As someone who wrote my first line of code in approx 2010 and used git & GH for the first time in… 2013? it kind of amazes me to remember that Git is only 20 years old. GitHub for instance doesn’t seem surprising to me that is <20 years old, but `git` not existing before 2005 somehow always feels shocking to me. Obviously there were other alternatives (to some extent) for version control, but git just has the feeling of a tool that is timeless and so ingrained in the culture that it is hard to imagine (for me) the idea of people being software developers in the post-mainframe age without it. It feels like something that would have been born in the same era as Vim, SSH, etc (ie early 90s). This is obviously just because from the perspective of my programming consciousness beginning, it was so mature and entrenched already, but still.
I’ve never used other source control options besides git, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will!
What surprises me more is how young Subversion is in comparison to git, it's barely older.
I guess I started software dev at a magic moment pre-git but after SVN was basically everywhere, but it felt even more like it had been around forever vs the upstart git.
Any version control where you had to manually (and globally) "check out" (lock) files for editing was terrible and near unusable above about 3 people.
Version control systems where you didn't have shallow branches ( and thus each "branch" took a full copy / disk space of files) were awful.
version control systems which would have corruption data-bases (Here's to you Visual source safe) were awful.
Subversion managed to do better on all those issues, but it still didn't adequately solve distributed working issues.
It also didn't help that people often configured SVN to run with the option to add global locks back in, because they didn't understand the benefit of letting two people edit the same file at the same time.
I have a soft-spot for SVN. It was a lot better than it got credit for, but git very much stole the wind from under its sails by solving distributed (and critically, disconnected/offline) workflows just a bit better that developers could overlook the much worse UX, which remains bad to this day.
>It also didn't help that people often configured SVN to run with the option to add global locks back in, because they didn't understand the benefit of letting two people edit the same file at the same time.
I think it was more that they were afraid that a merge might some day be non-trivial. Amazing how that fear goes away once you've actually had the experience.
(I had to check because of this thread. SVN and Git initial releases were apparently about 4 and a half years apart. I think it was probably about 6 years between the time I first used SVN and the time I first used Git.)
It's always hard to describe the minutiae of things happening in the span of just a couple of years, but I think you're overly broad here.
Wikipedia tells me the initial release of Subversion was in late 2000, and for git it was 2005 - but although those were kinda just smack in the middle of my first years online, learning to code, starting with FLOSS work, and so on - I think those years were pretty important with the shift to the WWW and then web 2.0.
I basically don't remember a world without SVN, but that's probably because I just missed the cutoff and projects and companies were migrating from CVS from 2002 on or so, because the model was very similar and while it wasn't drop in, it made sense.
For git I want to say it took just a little longer, and the decentralized model was so different that people were hesitant, and before github in 2009 (I know it was founded in 2008, but my user id is below 50000 and it felt very much new and not at all widespread in non-rails circles before that) I would have called it a bit niche, actually - so it's more like a 7year span. But of course I was living in my bubble of university, and working for 2 small companies and as a freelancer in that time. I think bigger FLOSS projects only started migrating in droves after 2010/2011. But of course my timeline could be just as wrong :D
Yeah, odd to learn. I remember dipping my toes into source control, playing around with CVS and SVN right around when git was originally announced and it felt so "modern" and "fresh" compared to these legacy systems I was learning.
There were far, far worse things out there than Subversion. VSS, ClearCase, an obscure commercial one written in Java whose name escapes me now..
Subversion was basically a better CVS. My recollection is that plenty of people were more than happy to switch to CVS or Subversion (even on Windows) if it meant they could escape from something as legitimately awful as VSS. Whereas the switch from Subversion to Git or Mercurial had more to do with the additional powers of the newer tools than the problems of the older ones.
I’ve been using Hatchet since the summer, and really do love it over celery. I’ve been using Hatchet for academic research experiments with embarrassingly parallel tasks - ie thousands of simultaneous tasks just with different inputs, each CPU bound and on the order of 10s-2min, totaling in the millions of tasks per experiment - and it’s been going great. I think the team is putting together a very promising product. Switching from a roll-my-own SQS+AWS batch system to Hatchet has made my research life so much better. Though part of that also probably comes from the forced improvements you get when re-designing a system a second time.
Although there was support for pydantic validation in v0, now that the v1 SDK has arrived, I would definitely say that the #1 distinguishing feature (at least from a dx perspective) for anyone thinking of switching from Celery or working on a greenfield project is the type safety that comes with the first class pydantic support in v1. That is a huge boon in my opinion.
Another big boon for me was that the combo of both Python and Typescript SDKs - being able to integrate things into frontend demos without having to set up a separate Python api is great.
There are a couple rough edges around asyncio/single worker concurrency IMO - for instance, choosing between 100 workers each with capacity for 8 concurrent task runs vs 800 workers each with capacity for 1 concurrent task run. In Celery it’s a little bit easier to launch a worker node which uses separate processes to handle its concurrent tasks, whereas right now with Hatchet, that’s not possible as far as I am aware, due to how asyncio is used to handle the concurrent task runs which a single worker may be processing. If most of your work is IO bound or already asyncio friendly, this does not really affect you and you can safely use eg a worker with 8x task run capacity, but if you are CPU bound there might be some cases where you would prefer the full process isolation and feel more assured that you are maximally utilizing all your compute in a given node, and right now the best way to do that is only through horizontal scaling or 1x task workers I think. Generally, if you do not have a great mental model already of how Python handles asyncio, threads, pools, etc, the right way to think about this stuff can be a little confusing IMO, but the docs on this from Hatchet have improved. In the future though, I’d love to see an option to launch a Python worker with capacity for multiple simultaneous task runs in separate processes, even if it’s just a thin wrapper around launching separate workers under the hood.
There are also a couple of rough edges in the dashboard right now, but the team has been fixing them, and coming from celery/flower or SQS, it’s already such an improved dashboard/monitoring experience that I can’t complain!
It’s hard to describe, but there is just something fun about working with Hatchet for me, compared to Celery or my previous SQS system. Almost all of the design decision just align with what I would desire, and feel natural.
There are discussions about lowering the seams (harder to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less aerodynamically effective) as well as lowering the mound.
There’s some consensus though that currently, pitching has evolved much faster than batting due to advances like Trackman and deeper understanding of the relationship between biomechanics, pitch tunneling, spinrate/flight path/movement, and so on. In conjunction with that has been a shift towards “TTO” (three true outcomes - HR/BB/K) on the offensive side, which is a statistically motivated perspective that batting for average is suboptimal. In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays. TTO tho is also partly a response to the elevated pitching capabilities - velocity and spin.
This is all just to say that batters are falling behind and there’s an argument that it hurts the on-field product from an entertainment perspective since balls in play are what we ultimately watch for - if torpedo bats make it more likely that players can bat for higher averages by barreling up the ball more consistently, it will be good for the game.
Other alternative proposals include lowering the mound (famously done in the 60s), adjusting the ball (eg lower seams, which makes it harder for pitchers to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less effective), and so on.
One good (bad?) thing is that to some extent pitchers are starting to reach a biomechanical wall, evidenced by the greatly increased rates of Tommy John surgery, though that is partly also an effect of better surgical techniques and recovery times.
I don't disagree with any of this, I'm just saying that we know where this goes. It's just an arms races if you let it become one. If the pitching is getting too good, make it harder to pitch.
>In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays.
Again, I see this as the tail wagging the dog. It's easy to point to home runs as entertaining, but they a ultimately rather boring. For die hard fans, you want more hits that end up in play, with more strategy, and more opportunity for mistakes and drama. You're not going to get that from home run derbies.
Again, I know it's complicated, but ultimately, most sports organizations face an extremely complicated paradigm. It's fun to follow complicated sports where anything can happen, but it's hard to follow the same sports if you're not already into them. The way you solve this is to make the sports incredibly accessible so people visit games easily and cheaply as entertainment. The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system, and so the fan bases are too large to allow the game to be accessible to most people. You end up making decisions that make television more watchable, and by making things "important" by "breaking records." This ultimately dilutes the game because it makes breaking records less relevant over time.
We've got to the point in golf where someone setting an all time PGA scoring record is basically a yawn-fest, because everyone knows they're not playing the same game.
>The American sports system doesn't allow this because there is no relegation system
A few years ago a friend of mine from the UK made the observation that American Football would benefit greatly from a relegation system... every season I have the same reaction. By about the 4th week of the season, the NFL bifurcates into legitimate contenders and everybody else. You end up with Thursday nights and late season games that nobody gives a shit about because it's gonna be a blowout. For that matter - the last 2-3 weeks of the season the playoffs are already set, so half the league has no reason to even play - and the quality of the product on the field matches this. Some kind of two-tier system would go a long way to fix this, and might also help with the larger problem of the bridge between the college and pro games. At the moment, the NFL is maybe the only league that doesn't really have a "minor league" or development league - its the colleges, and between NIL and the portal system, colleges aren't necessarily producing pro-ready players.
They're never going to change this, it's the reason NFL franchises have such massively inflated valuations. Same w/ basketball + IPL franchises, very little downside risk to the earning power of the franchise.
Guys are always playing for their jobs if nothing else.
There are only a few games where you can put out tape and careers are short in the NFL. So even if you're on a completely losing team there's plenty to play for.
Weren’t the Eagles a .500 team through week 4 and then won it all last season? You are correct that some teams mail it in once they’ve got the playoff seed locked but its a small handful of games. The broncos were a .500 team through game 6 and were in a wild card game last season.
In those few games where they sit starters, the backups absolutely want to do their best to get starting jobs, the games aren’t uncontested.
Basically none of this is true. The wild card system has resulted in an NFL where well over half the league has playoff hopes very deep into the season. It's completely false that "by about the 4th week of the season", the league has bifurcated. Simply not even close to being true.
The NFL has also been extremely successful in leveling the playing field via salary cap and draft, such that franchises beset by woe can become title contenders within a single year. The most recent of many, many examples is the Washington Commanders. Detroit came before that.
And no, the playoffs are not "already set" before the last 3 weeks. This is completely inaccurate, as anyone who watches the NFL and reads about the near-infinite playoff scenarios at the close of every season already knows.
And lastly, only a Brit with no understanding of the economics of American football would even propose that relegation could work in this sport. It can't. The sport costs far too much for that and any such "relegated" teams would instantly collapse financially. NFL rosters contain 53 players with a practice squad of 17 and gigantic support staffs which absolutely could not survive without the full levels of NFL TV contract funding, stadium revenues, and other financial flows that full NFL membership provides.
And lastly, anyone who is paying any attention to the NFL draft over time knows that there is no issue with colleges producing pro-ready players.
> If the pitching is getting too good, make it harder to pitch.
For ball games it sounds mostly fair.
There is a weird situation in cycling where any attempt at improvement (even in riding postures) getting banned by the UCI has become a meme and each year's announcement generates a fest of joke videos.
That would be the other end of the spectrum we're trying to avoid.
There’s minor leagues all over the USA. It’s pretty cheap to go to a baseball game if it’s not MLB. And even MLB if your not picky on where you sit and the game time
I used to attend round rock express games a lot. The problem is because they are a minor league team, it doesn’t matter if they are good or bad. There is no one to root for because their best players are all just sent up to the majors.
It lacks generational fandom, because there is no place for hope in farm teams.
> It lacks generational fandom, because there is no place for hope in farm teams.
Depends if you are a fan of the Major league team, imo. I enjoyed the Round Rock Express when they were a part of the Houston Astros. I still remember being really excited to see Hunter Pence in Round Rock on his way to the Majors. Lost interest in RR once it became the Texas Rangers farm team thou
In minor leagues you root for the players. At least when I was a kid I did. I knew them, had my favorites and they were accessible. I got lots of autographs of future stars and it was incredibly exciting to see them make it to the majors. As a kid anyway, which is who I feel baseball is for, it's weird to me for adults to care about baseball.
> It's easy to point to home runs as entertaining, but they a ultimately rather boring. For die hard fans, you want more hits that end up in play, with more strategy, and more opportunity for mistakes and drama. You're not going to get that from home run derbies.
There's a counter-example in Cricket.
The game used to be a 5-day long battle with daily skirmishes and tactical changes required according to the ebbs and flows of the weather, the players, the score each day. Sometimes you could win just by exhausting the other team, sometimes you could gain advantage by changing your play style transiently to force the other team to react. The players all wore white uniforms, national pride was wrapped up the success of the country's team and being a Good Sport was the highest ideal.
Then, the powers that be created a shorter variant, the One-Day Match. The players started wearing brightly coloured uniforms, the crowds grew louder and entire categories of strategy were rendered useless as the game finished in 20% of the time. Viewership increased, cricket became "exciting" and the players sometimes achieved rockstar status usually reserved for sports that more easily captured the Australian sporting imagination like swimming and athletics.
The trend was clear: the entertainment value of short-form cricket games were spectacular. In came a myriad of new sponsorship categories for things like domestic household goods ("It's Australia's Favourite Air"), energy drinks and Sports Utility Vehicles that would appeal to the demographic of viewers who only had a "day's length investment" in the game. They started playing popular music in between game pauses and the Gentlemanliness of the game's spirit gave way to Victory as the highest Ideal.
Then, Cricket had it's "YouTube Shorts" moment -- an even more abridged version of the game that only lasted 20 overs per side was born. This hyper-speed version of cricket favoured fast results, flying balls and fan participation like never before. There was now fireworks and rock music and after-parties and more. It was All Killer, No Filler. The goal was to Smash It Outta The Park as much as possible, and every time they did it, a quick ad-break got to play on TV while the fans in the crowd got to sing Seven Nation Army while cheering on whoever caught the ball this time. The domestic competition is even called the "Big Bash League".
Australian Cricket's archetype went from Twelve Magnificent Fellows in Baggy Green Hats to what feels like a monster truck rally with branded personalised beers, bucket hats, and brand-safe team rivalries. Sometimes they even drive a Ute truck around the stadium at half-time.
What I'm trying to say is that popular demand or the voices of those who claim to interpret it say that Spectacle Isn't Boring. They love the exciting moments, and maybe are only willing to tolerate the slow and strategic sides of the game to get to the next Home Run. This trend towards shallow spectacle seems to be happening to all forms of entertainment and I suspect that baseball is not immune.
I have stopped following professional sports for at least a couple of decades, despite being a sportsman of the real variety--of practice and not attendance as a spectator.
A friend sometimes invites me to see G League basketball games—he has season tickets—and sometimes I go, more for the company than anything else.
I watch a spectacle, dreadful, terrible. Every time out is a good reason to blast loud, annoying music and show a group of dancing children on the jumbotron, for a cheerleading exhibition of people who are over 60 or under 13, for a competition in which the girl, or the middle-aged man in attendance, tries to score a bucket with bio-mechanically unsound movements that herald an expensive visit to the orthopedist, for a toss from the in-house entertainers either of T-shirts or socks that gets retirees, who are struggling to get out of their chairs, all excited.
Cops on the court checking that the retirees themselves are not throwing a fit, tickets to be scanned, metal detectors ringing for a key in the pocket, a $15 draft beer.
When I leave, I'm exhausted, mortified, wondering who made me do it.
Give me back the sport of 50 years ago, or never invite me again.
When baseball starts taking multiple days to finish a game, I'll obviously change my tune. I just think the scope of cricket is a unique and bizarre one.
Home runs are not "balls in play," though. So are we to go to a binary game, which amounts to whiffs or homers?
Also I don't think your assertion that batters have "fallen behind" pitchers holds up. Shohei Ohtani just became the first player to have 50 homers and 50 stolen bases.
If pitching evolves faster than hitting, does that mean the response time of the hitter becomes shkrter? Can't you move the pitcher further away to give the hitter more time to respond?
MLB could move the mound back or lower it again like was done in 1969 after the 'Year of the Pitcher', but it's not that simple.
The other crisis baseball faces is pitcher arm health. The mere act of throwing a ball 90-105 mph is damaging to the arm, and it only gets worse the harder you throw. Every pitcher is chasing velocity and spin rate since the resulting success and money is undeniable. Pitchers frequently need major surgery and extended year+ time recovering as a result.
If the mound is moved back or lowered pitchers will respond by doubling down on chasing velocity just to stay level, leading to more injuries and UCL replacement surgeries.
The same incentives apply to other options to give batters an edge, like juicing the ball or shrinking the strike zone. Pitchers will respond with velocity and blow up their arms.
> Pitchers will respond with velocity and blow up their arms
They seem, from the outside, like they'll do this no matter what. Move the mound back, allow torpedo bats or don't, do you think pitchers will intentionally pass up the money and success?
The biomechanics involved are insane. You are hitting a baseball-sized object (ha) moving at 90+ mph with massive break, often very late and over two axes, with something a couple of inches in diameter, and need to make decisions and react and adjust your swing path in a handful of milliseconds. And that’s just to make contact, let alone good contact, let alone contact that can find a patch of grass.
It’s the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in my opinion.
> Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.
There will always be something so beautiful about node/graph programming systems that simultaneously allow you to go back and forth between the text-based program and the graph representation of the program. That fact that Modelica lets you do this with differential equations in a declarative style, including fairly strong encapsulation capabilities, is quite powerful and fun. The only other system I’ve worked with that gave me a similar feeling of being able - at least theoretically, ha! - to model absolutely anything so long as enough attention to interfaces between systems was paid is OpenMDAO.
The main other example that comes to mind is Cycling 74s Gen for Max/MSP.
Anyways, for those who are curious, Modelica was originally developed for the automotive/aerospace industries (IIRC) but is used in all sorts of fields - for me in particular, I know about it because of its use in modeling operational energy in buildings - everything from geothermal borehole fields and mesh topology district heating/cooling systems to complicated HVAC controls and more.
OpenModelica is the main open source tool for building and running modelica programs, and there are python wrappers you can use as well!
> passing them means nothing about the ability of neural net-based systems to understand language, regardless of how much their authors designed them to test language understanding.
Does this implicitly suggest that it is impossible to quantitatively assess a system’s ability to understand language? (Using the term “system” in the broadest possible sense)
Not agreeing or disagreeing or asking with skepticism. Genuinely asking what your position is here, since it seems like your comment eventually leads to the conclusion that it is unknowable whether a system external to yourself understands language, or, if it is possible, then only in a purely qualitative way, or perhaps purely in a Stewart-style-pornographic-threshold-test - you’ll know it when you see it.
I don’t have any problem if that’s your position- it might even be mine! I’m more or less of the mindset that debating whether artificial systems can have certain labels attached to them revolving around words like “understanding,” “cognition,” “sentience” etc is generally unhelpful, and it’s much more interesting to just talk about what the actual practical capabilities and functionalities of such systems are on the one hand in a very concrete, observable, hopefully quantitative sense, and how it feels to interact with them in a purely qualitative sense on the other hand. Benchmarks can be useful in the former but not the latter.
Just curious where you fall. How would you recommend we approach the desire to understand whether such systems can “understand language” or “solve problems” etc etc… or are these questions useless in your view? Or only useful in as much as they (the benchmarks/tests etc) drive the development of new methodologies/innovations/measurable capabilities, but not in assigning qualitative properties to said systems?
>> Does this implicitly suggest that it is impossible to quantitatively assess a system’s ability to understand language? (Using the term “system” in the broadest possible sense)
I don't know and I don't have an opinion. I know that tests that claimed to measure language understanding, historically, haven't. There's some literature on the subject if you're curious (sounds like you are). I'd start here:
Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data
>> While large neural LMs may well end up being important components of an eventual full-scale solution to human-analogous NLU, they are not nearly-there solutions to this grand challenge. We argue in this paper that genuine progress in our field — climbing the right hill, not just the hill on whose slope we currently sit —depends on maintaining clarity around big picture notions such as meaning and understanding in task design and reporting of experimental results.
These ramp functions are actual quite powerful and beautiful sounding when implemented in analog electronic synthesizers - by controlling the ratio of the quiescent and moving phase, and by controlling the ratio of the rise and fall times in the moving phase, you can achieve all sorts of very beautiful, rich timbral modulations with interesting harmonic behavior - particularly if your pulse generator and the envelope duration are decoupled in terms of durations. Wind, brass, reedy sounds are all possible, some cool undertones can be created, etc etc.
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing! Would you mind pointing me to where I could listen to some of the sounds produced by analog electronic synthesizers running ramp functions? I'd love to hear it. I looked through the repo and didn't find an easy way to listen.
Fantastic write up and beautiful design decisions. Really remarkable work! As another market data point, I would definitely pay a premium price if you were to go to market with it.
I’ve never used other source control options besides git, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will!
reply