OpenAI jumped the gun before *the closing party* - didn't even let the kids celebrate their winning properly before stealing the spotlight
Also in the article
> In response to the controversy, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown posted on X, "We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did."
> However, an IMO coordinator told X user Mikhail Samin that OpenAI actually announced before the closing ceremony, contradicting Brown's claim. The coordinator called OpenAI's actions "rude and inappropriate," noting that OpenAI "wasn't one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models."
Having worked for AWS, one of the things we got a lot push back from was offering something free and then walk back from it.
AWS really strongly focuses on gaining customer trust, and they will only lower price, and never increase price. They won't turn off things until the last customer stops using it (they might stop new customers from onboarding)
I did not enjoy working for AWS so I left pretty fast, but some of the customer obsession there really impressed me.
Amazon employee here, but the statement I'm making is of my own.
Internally we treat customer names and email addresses as the second highest data classification. The highest one is credit card/financial/password data.
What does it mean? It means that there are a bunch of requirements that a software team must fulfill and pass (reviewed by an SDE trained in the process outside the team). This makes accessing this sort of data a PITA for a lot of people, and I can see why they why they would send out notifications when a breach like this happen. Amazon takes security very seriously, and it in fact creates quite a bit of friction to many engineers. However, I'd rather than than the break things and ask for forgiveness model like some other companies (not going to name names here)
I can confirm that names and email addresses are classified as saltysugar states, and the security reviews. So they do have to pass all those requirements for secure storage and transmission, but then names and emails are made visible by default through mechanisms like reviews, profile, wishlists, and that passes the review because it is the user's choice.
I don't even think this is anything nefarious by Amazon. It's more that teams dedicated to security issues consider it out of their lane to deal with conflicts between the designed UX and actual user expectations; especially for privacy issues where even asking the person isn't a reliable way to understand what they want.
> Given that segfaults almost never happen in the JVM (I've never seen one)
I've seen 5 segfaults over the last week in our system. Unfortunately we don't enable core dump in our system (yet) so we haven't really had a good sense of what might cause the system. We've been seeing about 30 SIGSEV's over the last three months, but we haven't been able to root cause it yet.
What it boils down to, is whether or not taking advantage of a technology puts them under the influence of those outside their community. For example, if they use electricity then they have to be involved with the affairs of the town, and not self-reliant. But they can choose to use a diesel engine to power equipment for their farms, as they have the ability to make their own bio-fuel. And they use modern refrigeration and battery-powered lights on their carriages for safety reasons.
In short -- does a technology pull them away from their faith, or is it needed for a greater good? Not to mention, that each Amish community is independent and sets their own rules (there is no central Amish version of the Pope, for example).
Very good explanation! I'll also add that some Amish (and somewhat more Mennonite) communities actually OK laptops and cellphones, while desktop computers and landlines are eschewed. (Or, to use a somewhat older example, some communities accepted phones that were located outside the house, leading to phones mounted on poles placed suspiciously close to the kitchen window.)
I'm betting the desktop/laptop thing is a good example. Desktops require power grids, which the Amish prefer not to be tied to. Laptops are easier to run independently of the rest of the work since you can charge them when you can in a variety of ways.
Likewise, flying on airplanes or taking the occasional train on a one-off trip isn't really that big of a problem, either: you aren't tying yourself to the rest of the world. If you go on a mission this year via airplane, it doesn't compel to do the same thing next year. On the other hand, buying into automobile culture to commute to work ties you pretty hard to everything.
It seems to me using a plane would be a bit of a slippery slope then. A commercial airplane's main purpose is to access somewhere beyond one's own community, and the experiences of international travel to a foreign land will change you (not to mention, I'm curious why they would target the Philippines vs any modern local American city). But people will do as they do, I suppose.
They aren't opposed to an experience changing them. And most things are guidelines to make choices, not absolutes. In this case, going on a mission was a higher priority, and the most effective way to get to the target was via air travel. If there was an alternative then they would take it.
This decision matrix isn't unique to the Amish -- people do it every day. For example, I want to save money. But I also want to work at a job. To get to the job I have to travel. I choose to drive to the job (incurring vehicle expenses), whereas I have the alternative of walking (would take several hours) or cycling (too lazy, too cold). Therefore I choose to spend money on gas instead of either not working or walking to work.
>They aren't opposed to an experience changing them. And most things are guidelines to make choices, not absolutes. In this case, going on a mission was a higher priority, and the most effective way to get to the target was via air travel. If there was an alternative then they would take it.
It's not so much the experience change I'm pointing out, rather that that will bring foreign influence from outside (and obviously foreign influence has occurred because they are using tractors and diesel from the other comments.)
And if we're considering a decision matrix that tries to minimize outside influence, that still doesn't explain why the Philippines vs any where in North America, really.
Minimizing outside influence is only a portion of the decision matrix. They want to maintain their community and their religion. Minimizing outside influence might be part of that, or it might not. As said above, there is no absolute rule - the community decides are a group which technologies/changes they want to use or discourage.
Sure, that is the explicit goal, but throughout history, missionaries/explorers have always brought something back with them, be it physical items or ideas. That's just part of the nature of "exploration". Unless someone impressed those laptops, cranes, and telephone poles upon the Amish, I imagine they saw them when they ventured out and decided the "goal posts" of their beliefs could be fiddled with to accommodate them.
Kafka is mostly in Scala (which runs on JVM). Scala provides many attractive features to build scalable and type-safe code. And about performance, Kafka is used of LinkedIn and it process hundreds of gigabytes of data, close to a billion messages per day (reported in their paper in 2011), and the engineers claim that they're processing terabytes of data a day now.
Not sure on what basis you claim the choice of language to be "questionable", but keep in mind that Scala's type-safety and many other features are much more difficult to achieve in C/C++. Cleaner code is sometimes more important than some tiny gain in performance.
Also in terms of scaling, Kafka cleverly takes advantage of many aspects in their design to ensure low-latency high-throughput.
* Little random I/O
* Relying heavily on the OS pagecache for data storage
Performance-wise, Kafka can outshine some of the in-memory message storing message queues.
That document acknowledges inherent JVM limitations:
> Java garbage collection becomes increasingly fiddly and slow as the in-heap data increases.
So they had to work around that. In my view it's not a tiny issue. I'd say, instead of working around such inherent limitations, it's better not to have them to begin with when making high performance systems. That was my main point above. Time spent dancing around such problems defeats the purpose of supposed easiness of development.
You don't even bother to read past the section about the limitations that the engineers were well aware of in advance - they re-emphasize a common concern for people who question their choice of JVM.
The next line reads:
"As a result of these factors using the filesystem and relying on pagecache is superior to maintaining an in-memory cache or other structure—we at least double the available cache..."
And if you don't know about pagecache, it's an in-memory cache managed by the OS and has nothing to do with JVM's memory at all.
And you forgot that C++ isn't the easiest language when it comes to designing a distributed system. Scala, as I mentioned, offers many other features that suit the needs of the team. Of course if you're a good engineer you'll know that there are trade-offs such as compiling time, but that's the same for every engineering decision.
Designing around platform flaws can be worth it if there are commensurate benefits. You're very lucky if you've never had to do this, or perhaps just blind to the tradeoffs you were making.
That's like saying "we had to consider memory management" in a C++ system.
When you are designing a high performance system you have to consider everything. Different platforms have different tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs on the JVM have been well proven over time.
Having written a few low latency systems a few of which are on the JVM, I will say that in all of those cases, allocating/freeing memory is always a slow down regardless of GC or not (cache coherence is almost always the deal breaker here). So in those systems, you simply do not allocate/deallocate along the critical path.
Is this difficult in Java? Yes. It's also difficult in C++. Just because it is difficult doesn't mean it is impossible.
So if I am resorting to managing my own memory anyway, why would I use the JVM? Because typically the code that is on the critical path is a small percentage of the entire code base, and the other advantages of the JVM (tooling, language features, libraries etc.) out way the downsides.
That's not always the case, and I don't have any specific knowledge of Kafka, but just because something needs to be low/consistent latency doesn't mean it can't (or shouldn't) be written on the JVM.
You are right that this can be a major problem with the JVM and working around it can be a lot of work. But you need to consider what kind of system we're talking about in this particular case.
This is a persistent message queue for log messages. Messages are coming in sequentially and subscribers read them sequentially. It makes zero sense to keep tons of messages in memory inside complex data structures as they are not indexed or searched or analyzed.
So in this particular case it's not actually a workaround. It's just sensible design and I wouldn't do it any differently in C++ either.
My flickr account is created with Google login. I wonder whether they'll force me into singing up for Flickr cause it's the service with most storage for photos out there (albeit the lack of desktop sync).
Yes, from the server side's mishandling of TXT extension. Probably the server put the MIME type in the HTTP header as "HTML" instead of TXT, and the browser renders the page as such.
OpenAI jumped the gun before *the closing party* - didn't even let the kids celebrate their winning properly before stealing the spotlight
Also in the article
> In response to the controversy, OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown posted on X, "We weren't in touch with IMO. I spoke with one organizer before the post to let him know. He requested we wait until after the closing ceremony ends to respect the kids, and we did."
> However, an IMO coordinator told X user Mikhail Samin that OpenAI actually announced before the closing ceremony, contradicting Brown's claim. The coordinator called OpenAI's actions "rude and inappropriate," noting that OpenAI "wasn't one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models."