Marginalia: 3 Years
It’s been three years since the inception of Marginalia Search, then a dinky experiment to find where the heck the cool Internet has gone, now my full time job. While there’s always things that can be improved, it’s fair to say the search engine has never worked as well as it does right now. A […]
Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science
Abstract:Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero […]
The Top of the DNS Hierarchy
In the past (in fact two years ago, proof I have been doing this for a while now!) I wrote about the “inconvenient truth” that structural aspects of the Internet make truly decentralized systems infeasible, due to the lack of a means to perform broadcast discovery. As a result, most distributed systems rely on a […]
Building a Fly.io-Like Scheduler with Resource Requirements
In our the last post, we built a simple coordinator and a worker that could increment a number from a client request. That simple example introduced us to scheduling tasks on workers from a compute cluster in the same style that fly.io uses to schedule machines on their compute nodes. But our example was really […]
It’s OK to abandon your side-project
The web industry is full to the brim with tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses and, like many of us, I’ll often find myself tinkering away on an idea or three after I’ve finished with my day-job. Whilst it’s definitely an enticing prospect, working on a side-project is not always sunshine and Lambos […]
Mexico City may be just months away from running out of water
Mexico City CNN — Alejandro Gomez has been without proper running water for more than three months. Sometimes it comes on for an hour or two, but only a small trickle, barely enough to fill a couple of buckets. Then nothing for many days. Gomez, who lives in Mexico City’s Tlalpan district, doesn’t have a […]
Is Emacs Dying?
Is Emacs dying? Lordy, I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used it seriously declaring it a spent force. To be fair, redditisinmyheart doesn’t appear to fall […]
You almost never see a clock at the mall
Retailers, casinos, and grocery stores use a trick called temporal distortion to make you forget about the real world.
Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models
Abstract:Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem […]
Why fake research is rampant in China
Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the element. HUANG FEIRUO was once a respected scientist who studied ways to make pigs gain weight more quickly. He ran government-funded research projects at Huazhong Agricultural University in the central city of Wuhan. But last month 11 […]