I use Rancher for a hosted Kubernetes cluster on top of dozens of dedicated servers, and so far, it has been super nice. What are the alternatives for CI/CD for a small team (30)?
I'm really curious about the history of spaCy. From my PoV: it grew a lot during the pandemic era, hiring a lot of employees. I remember something about raising money for the first time. It was very competitive in NLP tasks. Now it seems that it has scaled back considerably, with a dramatic reduction in employees and a total slowdown of the project. The v4 version looks postponed. It isn't competitive in many tasks anymore (for tasks such as NER, I get better results by fine-tuning a BERT model), and the transformer integration is confusing.
I’ve had success with fine tuning their transformer model. The issue was that there was only one of them per language, compared to huggingface where you have a choice of many of quality variants that best align with your domain and data.
The SpaCy API is just so nice. I love the ease of iterating over sentences, spans, and tokens and having the enrichment right there. Pipelines are super easy, and patterns are fantastic. It’s just a different use case than BERT.
I feel sad and disappointed in Microsoft for letting the entire Faster CPython team go. I was a big supporter, always leaving positive comments and sharing news about their work. I'd figure the team paid for itself in goodwill alone. What a letdown, Microsoft. You ought to do better.
My concern is that it doesn't just change war, but security in general. I don't think that we have realized the real implications of this technology, especially the fiber optic drones.
> I don't think that we have realized the real implications of this technology
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
We as a society. I don't want to write down my detailed thoughts on this, but anyone with a red team mind can imagine the implications for personal security.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote down pretty bluntly what society might do against the vicious nasty foes of the world with drones, in Ministry for the Future. A book very well reviewed by for example Bill Gates. https://www.gatesnotes.com/books/science-fiction/reader/the-...
Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.
It's cheaper now, it's easier to pull off remotely, but most airports already were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It feels like the primary mechanism that protected civilian airports is that the weapons you'd use aren't easy to get, and states didn't want to supply their sponsored terror groups with that kind of weaponry because it'd be dangerously close to an act of war and very hard to deny.
Individually, you were never safe by default. Your safety depends on not being an interesting target.
So you know, if instead of being one guy he was a substantial portion of intelligence operatives of a nation-state with significant industrial resources backing him?
Ukraine isn't wealthy, but it's still an entire country.
Bluntly: nothing is safe from drones + a determined operator. No airfield, no aircraft on the ground, no government institution. Drones have changed warfare forever and Ukraine is writing the manual for future operations. What happened today was unthinkable 10 years ago. As one side effect I predict that at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal. Think about it: for a few hundred K you get to take out a good chunk of a nuclear power's strike capability.
We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.
Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.
> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal
I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
Won't the cat and mouse game ultimately tilt to the side of defense? I imagine automated rifles are basically impossible to dodge. Automated rifles sound much more scary to me. Plant a rifle and wait a year, works on people and drones.
> Won't the cat and mouse game ultimately tilt to the side of defense?
Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
I feel like this correlates with nations getting bigger over time and the square-cube law (or line-square law for national borders?) but I am not smart enough at military stuff to figure it out
I've read that it's kind of the converse - as military technology advances the size of a "minimum viable nation" increases. E.g. as gunpowder technology developed, anywhere that couldn't afford to field a gunpowder military got absorbed into somewhere that could.
On the other hand defensive alliances like NATO and the like pretty much work. A couple of centuries ago war was all over the place. These days most people never see it unless they deliberately go to a war zone.
You need a globe - an old school one, physical, a map of the black soils, population density and to remember how long it took Prigozhin to get to Moscow outskirts, with all the stops, interviews and scuffles with VVS.
To be fair, these planes were out in the open, protected by tires on the wings. If they were in simple hangars, this operation would have already been way harder.
I doubt they're claiming to have anything novel in their heads. It is like WWII where the militarily engaged people probably had a pretty good idea of what was about to happen as Europe descended into war. The citizens didn't really understand and there wasn't the level of diplomacy and panic in the early stages that the eventual crisis would have justified.
If the average citizen had a good understanding of what an industrial war looked like and what was possible, they'd (taking an optimistically charitable view) have spent the 20s and 30s being a lot more vigorous in trying to keep the peace. Like the efforts we say from the 40s to around the 2010s where people who remembered WWII put huge amounts of effort into not letting it happen again.
Real implications are that once again you don’t want your personal shit being public, which will still take some while for gen.audience to understand about social media and all sorts of corporate surveillance.
This is a common mistake and very badly communicated. The GIL do not make the Python code thread-safe. It only protect the internal CPython state. Multi-threaded Python code is not thread-safe today.
Internal cpython state also includes say, a dictionary's internal state. So for practical purposes it is safe. Of course, TOCTOU, stale reads and various race conditions are not (and can never be) protected by the GIL.
It's memory safe, but it's not necessarily free of race conditions! It's not only C extensions that release the GIL, the Python interpreter itself releases the GIL after a certain number of instructions so that other threads can make progress. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html#sys.getswitchinte....
Certain operations that look atomic to the user are actually comprised of multiple bytecode instructions. Now, if you are unlucky, the interpreter decides to release the GIL and yield to another thread exactly during such instructions. You won't get a segfault, but you might get unexpected results.
This should not have been downvoted. It's true that the GIL does not make python code thread-safe implicitly, you have to either construct your code carefully to be atomic (based on knowledge of how the GIL works) or make use of mutexes, semaphores, etc. It's just memory-safe and can still have races etc.
We already have. Chrysler laid off 3600 people in Canada due to tariffs, and 900 people in the US that worked at plants supplying the Canadian factory.
