With all due respect, I disagree.

I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.

My point is not that oil fails to generate revenue. Clearly it is a lucrative business. Instead, my claim is that the state economy was remarkably robust, productive, healthy, and well-optimized for middle class quality of life pre-2007.

Does it sound surprising to you that it was perfectly normal to rent a perfect acceptable two bedroom apartment in a safe town on the interstate for $300 a month and still easily find dignified, decent paying jobs without 1000 applications?

I've lived in many cities and work in tech now, and I can confidently say that, as it concerns the professions and jobs that unambiguously sustain and improve life, no community on the planet was more productive than my home state. There is more to the story than some shale.

"Studies underscore cocaine's significant impact on Colombia's economy"

Snort another line while you're at it.

I mean... You're not wrong.

I see you speak in the past tense. So you’ve moved away, in spite of your love for the winters?

>I loved the winters. I loved the people.

My pet theory based on personal observation is that there's a strong inverse correlation between nature trying to destroy your shit and insufferable people.

I don't like this article. In particular, this section is especially poor:

> Block 1: We couldn't calculate fast enough. Solution: The GPU.

> Block 2: We couldn't train deep enough. Solution: Transformer architecture.

> Block 3: We can't "think" fast enough. Solution: Groq’s LPU.

#2 is outright wrong. Deep networks were made viable from residual layers and their refinement. #3 is also incorrect; "think" = compute so this is the same statement as #1.

Also, the "limestone" analogy is pretty weak.

I originally tried to do this on my own server but my GPU is too old :(

Slammed an A380 in my old server that doesn't even have a GPU power connector & it works pretty well for stuff that will fit on it. They're only like, $150 brand new nowadays; could be a decent option.

I wanted to let an LLM be able to grep and read through it.

I wasn't aware of dots when I wrote the blog post. This is really good to know!! I would like to try again with some newer models.

A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.

I am 51 and a Gen X. I did my part, I voted for policies to increase the social safety net, universal healthcare, etc.

This is the world that people wanted. I have the Ben Kenobi plan, I’m going to disappear somewhere and when the evil empire comes for me, just give up and die and then it becomes the younger people’s problem.

I sometimes think that I know better, and younger people are just wasting away. But maybe every generation feels that way when they come of age.

Given that we have written record going at least as far back as Socrates bitching about the kids these days, I think it's pretty consistent. But it's different this time, I'm sure of it.

Agreed, but good luck with that.

When you try to highlight how some things could be better by going "backwards", you're accused of wearing rose-tinted glasses, or being out of touch.

From this perspective, humans are just ECC with an optimally non-zero bit flip rate for evolution.

I guess? If we take this-gen (2026/01) AI to be human-like, then perhaps. I'm not so bullish rn tho. They good, they ain't that good. Let me see em in a robot body walkin' around ordering coffees interactin. then i judging.

I think Theano takes the crown as first modern end-user library for autodiff and tensor operations.

Original Torch too. https://torch.ch/

Ok, that's fair.

Mobile experience is not great

I agree with some of the author’s criticisms, but diversity citations are a minor concern compared to the idea of paid access to publicly funded research.

Yeah, same.

The journals pay reviewers $0, and they pay authors $0, but they charge huge sums for access to the information they gatekeep. They also squat on the copyrights to the works they publish. And if an author wants to publish "open access," they'll charge that author anywhere from $1k to $10k for the privilege.

For all that, they do very little. Arxiv's overall level of quality is actually higher than the average paper in one of Nature's many journals.

The social justice thing is extremely obnoxious, but the business model is what really gets on my nerves...

Why is that Nature’s problem? I can see granting organizations penalizing recipients that don’t disseminate their work openly. But do you think a company should not be allowed to make a business of publishing papers at a profit?