Both pure vegan and pure meat camps claim to have scientific evidence that it works, which make me question if change is what the body responds to. From personal experience, eating less often and fasting does seem to improve things like brain fog, indigestion etc.
People going vegan or going pure aktins or whatever have the most important thing in common, they are actually thinking about what they eat, reading labels and generally making conscious decisions about food.
That’s a false equivalence, not all evidence has the same quality. I don’t think there’s any doubt across serious scientists that meat intake should be limited for positive health outcomes.
Just a few days ago I was pondering why an Emacs like environment that provides such powerful tools to examine and manipulate texts is not being used more prominently than say VSCode where you need to be build many features or use plugins or rely on system utilities.
I made the same point to an academician who was dejected about the prospects of future PhDs and Postdocs. My personal belief is that AI opens the gate for more unconventional and interdisciplinary research.
I'm reading all these accounts of people who were considered "smart but lazy", who were bright but not disciplined or driven to participate in things that gets grades. As a kid I had a near perfect memory and limitless curiosity. I would sit with all the textbooks before the academic year started, flip through them and feel excited. I also loved doing my own experiments, sometimes with near-perilous outcomes too. I was way ahead of the curve and did great academically too until high school.
Over time I lost my golden memory and started finding it hard to remember exact details and even vocabulary as easily as normal people do. The slowness and the academic rut also stifled my natural growth. I forced myself through a bachelor's in computer science. I loved every topic and went diving deep into many of them and I could explain them better than my professors, but I had no desire to pass silly exams and prove myself. I passed with a CGPA 8.4/10 and entered a workforce that followed the same rut. Silly, irrelevant interviews that force you to "prepare" for months for them. I did it early on to get my first job but never indulged in it since.
I have had a fulfilling career so far, working on interesting problems with real outcomes. I switched to data science. I dabbled on both sides of the industry; the research papers obsessed R&D and the whatever-shit-sticks side of software development and found mediocrity and sleaze on both sides. I never climbed the corporate ladder and never got close to getting loaded.
I think for smart people happiness comes from chasing exciting and meaningful goals, but the realities of life keep them chasing other more mediocre things and that takes a toll.
Personally, I have stopped looking to my work for intellectual satisfaction or growth or safety or camaraderie. It's a purely transactional relationship. I work sincerely and I get paid. I give them inputs on what can be improved and what makes more sense, but I don't go overboard and make any efforts beyond my paycheck.
I let my true self run amok in exploring things I do on my own, in applying the scientific and analytical mindset to everything from gardening to sewing to building better learning environments. If some of it brings a windfall someday, I'll be marginally happier.
I've not used Open Router but I'm wondering what are the reasons to route LLM queries at large scale?
Isn't the trend increasingly to let an orshestrator agent decide which model to use in terms of problem difficulty vs. size and thinking budget?
Once you fix those parameters there's little to optimize over, no? I mean you want to find the cheapest one across providers but that's not a recurring decision.
I suspect only a very small subset users are sophisticated/interested enough to do that for themselves on a regular basis. More will likely hop between agents based on cost and the perceived nature of the task, without hard data (or an orchestrator model) to support that decision.
In the second case OpenRouter is very useful; in the first case, maybe it’s an area they move into in time - providing and owning/optimising the orchestrator?
Convenience. Paying only one provider, but get access to different models hosted around the world. Need a model for a project where latency matters? EU hosted and ZDR for another customer? Cheapest for personal use?
Regulation is necessary but it won't be sufficient. In India they have the do not call registry but despite that I get twenty odd spam calls a day whenever my number is active.
Personally I've benefited 100x more by using Truecaller but with time the app has been enshittified with weird features. That and my migration to iOS which has questionable support for Truecaller has made me the target of spammers again.
Furthermore many telemarketers are now using Whatsapp bypassing such regulations.
Hardware is hard and I applaud every effort to make it easier for tinkerers to build atop a platform. I've been away from it for a long time but how does the RPi system stack up in comparison? With all the hats available and the variety of cases, it shouldn't be too difficult to match the aesthetics, power consumption and exploit all the pluggable peripherals. What are the blind spots?
I started my software career maintaining and forking Unicode parsers. Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Thai among many other complex languages. It was great fun and it helped me get a deep understanding of how complex writing was and appreciate the beauty of being able to reduce this complexity down to data structures and functions.
