> Neoclouds are startups specializing in AI-specific cloud computing. Unlike their larger competitors, they don’t develop proprietary chips. Instead, they rely heavily on Nvidia’s cutting-edge GPUs to power their operations. By focusing solely on AI workloads, these companies offer specialized solutions tailored to AI developers’ needs.
I sometimes skywatch late at night, marveling at the vastness of what's out there, and the glimpse of it we get over here. That gives me a sense of wonder about space, but did not make astronomy any more appealing to me.
Gaining an appreciation for nature is good, getting fascinated with biology is also good, but one is not necessarily related to the other in practice.
> The field of biology was created by people who love to classify/name things.
More to the point, the field of biology is so complex that for the longest time we could only name and classify things. Understanding came later, when we'd accummulated enough data and had hints from chemistry and other fields.
The problem is that once we gain that understanding, we add that as one more chapter to our textbooks, one more lesson tacked on, instead of rethinking the curriculum around our understanding.
> If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment
FSF is not the average recipient of copyright assignments - I'd be much more comfortable giving copyright assignment to FSF than to pretty much any other entity:
* They're much less likely to rugpull on the contributors and change the licence to something non-free: even pessimistically assuming their leadership got subverted somehow, doing something like this would pretty much be the deathknell to FSF. So there's a known, very high cost to the negative side of CLAs.
* They're much more likely than the average project or corporation to actually use the positive benefits of copyright assignment, to pursue legal action and enforce the Free licences the way it empowers them to.
The article has a melancholic tone running through it, felt especially keenly when you consider it a microcosm of the much wider struggles of maintaining a public good: sustaining it while keeping its integrity.
When your service is small or not easily visible - while still doing significant good - it's hard to find enough people willing to spend their time and resources helping you sustain it.
When your service becomes big enough to be noticeable - which is the arXiv is in by now - it also becomes attractive to the people looking to subvert it to be something else, to enshittify it, and so the limiting factor in getting help becomes the risk to its integrity.
The power issue with platforms is a bit like with polities : sure, a platform might be great when ruled by an enlightened despot (and there's probably a survival bias here for the most enlightened ones ?), but that's only a small fraction of its life of domination, and what happens once the enlightened despot goes away (in one way or the other) ?
So it's probably better to not rely on platforms in the first place...
Totally agree, researchers shouldn't rely on ArXiv as being their only publishing platform. Also due to the rigid narrow format of the paper, each paper should have a page, to link to the code, link to the talk about the paper, etc.
It is unbelievable how much more communicative power a paper with a site vs just a paper on arxiv.
Revise.jl in Julia (https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/workflow-tips/#Revis...) also gives a really neat REPL development experience. It allows tracking changes to any source code file, module, even standard libraries or the Julia compiler itself!
Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).
I don't think being whitespace-significant is a "hard pass" dealbreaker, but as someone who's not a fan of it, I'd say this only goes a small way towards alleviating that - like most "choose your preferred syntax" designs. Even if you're a lone-wolf developer, you're gonna end up reading a lot of example code and other material that's in the ugly whitespace-sensitive style, given that:
> The verbose syntax is not as commonly used ... The default syntax is the lightweight syntax.
And most people in practice are not lone-wolf devs, and so the existence of this syntax helps them even less.
For anyone else who hadn't heard of this term:
> Neoclouds are startups specializing in AI-specific cloud computing. Unlike their larger competitors, they don’t develop proprietary chips. Instead, they rely heavily on Nvidia’s cutting-edge GPUs to power their operations. By focusing solely on AI workloads, these companies offer specialized solutions tailored to AI developers’ needs.
from https://www.tlciscreative.com/the-rise-of-neoclouds-shaping-...
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