That's partly the point of the article, except the article acknowledges that this is organizationally hard:
> You get things like the famous Toyota Production System where they eliminated the QA phase entirely.
> [This] approach to manufacturing didn’t have any magic bullets. Alas, you can’t just follow his ten-step process and immediately get higher quality engineering. The secret is, you have to get your engineers to engineer higher quality into the whole system, from top to bottom, repeatedly. Continuously.
> The basis of [this system] is trust. Trust among individuals that your boss Really Truly Actually wants to know about every defect, and wants you to stop the line when you find one. Trust among managers that executives were serious about quality. Trust among executives that individuals, given a system that can work and has the right incentives, will produce quality work and spot their own defects, and push the stop button when they need to push it.
> I think we’re going to be stuck with these systems pipeline problems for a long time. Review pipelines — layers of QA — don’t work. Instead, they make you slower while hiding root causes. Hiding causes makes them harder to fix.
Updating video drivers in Ubuntu is so so so much easier than under Windows it's ridiculous.
Windows has more drivers for more things, but if Linux has drivers (e.g. you buy a Laptop with Linux support) then driver management is massively easier.
I spent god knows how many hours getting the windows drivers for my last self built gaming PC working. Linux I just installed and was done. In reality the Windows experience was also a lot worse than having to drop to the console occasionally. It definitely required more in depth knowledge, even if everything was UI driven...
Unless you have very specialized needs, the driver experience on Windows is "turn the machine on". The driver update experience is "connect to the internet" and occasionally "reboot". That's it.
Linux is significantly easier than it was 20 years ago but still not as easy in general.
I've been building machines myself for nearly 30 years, including multiple in the last 5, and I assure you I've needed to do nothing besides connect to the internet and let it get updates each time.
We had this discussion on here recently. It's really puzzling to me. Julia has the most ergonomic array interface I have worked with by far. How did 1 based indexing ever trip you up?
I love Makie but for investigating our datasets Python is overall superior (I am not familiar enough with R), despite Julia having the superior Array Syntax and Makie having the better API. This is simply because of the brilliant library support available in scikit learn and the whole compilation overhead/TTFX issue. For these workflows it's a huge issue that restarting your interactive session takes minutes instead of seconds.
On top of what others have said: In many situations the alternative to Julia isn't Go but C++ (or maybe Rust though its library support is lacking). E.g. if you are writing high-ish* performance algorithmic code that should also run on GPU. Julia also heavily prioritizes composability of libraries. And though that can be a source of bugs at times, there are things we are doing in Julia with one or two PhD students that would be practically impossible (as in require an order of magnitude more implementation work) in any other language.
This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.
Well, yes. "Accelerationists" of all philosophies think that heightening the contradictions and breaking the current system will bring about its replacement with a better one. But a new system requires work, while chaos doesn't. It's quite possible to just destroy the current system leaving us without the wherewithal to build a replacement any time soon.
Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors.
As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.
This is stupid. Nobody motivated by money is in academia. Academics are motivated by curiosity, but also prestige, vanity and the wish to hire students and collaborators. And on top of human vanity working it's magic, the ideology that everything should be a market and competition is the final form of social organisation, has pervaded academia just as much as everything else.
I agree that the system of publishing papers to gain prestige to gain resources to publish papers was already broken pre AI.
You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a primary driver in the background.
My dad said he stopped being a professor because of that.
He liked the research, and he even liked teaching, but he absolutely hated having to constantly try and find grant money. He said he ended up seeing everyone as "potential funders" and less like "people" because his job kind of depended on it, and it ended up burning him out. He lasted four years and went into engineering.
I don't know that "motivation" is the right word for it, because I don't think professors like having to find grant money all the time. I think most people who get PhDs and try to go to academia do it for a genuine love for the subject, and they find the grant-searching to be a necessary evil part of the job; it's more "survival" than regular motivation, though I am admittedly splitting hairs here.
LLMs can execute searches? You can absolutely send ChatGPT to look for a cheap flight and it will do pretty well. And because I am paying for ChatGPT rather than the advertiser's, I am the customer and not the product.
You may pay to ChatGPT, but sooner or later you will become their product too. All the conversations you had or will have will be turned into signals to match you with products from advertisers, maybe not directly in the conversation with them, but anywhere else. It's not a mater of if, but looking at the pace things are going, and how financially pressured openai is, it's only a matter of time that their conversations with them will be turned into profit in some way or another, they basically have no choice financially.
I disagree. Julia has correctnes issues because it chose maximum composability over specifying interfaces explicitly. And those are not just in immature packages but also in complex packages. Compared to other languages, Julia has no facilities to help structure large complex code bases. And this also leads to bad error messages and bad documentation.
Recently we got the public keyword, but even the PR there says:
"NOTE: This PR is not a complete solution to the "public interfaces are typically not well specified in Julia" problem. We would need to implement much than this to get to that point. Work on that problem is ongoing in Base and packages and contributions are welcome."
> You get things like the famous Toyota Production System where they eliminated the QA phase entirely.
> [This] approach to manufacturing didn’t have any magic bullets. Alas, you can’t just follow his ten-step process and immediately get higher quality engineering. The secret is, you have to get your engineers to engineer higher quality into the whole system, from top to bottom, repeatedly. Continuously.
> The basis of [this system] is trust. Trust among individuals that your boss Really Truly Actually wants to know about every defect, and wants you to stop the line when you find one. Trust among managers that executives were serious about quality. Trust among executives that individuals, given a system that can work and has the right incentives, will produce quality work and spot their own defects, and push the stop button when they need to push it.
> I think we’re going to be stuck with these systems pipeline problems for a long time. Review pipelines — layers of QA — don’t work. Instead, they make you slower while hiding root causes. Hiding causes makes them harder to fix.
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