Yes, the thing Salesforce are good at, and is little understood here, is that they've kept their platform online for 27 years so far. Its constantly evolving, three upgrades per year, but changes that require customers to change their customisations are rare, and when they happen they are communicated at least a year in advance. Approx 150,000 tenants, all with different configurations and some so heavily customized that they are effectively unique apps. Salesforce keeps them all online and evolving. In those 27 years there hasnt been a 'lets trash this and rewrite from scratch' and there hasn't been a 'you must migrate your data to our new platform, we're closing the old one'. They've just evolved it while running. They must have got some things very right in the original architecture to be able to do that.
One thing that I find interesting is that they launched their platform language Apex (a sortof subset of Java) in 2007 when TDD was the hot new thing, so TDD is baked into the platform - your Apex code must have at least 75% test coverage, and the tests must pass, before you are allowed to deploy to prod.
They leverage that test coverage when they are upgrading the platform - they have an internal process called The Hammer where they run all customer-created tests against customers own unique configs on the current platform and then again on the next version of the platform to see if any customer tests are being broken. Look it up, its really interesting.
> They must have got some things very right in the original architecture to be able to do that.
I'd argue they (and many larger, older, established etc systems) may not have, but it's part of how it works so while it may not be the best it's the one that is working right now and earning them money - working (and earning) software always trumps correctness etc, in practice.
My favorite line, especially as an American because I can say it out loud without the person getting upset since they have no frame of reference. And other Anglophiles I could probably handle.
The idea that the snooker commentators are probably drinking is very Britain, and especially Britain from a particular era.
I think that series came out slightly after that era ended, I remember as a child (so years earlier) realising that snooker players at the time were often tipsy if not actually drunk, and also darts players, but by the time I was an adult the professionalism really changed that, turns out that if you're very good you probably are better at snooker when sober. I think the commentators, being often a previous generation of players, lagged that slightly.
Funny thing about vision, inside our heads, in our consciousness, it feels like we are seeing a picture. As in, we have pictures 'inside our heads'. But they can't actually be pictures, they must be data structures.
When our vision centres have analysed the incoming signals from the retina and processed it into information about edges, lines, colours, objects - does that then get reassembled somewhere to make the image we see in our heads? Its a very intuitive idea but that can't be possible. Because if your brain is recreating the 'image' inside your head somewhere, something then needs to look at it (and process it and break it down again to information about edges, lines, colours). But you've already done that! You already have the data, no need to make it back into an image and then re-analyse it again (see Dennett, cartesian theatre, inner observer, homunculus etc).
This is a simple concept but its very hard to get a grip on it, it is so against our intuitive feeling for how these things should work.
I have an analogy with computer games - imagine rendering a frame of a 3D game, Doom or something. The game has information about the 3D structure of the room, where the walls are, where the entities are. Then it goes to the rendering pipeline and that data is used to draw on a 2D screen, creating a 2d image. The light from that image then hits your retina and your vision processing centres break the image down into data again - the 3d structure of the room as far as you can see it, where the entities are, colours. That data is then in your head (obviously not exactly the same data that the game had, but some analogous data structure in whatever weird internal format the brain uses). And thats it! That data is you seeing it! (But no, you think, surely that data is used to recreate the image in my head somewhere....)
Things like the necker cube gives us a peep behind the curtain maybe.
I didn't vote, but my guess would be that it's because "aphantasia" (the inability to visualize images) is a popular topic on this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Some people see images in their head, and others (possibly overrepresented here) simply don't. My guess would be that a comment that starts by assuming everyone sees images in their heads was considered misleading and simplistic.
My confusion was slightly different. The parent comment was the top ranked comment yet grayed and continued to remain gray after I upvoter.
About your comment, I am very because I am not sure where I myself fall.
My mental imagery is certainly not so strong that I can claim with any confidence that I have one. My wife, on the otherhand claims strongly that she can see things in her minds eye and I have ample evidence to believe it.
Can those with aphantasia do rough sketches of some familiar object from memory of the object ?
There is a loophole in the task though. One can translate the visual imagery into words and remember them. Then one can sketch using the remembered words, not that different from the workings of a deep autoencoder.
It really comes down to the nature and geometry of the latent space. Is it a topological space with a topology less boring than a discrete topology. Is it spatial/geometric or symbolic.
If you remember the launch of IBM Watson in about 2011 it was meant to be this super smart AI entity and they demoed it by taking it on "Jeapordy!" and having it answer the quiz questions. To be fair, for the time that was kindof impressive but (if i remember correctly) attempts to turn Watson into something industries could actually use and pay for didn't really work. Access to it was tightly controlled.
Its interesting to contrast that with OpenAI chatgpt 3.5 which was launched and then immediately available to pretty much anyone and everyone. Would OpenAI have launched it that way if they werent (as they were at that time) trying to be open? (I get they arent really open but they were at least trying to be then). I guess I'm saying if the first chatgpt 3.5 level LLM had been built by someone less open like facebook or MS would the whole thing have gone in a different direction? Chatgpt being available to everyone seemed to set the pattern for everything since. Was this inevitable? Was it the only way these LLMs could have progressed?
I inherited a project two or three years ago which was consuming a Watson API. Obviously I didn't get a key, but I think they were only using it as a speech-to-text API. Really sad, actually.
I'm in the UK and it always seems weird to me how in the USA its totally normal to publically register yourself as either a Democrat or a Republican. To me seems like the kind of thing that should be private. In the UK I might choose to be a member of a political party but no-one needs to know that except that particular party. Or I can just join no party and vote in private on polling day.
It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. There are pros and cons for both systems but the US system is fairly unique globally aside from a few exceptions in South America.
Isn't it kinda internal here too? Parties get to pick their candidates how ever they want. The major ones have primaries, but I still don't know if anything legally requires them to respect the votes there.
It's weirder still because you often don't actually have to register with a party, even to vote in the primaries like other commenters have mentioned; it depends on which state and which party. [0]
For example, I just voted in the Minnesota primaries. Ours are open primaries, so you don't need to register with any party and the ballot has every party on it. Though, it spoils your ballot to vote in multiple parties' primaries. So you gotta choose, but you do that privately.
It seems quite weird. Our parties are generally quite weird because were are not supposed to exist in the first place and so most of the rules are sort of ad-hoc.
I don’t belong to one, but it is sort of annoying to not be able to vote in the “primary elections” (where the parties pick their candidates). My state has a strong partisan lean so this is the only election that actually matters here. Oh well.
Malcolm Walker, the founder and his son Richard Walker the current chairman are (for such an ordinary seeming supermarket) surprisingly progressive and have often spearheaded sustainability and corporate responsibility campaigns. Malcolm Walker was an active member of Greenpeace and Iceland worked with Greenpeace on several campaigns over the years.
Richard Walker tried to become a Conservative MP, but when no constituency party selected him as their candidate defected to Labour, who put him in the House of Lords.
Interested in this, but to work on an ipad that has youtube.com blocked via ScreenTime I imagine it probably wont work (unless you unblock youtube.com and the youtube becomes accessible via the browser). Unless they have found a way round this problem?
Yes — this is exactly how I use it on my children’s iPads. I install KidScreen as a Home Screen web app, block the regular YouTube website and other video sources with Screen Time, and allow KidScreen together with its `youtube-nocookie.com` player. The child opens only KidScreen and sees the shelf I prepared.
Its a way to make sure the delivery takes place. A code is sent to recipient and recipient only gives it to the delivery person once item is handed over. Delivery person cant mark item as 'done' without the code. I've seen Uber Eats do the same thing sometimes.
My signature on a touchpad is noticeably different from my paper signature. It’s been a real challenge for me recently as I’ve had to sign a number of paper documents while the “official” signature on file for me is an electronic one from a touch interface. A few times I have had to resubmit fresh copies when the first ones were rejected.
Sometimes I wonder if true reason behind them is not any sort of verification but to maybe increase potential punishment if caught... So effectively nothing...
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