Let me share a hot take. I am deliberately taking this somewhat to the extreme, so please attack the idea not the person. Looking for thoughtful replies and good counterpoints, rather than language zeal.
Let's assume that you need to write a program with a given set of requirements, and that you have a magic wand that can instantiate a high quality implementation of the program in any programming language instantaneously and for free. My hot take is that you would not want to choose Go, and you would likely want to choose Rust.
The Go implementation will have higher memory and CPU consumption due to garbage collection, while still being subject to memory bugs. The Rust implementation would be as efficient as possible on the given hardware with minimum memory/CPU, and it would be immune to memory bugs.
In my view, the biggest challenge with Rust, and where Go wins, is the relative difficulty of writing in Rust as the language is significantly more complex. With LLMs this is becoming a non-issue, and we are getting ever closer to having this magic wand (I'd argue that for smaller programs the wand already exists today). The article advocates that Go has excellent readability. I agree that Go has trivial syntax, but given that it's so verbose, I actually find it easier to read Rust code. Its higher expressivity allows you to see the higher level intention of a piece of code more easily.
Many of the other benefits the article mentions for Go are equally applicable to Rust: compiler error messages are super detailed and a great help to coding agents, auto-formatting, a great language server, and a package ecosystem.
I guess from a pure language POV, one might argue that rust leaves humans with more opportunity to add abstractions that are too clever and too hard to wrap your head around. That doesn't feel like a strong argument, though.
Then there is of course the ecosystem, where go maybe has better libraries for some stuff (while rust may have better ones for other things).
Pretty much all of the AI weather prediction models are trained on ECMWF ERA5, which is kinda like a numerical weather prediction model run to forecast at t=0. ERA5 is historical weather data, but it’s a “reanalysis” of it.
Indeed, you can imagine this as some sort of advanced physics-based interpolation of various measurements (land stations, satellite data, ...) to fill in every cell in a latitude-longitude grid. This is not only used for ERA5 (training data for the models), but also to determine the initial conditions for every grid cell which are used to roll out the forecast. So AI weather models depend greatly on the NWP/physics used in for reanalysis and initial conditions. That being said, there is also research being conducted in training models straight from the raw data (weather stations, satellite, ...), thus bypassing the "interpolation" step.
Yeah. I can’t remember names off the top of my head, but there are a few companies, and I think many researchers, working on AI “data assimilation” for this.
ECMWF has an experimental AIFS direct observational prediction model (AIFS-DOP) that has become competitive with their physics based IFS model on certain metrics just in the past year.
I'm interested in understanding wheater prediction models because accurate wind forecasts make a big difference to my personal life (sports).
Is there a good overview to learn about the current models, which all just seem like cryptic acronyms to me? in apps like Windy etc.
WRF, TRRM, IK-HRRR-3km, ECMWF-9km,...
I understand by now that small grid cells are better for local prediction and that thermic winds are mostly missing from them all.
Ask your favorite AI to give you a crash course, but to start the main models you need to know are the GFS and the ECMWF. In the US where available in high res, the HRRR is excellent, but doesn’t forecast very far out. The PWG/PWE 1km PredictWind models are also very good at picking up land based features and other more precise patterns. If you are in the US everything else is probably not super relevant.
Any advice will really depend on where you live and the dominant source of local error. These are all good options for the US and if the one main source of error is near surface winds around complex terrain then you can also look into WindNinja from the National Forrest Service.
Historical weather data is discrete. You need continuous state for weather modelling which is currently achieved through conventional reforecasts using those historical observations.
> But it’s tough to engineer much these days. Instead I find I’m PM’ing the bots more than solving problems.
I’m genuinely curious about your perspective as I have almost the diametrically opposite view. I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally. The speed makes me feel, sometimes, almost superhuman.
Do you take emotional ownership in the shape output artifact itself, or merely that it works?
>I love chatting with the bots as they can build the thing I want, how I want it, much faster than I could. The output still feels mine. Maybe not line by line, but definitely architecturally.
The output, in my case, feels just as mine as the toppings I tell my local pizza store to add to whatever they're about to cook for me. It's tasty, and fills my stomach, but I didn't make it. I ordered it.
Ok. I had pizza last night. It was delicious. Most meals are packaged protein workout food. But I have a griddle and I love to make brunch, burgers, sliders whatever.
A lot of my job is really pizzas. Massive scale pizzas but still pizzas. God I hate making pizzas. Now I don’t really have to. That means I can focus more on a perfect burger. Or cooking a massive brunch for a crowd of friends. (Think: refactoring some giant hole that 5 years of pizza dug us, or rearchitecting an application rather than just porting it).
I’m definitely in the vocation not job position. I would do this even if we got post-scarcity utopia tomorrow.
I just remembered I used to make pizzas in college if they were short and I drew the short straw. Fuck me that was soul destroying. Much better to be working the bar.
Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one of those problems where the train is already running down the hill, and we need to engineer a way to catch it. We cannot stop it anymore.
AI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?
> so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively.
> In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening.
So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative, because...magic, I guess?
> So we're going to skip becoming carbon neutral and go straight to carbon negative
Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.
I am not saying this is a good option. I am saying that I don't see an alternative to get a world wide mobilization. Do you see China and the US becoming carbon neutral in the next 10 year?
The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary. With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.
> Yes, when the effects on the environments are so bad that there can be no denying anymore because they affect everyday life of almost all people.
I can't reconcile 2 things here. The effects will be so bad, but at the same time we will have energy abundance to go beyond carbon neutral and carbon negative. Have you ever lived in a country with famine or where energy/water is only available for few hours a day?
Do you think such country has a capability to have energy abundance for carbon storage.
> The annoying "magic" dig was unnecessary.
I'll decide what's necessary in my comments, thank you very much. Unless you want to get responses like "your entire comment wasn't necessary", to which I will not stoop to.
> With (clean) energy abundance you can indeed capture enough CO2 to make a world wide impact.
I've yet to see how that is possible from your comment. Maybe it is "annoying" to you to provide some arguments, but that's how discussions work between adults.
The last thing the EU needs is a higher budget. Unelected bureaucrats that control a trillion dollar budget and have the ability to introduce legislation that supersedes national laws, what could possibly go wrong?
Can we stop parrotic absurdly stupid "unelected bureaucrats" mantra? EU and it's bodies is not more "unelected" than in any other government body -- in the UK people don't vote for the PM, members of Lords or civil servants ("unelected burocrats managing money")… same goes for most of other countries…
Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.
There are two different questions. Are cables cheaper and is Starlink profitable in the long term?
Launching a starlink satellite costs $1.5-2M per satellite for the current design. Each satellite lasts around 5 years and they need 42k of them.
Do the math and you get $13B to $17B per year ignoring inflation and ignoring the massive ground infrastructure that is also needed (costing billions more per year).
Residential plans range from $55-175/month and will make up almost all subscriptions. Most people will get the $85 middle plan, but we'll round up to $100/mo or $1200/yr.
Breaking even with no profit requires 10-15 million subscribers.
As starlink claims to have around 12k subscribers and just 10.5k satellites, I'd guess the system is profitable.
The cable question is still compelling though. Rural fiber costs around $25k per mile. This means that an average $15B/yr buys 600,000 miles of installed fiber every single year.
My conclusion is that the ideal solution would be Starlink keeping total satellites closer to the current 10k number ($4-5B per year) and spending the other $10B/yr running fiber to new areas.
Their subscriber base would drop as new fiber got installed in rural areas overlooked as "not profitable enough", but stabilize at still profitable enough from travelers and truly inaccessible places.
The Falcon launch business is profitable on its own, which may be what GP meant. Once you include the ~$3 billion in Starship yearly R&D the space segment goes into the red.
It is what I meant. SpaceX has strong division between its operational and R&D arms, and Falcon launch has been insanely profitable from the first F9, even before reuse dropped their costs like a rock. They just invest those operating profits back into the company.
The word ‘crank’ is a dismissive insult. Wolfram is definitely eccentric, probably hard to work with, but also undoubtedly smart. What good does it do to dismiss him? He’s doing nothing wrong spending his own money the way he wants to. And who knows something will come out of this. Similar to GP I’d like to see more of this.
A crank is a real pattern of behavior where a person tries to prove things they don't have enough knowledge and intelligence to even understand correctly.
There does appear to be a limited walk back for dual intent visa holders (H1B and L1)
“A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, told Semafor that H1-B visa holders and high-skilled workers might not be affected in the near term.”
reply