This will keep happening until we start programming computers with some kind of AI style driven interfaces, and even then maybe not.
Humans are tribal, and HR only hires for specific bullet points, thus everyone wants to assert they are on the right tribe when they need to go job hunting.
Eh, in different ways. Ruby people often felt a little smug/over-emotive about how much joy using their tool could bring programmers. TFA is spot on about Perl: Perl folks often felt cliquish, arrogant, defensive. Python people are at times patronizing or overly dismissive.
And in all of those communities the biggest difference was how many people in the community had those dysfunctions, versus the rest—the vast majority of each language’s users who were using it, sharing techniques or code, answering questions about it without being jerks.
Where Perl fell down for me was that its community and people I knew who used it had a much higher chance of evidencing those crappy behaviors. More bad apples—not many in the grander scheme, but enough more to be noticed.
A 2025 GMC Sierra 2500 is a way bigger vehicle than a 1995 Ford Bronco. 7,417 lbs vs. 4,616 lbs. and hood height of 6.6 feet vs. about 3.7 feet. And the "light trucks" category has risen to 65% of the market from 36% of the market back then. There are a lot more of them, and they're a lot bigger.
Yeah, I don't think the "release valve" is the correct metaphor. This is more like a crack around a door frame that you can get a lever into in order to eventually pry it open.
> that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language
I'd argue that it pretty effectively mimics natural language. I don't think it really understands anything, it is just the best madlibs generator that the world has ever seen.
For many tasks, this is accurate 99+% of the time, and the failure cases may not matter. Most humans don't perform any better, and arguably regurgitate words without understanding as well.
But if the failure cases matter, then there is no actual understanding and the language the model is generating isn't ever getting "marked to market/reality" because there's no mental world model to check against. That isn't going to be usable if there are real-world consequences of the LLM getting things wrong, and they can wind up making very basic mistakes that humans wouldn't make--because we can innately understand how the world works and aren't always just stringing words together that sound good.
Break the aspects of language understanding and language generation apart. While I would agree that generative LLMs are understanding-free madlibs for writing text, embedding vector spaces and LLM latent spaces seem are a pretty genuine understanding of natural language. High dimensional vector spaces seem like the best machine representation we currently have for meaning and LLMs are using it effectively.
I've been hearing that China will hit a plateau, like Japan, for at least 20 years now... Meanwhile, China is now pumping out BEV trucks, affordable electric cars, sixth generation military jets, and nuclear aircraft carriers.
> I've been hearing that China will hit a plateau, like Japan, for at least 20 years now...
Chinese growth is slowing permanently.
GDP growth trend in 2000s was 10-12% p.a. In the 2010s it was 6-8%. In the 2020a expected to be 3-4%. This slowdown is structural, not cyclical.
China is aging faster than the west.
Real estate in China at one point represented 25-30% of GDP, but this model has collapsed.
Manufacturing remains strong, but is shifting upmarket, eg EVs, batteries, solar panels, robotics, semiconductors. China’s strategy is to move up the value chain faster than competitors can catch them.
Consumption is weak, but has strong potential.
China had high technological innovation, but political constraints are rising for them.
China’s growth will be more state driven, less entrepreneurial, but formidable in industrial capacity.
> China is now pumping out ... sixth generation military jets, and nuclear aircraft carriers.
They are not. They have some initial versions.
The thing about long distance navies is that they require lots and lots of oil. No matter if you have a nuclear powered aircraft carrier or not.
The most damage China can do to western interests is that they start some local war, which we disapprove of, and so we end up sanctioning and embargoing them, which means we lose their production. The end of mass production from China. This is how we killed the USSR and a bunch of smaller wannabes. It's just geography. USA and Europe have the most productive land and port access. Most access to oil to give us long reach. China is practically land locked because of the first island chain. Think of it as being surrounded by a thousand aircraft carriers with infinite fuel. They don't have enough oil domestically. Middle eastern oil is trivially interdicted.
i doubt that - the USSR killed themselves with their poor economic policies (as well as expensive wars they cannot really afford).
China on the other hand, hasn't made the same mistakes. They posture, they build military installations (such as those in the south china sea), but they haven't committed much, if at all, to an actual war. Not to mention their economic policies are vastly superior to the USSR's - sucking in western capital at the beginning, and now, to overtaking them.
China's lack of oil is an achilles heel, but not a very big one. And every day, they're closer to diversifying away from oil as an energy source. Not to mention having pipelines through russia and the much of asia minor to have land routes that aren't blockade-able.
The economic modal of china is irrelevant to how their geography makes them easy to blockade. I think you might have just misread what I was saying here. I was saying how they don't have a viable long game _if_ they choose to start a war that the west doesn't approve of. Because they are practically land locked like the USSR when compared to the west.
Nothing replaces oil as an energy source for military reach.
China is decades away from having any pipelines to north siberia where most of the russian oil is. There's really nothing practical even on the drawing board atm.
Pipelines are the easiest transport of oil to stop. Look at ukraine.
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