Probably. I'm from the US, and I know a few Dutch people, and I find their approach to direct negative feedback off-putting to the point of feeling rude, even when knowing what to expect from them. (I'm sure they find my communication style long-winded, frustrating, and a waste of their time.)
It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals.
Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense of hierarchy and not contradicting the master.
> IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
By the same reasoning, India, Bangladesh and China — all ancient civilizations threatened by great rivers — should have developed similar egalitarian cultures but the reality is the polar opposite.
Maybe something as complex as human civilizations can't be the result of just one geographical feature.
India and China are huge countries with very small percentage river deltas. Not comparable by any means. Bangladesh in a very young country that inherited it’s culture from India. I’m not an anthropologist, but sorry, I don’t agree there is any likeness with these countries.
If you have an other theory about the Dutch culture and why it is so different from it’s neighbors, I happy to hear.
When I worked a Radboud University in the Netherlands for a summer, they were definitely more direct than I was used to, and kept work more work-focused. But they also combined that with a culture of quitting on time, and going out to socialize a bit before dinner, which I think was vital to sustain interpersonal connections.
I liked that style a lot, but Americans are very bad about quitting on time, which necessitates more socialization at work itself.
You are violating the rule of the principle in saying this. :-)
(Yes, I am aware it does not apply here.)
It is EXTREMELY US-centric and frankly as a Brit who lived and worked in Central Europe and was previously engaged to a Norwegian, I find Crocker's rules laughable.
How it looks to me is:
"Use European manners with me. Don't waste your words or my time. Shut up and get on with it."
...at least until we get real Test-Time Training (TTT) that encodes the state into model weights. If vast amounts of human knowledge can be compressed into ~400GB for frontier models, it's easy to imagine the same for our entire context
There is a fantastic book on this topic called "By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV" that cover the inception of modern brands. It's a very similar story to what happened to watches. The industrial revolution made quality clothing accesible for everyone, so the cloth appearance no longer was a clear indicative of status, so brands started placing their emblems on the outside of the fabric inside of the inside. At the time it was seen as gross, obvious and bad taste. Guess we had a century to normalize it.
Another big factor is that many areas of the US feature horizontal architecture instead of vertical ones (i.e. Los Angeles vs NY). A bus stop in those areas cover orders of magnitude less people given the same radius
I'm suprised there isn't more "hope" in this area. Even things like the GPT Pro models; surely that sort of reasoning/synthesis will eventually make its way into local models. And that's something that's already been discovered.
Just the other day I was reading a paper about ANNs whose connections aren't strictly feedforward but, rather, circular connections proliferate. It increases expressiveness at the (huge) cost of eliminating the current gradient descent algorithms. As compute gets cheaper and cheaper, these things will become feasible (greater expressiveness, after all, equates to greater intelligence).
It seems like a lot of the benefits of SOTA models are from data though, not architecture? Won't the moat of the big 3/4 players in getting data only grow as they are integrated deeper into businesses workflows?
That's a good point. I'm not familiar enough with the various moats to comment.
I was just talking at a high level. If transformers are HDD technology, maybe there's SSD right around the corner that's a paradigm shift for the whole industry (but for the average user just looks like better/smarter models). It's a very new field, and it's not unrealistic that major discoveries shake things up in the next decade or less.
With such a high throughput because of sparsity, I'm particulary interested in distilling it into other architectures. I'd like to try a recurrent transformer when I have the time
The Internet Archive would not require the Internet to continue to store digital data, nor to ingest additional digital data. As long as the bills get paid and people watch the machine, the data would remain on disk and accessible.
The Library of Congress has existed for ~225 years, for example.
One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.
I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.
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