not make that assumption.
Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
>>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
OpenAI is dependent on same hyperscalers (most specifically Microsoft/Azure) as everyone else, and even have access to preferential pricing due to their partnership.
A better explanation is to point out that ChatGPT is still far and away the most popular AI product on the planet right now. When ChatGPT has so many more users, multi-tenant economic effects are stronger, taking advantage of a larger number of GPUs. Think of S3: requests for a million files may load them from literally a million drives due to the sheer size of S3, and even a huge spike from a single customer fades into relatively stable overall load due to the sheer number of tenants. OpenAI likely has similar hardware efficiencies at play and thus can afford to be more generous with spikes from individual customers using OpenCode etc.
I would guess the biggest AI product on the planet is Google's Search AI. Although even that might not be the case, unless your definition of AI is just "LLMs" and not any sort of ML that requires a GPU.
Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen, but smaller passenger vehicles will stay on batteries. The nature of hydrogen containment favors larger capacity, on account of better volume to surface area ratios.
Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.
And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.
Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.
Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Imagine the cost of installing massive diesel depots at half the wide spots on every highway. And yet, there they are. And we already have car chargers every few dozen miles on the highways. A larger number of smaller chargers adding up to likely a larger wattage than what the trucks need.
> Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
Do those spots have lighting? If so, a significant portion of the work has already been done. Even if the electrical wiring must be supplemented or replaced, just having already the subinfrastructure to snake high voltage wiring up there is the major hurdle.
>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...]
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
Electrifying all transport in the nation would increase electricity load by 20%.
But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.
That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.
Life expectancy. A hydrogen tank can be refilled forever. A battery is normally limited to a few thousand cycles. A truck, or airplane, is expected to be fueled/recharged daily for decades. A car is designed to survive the length of a standard lease. Those running fleets of trucks/aircraft will always care more than car owners about long-term ownership costs.
Yeah, Li-ion batteries already have comparable life cycles to hydrogen tanks 1-2k fills/recharges, _but_ batteries are improving rapidly and tanks are already a mature technology.
This isn't necessarily true. Most cylinders storing compressed gasses need to be hydrostatically tested in regular intervals to ensure continued safety and will need replacement when they fail. Other kinds of composite cylinders have fixed ages where they should be replaced.
Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means extra expense. A tank that needs inspection every decade is a known problem. A battery that looses 1% to 5% capacity every year, depending on weather/use factors, is harder math.
I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.
> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.
Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.
Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.
So tires with 2/32nds will have better grip in the rain than warmed up fresh ones? They just get better until they pop? That must be the reason why race cars only use heavily worn tires instead of fresh ones when they race. Engine lubricant is better at 5,000mi than 1mi?
You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.
And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.
Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.
Mold release needs to be rubbed off. And the bead needs a few weeks to harden. That's why the tire people tell you to go easy on new tires. As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades and you will learn which parts are more reliable once proven than when brand new, which need time before being pushed to limits.
> As for other stuff, work on cars for few decades
That's the experience I'm drawing from when I point out that "virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it" isn't based in reality. Everything is constantly wearing out. Anything rubbing on another thing, any fluid being pushed through a hole, anything that might be reacting with another thing, its all slowly getting more and more out of spec. And when it gets more and more out of spec, its performance gets worse. You might not immediately notice it, that performance might not be in the go go kind of performance, but it isn't working as well as it used to.
Are you really going to tell me a car with a couple hundred thousand miles on it running all original parts (assuming they didn't literally break apart yet) is likely to be anywhere near the same performance as when the car had 200 miles on it? Its not. Its almost like there's a reason why mileage is considered when people price cars. The suspension isn't going to keep the wheels as well planted, the cylinders likely don't have the same compression, those fuel injectors are likely tired and aren't spraying optimally, that coolant pump is worn down and barely able to pump coolant anymore, your timings are likely not optimal anymore due to slack in the timing chain or belt, your spark plugs aren't making as full or reliable of spark, etc.
If your response is "well you would have replaced those by now"...well, why would you have to do that? Because they...had their performance reduce over the life of the part?
And even then, a part of that break-in period of those parts is the part's performance actively changing over the life of the part with pieces of the part literally degrading, just pretty quickly and positively for performance as opposed to negatively. That positive slope of performance change is a pretty early hump though, otherwise as I mentioned you'd be taking me up for ensuring all your tires are near-bald (but not quite, they haven't actually failed yet!) all the time and you'd be dumpster diving for the good stuff out behind your auto parts store.
Perhaps, but the larger question is whether the price of hydrogen itself can be sufficiently reduced. $36/kg is not justifiable for distance trucking or planes. If the price of hydrogen dropped sufficiently, then there's more demand to build hydrogen infrastructure, which increases demand for hydrogen in smaller vehicles, etc. in a positive feedback loop.
That theory didn't play out, mostly because the price of electrics kept dropping year after year, undercutting any appeal in early investment in hydrogen.
I worked in one of the top 5 logistics companies in the world and I can recall them investing in electric trucks and charging infrastructure. Idea was to have strategically placed overhead lines that could recharge trucks without need for them to stop. Can't recall any mentions of hydrogen.
I have seen at least one stretch of highway in Germany that has overhead power lines for trucks. I think it's a very interesting concept: the big downside of batteries is slow charging (compared to diesel) and limited range. Charging while driving on highways would largely solve these downsides.
I sympathize with the author, and in principle I find myself nodding along with his prescriptions, but one of the benefits of Dependabot (and Renovate) are that they are language-agnostic. Depending on how many repositories, and how many languages, and upon whom the maintenance burden falls, there's a lot of value to be had. It may not really be feasible to add "the correct" CI workflows to every repository, and the alternative (nothing) inevitably ends up in repositories where dependencies have not been updated in years.
It's good optimization advice, if you have the time, or suffer enough from the described pain points, to apply it.
A lot of people are often surprised at how non-frugal their lifestyles are. I'm not suggesting that people living on $50k/year aren't already frugal, but yeah, there's definitely people who take out car loans, take out mortgages for the full amount they were approved for, and all sorts of random things like buying chicken parts instead of whole chickens, buying small grocery store containers instead of bulk pricing for shelf-stable items, keeping your speed down to save gas, etc.
You really just need to build an innate understanding that the hedonic treadmill doesn't make you happier long-term and develop a resolution to get your expenses down and stay disciplined about it.
There are three things you can do with your money - save it (e.g. investments), give it away (e.g. charity), or spend it (e.g. housing, vacations). Whether or not somebody's investment strategy (i.e. saving) is optimal for their income level has nothing to do with the frugality of their lifestyle (i.e. spending).
So you are saying when I first graduated from college in 1996 I should have been able to max out my 401K - then it was $10K I believe. I was making $22K.
If the median income is $70k a year, after taxes they should be able to save $23500 a year and have an HSA compatible healthcare plan and max out their HSA?
I have no idea how you got that from my comment. How much you make, how much you save, how much you spend, and how much you give away are all independent, and neither is it a zero-sum pie (for example, sometimes investments go down in value, and sometimes the line between giving away and spending is blurry).
To answer your question directly, $70k income is independent of the cost of living in high cost of living cities (like NYC or SF) vs. low cost of living areas. If you make $70k/year in NYC, no you don't have the spare income to max out 401k/HSA. If you make $70k/year working for Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas, then yeah, I expect that you ought to be able to max them out.
The bigger question (that remains to be seen and played out) is whether AI will be a forcing function towards small-cap. If smaller companies can build the same products as larger companies with fewer people then they can compete on price and win, hollowing out the revenue base of large-cap companies and leading to their downfall due to the dwindling workforce not having the culture to adapt. Of course reality is more complicated (moats, larger companies making too-good-to-be-true offers to acquire smaller competitors to prevent the emergence of genuine competition, boys-club who-you-know-not-what-you-know corruption via lawfare ...) so, yeah, remains to be seen.
reply