~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
If you doubt the computer’s influence has made its way into every walk of life, you haven’t met New Hope’s Jim Woolsey.
For a decade, Woolsey has worked with the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmshala, India, to put the Tibetan language on computer.
The free-lance computer whiz has compiled a source book of Tibetan literature and also has worked to create a Tibetan computer keyboard for the exiles from that ancient Asian kingdom. In the course of his work, he’s met the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political leader since placed under house arrest in that country.
Both leaders are recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, the Dalai Lama in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.
“If the Tibetan language isn’t put on computers — because of the fact that there are fewer than 1,000 Tibetan typewriters in the world and they’re more expensive than computers –the Tibetan language might not be saved from being put on the shelf with all those other dusty, musty languages of the scholars,” said Woolsey. “This is its only hope.”
Woolsey’s work with the Tibetan Buddhist government-in-exile in India began with an interest in Tibetan literature.
Formerly a technician with various rock’n’roll groups in the 1970s, he would read anything he could lay his hands on concerning Tibet, then enter the titles of the books in a bibliography he kept. He was traveling both for work and pleasure, and decided it was time to journey to one of the farthest corners of the globe.
“I booked a 120-day round-trip ticket to India,” he said. “I threw on my backpack and went to India. I was coming in from the airport in New Delhi at 3 o’clock in the morning and passed a camel pulling a cart down the street. I said, ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.'”
He saw a sign for Tibet House in Dharmshala and decided to go there, even though he had no idea what Dharmshala was like or what awaited him there. His first trip to the Tibetan exiles’ home was a short one, and he later traveled to Kashmir, Darjeeling and Nepal.
By the time he returned to Dharmshala in 1983, the Tibetans knew him.
“Before I left, the Office of Tibet in New York asked me if they could have a copy of the notes that I had been keeping on my computer about Tibetan studies, mainly my reading list,” he explained. “I looked at it and it was a mess. I thought I had better clean it up. I wrote a couple computer programs to make it an organized matter. I printed it up and gave them a copy.”
A friend who was learning word processing wanted a copy and Woolsey also gave him one.
“He sent a copy to the Dalai Lama,” said Woolsey. “The Dalai Lama must have figured it was going to be published, so he wrote a forward to it.
“By the time I got back to the library in Dharmshala, I didn’t know anything about this. I got to the Western reference section and they said to me, ‘Oh, we’ve been wanting to meet you.'”
They asked Woolsey at the library what his background was and he answered rock’n’roll. They asked who his teacher was and he told them he didn’t have one. They asked if he was a Tibetan Buddhist and he said no. They asked if he wanted to become one, and he again answered no.
“I was raised a Quaker, and that was close enough,” he said. “They meditate, but they don’t call it that.”
At the Tibetans’ request, Woolsey settled down to begin work organizing by computer the chaos that was the Dharmshala Library.
Realizing the power of the age of information had fallen into their laps, the Tibetans decided he was to be their computer guru, and designated him as such.
They told him he could consider them his affiliation in the academic world.
The chaos inflicted on the Tibetans by the Chinese invasion of the late 1950s had not yet been alleviated. Books and manuscripts lay in unsorted piles in the library, so Woolsey’s computer was the perfect tool to help put things in order.
“Later on, in 1984, they sent me a list of letters to all the high lamas in the United States, from the director of the library, telling them that I was their computer guy, and would they please aid and abet me in my endeavors,” said Woolsey. “Of course, they sent them the letters before they sent me one asking me if I wanted to do it, which makes it a little strange.”
Woolsey returned to India several times at the invitation of the Tibetans. He had discovered in the United States that no one was working on computerizing the Tibetan language with much interest.
By 1985, he was acting as the consultant to the library in developing the language on computer.
Once he was given the assignment, he was besieged with students, one of whom was the abbot of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple in St. Petersburg, Russia. Tenzing Samaev was visiting Dharmshala in 1990, and Woolsey had arrived just after Tibetan New Year.
“This Tibetan brought over a monk and said ‘He wants to know something about computers,'” said Woolsey. “I said, ‘OK.’ I answered his question.”
The monk returned after the New Year with two more questions, and then the next day with two more, and then two more the next morning, and two more by that noon.
This went on for four days.
“Tenzing, in the true Tibetan tradition, formally presented himself and requested me to become his teacher, to accept him as a student,” said Woolsey.
The abbot came to this country in 1991 and went home with a computer and laser printer. With Woolsey’s help he set up the computer to work in Cyrillic, the alphabet used in Russia, and is now publishing the temple’s newsletters and other proclamations on it.
Norbu Chompel, director of book sales for the Office of Tibet in New York City, said, “Jim has done quite a lot. He’s the main person responsible for introducing computers to the Tibetan administration … He came with a lap-top and talked computers to several staff members. That’s how computers came.
“Before, we used to use typewriters,” Chompel said. “He taught computers, and then everybody got into buying computers.” With all the work he was doing for the Tibetans becoming known, perhaps it was inevitable that the Dalai Lama take more notice of him.
The Tibetan spiritual leader wanted to know what was going on with the development of Tibetan on computer, Woolsey said.
“A couple years ago, I was given the opportunity to brief the Dalai Lama about what’s going on,” said Woolsey. “We had some interesting conversation, but I feel that he’s got better things to do.”
The Dalai Lama had the pursuits of freeing his country from Chinese domination and leading his people in their exile as more pressing problems.
Aung San Suu Kyi also had more important pursuits to consider.
Woolsey met her in Dharmshala, prior to her house arrest in Burma (now officially called the Union of Myanmar) as a political dissident.
She’s been detained by the Burmese government for the last four years because of her political activities and her great personal power. Her father, Aung San, founded modern Burma and was assassinated in 1947.
She has followed in his footsteps in an attempt to free her people from military rule.
Woolsey recounted an incident at a rally in which Aung San Suu Kyi prevented a slaughter by the army of an unarmed crowd of 20,000 people. The army approached to smash the rally, Aung San Suu Kyi positioned herself between the crowd and the soldiers and halted the military with her words.
“She told 20,000 people to sit down and be quiet and they sat down and were quiet,” said Woolsey. “She out-positioned the army and did it non-violently. That’s the key, non-violence.
“She’s a very, very learned person,” continued Woolsey. “She really has the rights of her people in her heart more than worries about herself.”
As is the case with Woolsey and the Tibetans.
Woolsey’s source book of Tibetan literature is under consideration for Internet, the international computer-user network.
With his help, Tibetan might go from being an endangered language to one available to everyone who can hook up a computer to a phone line.
And that might bring an ancient kingdom into today’s electronic age.
“I feel that you should be able to leapfrog over the industrial age into the information age as an agricultural society, and perhaps be farther ahead than where we in the West are trying to get to,” said Woolsey.
Push a few computer keys and it might happen.
Originally Published: October 8, 1993 at 4:00 a.m.
Jim Woolsey, a hippie and early-ish computer hacker from New Hope, Pennsylvania, was an important and early force in the digitization of the Tibetan language. This interview[0] with him from 1993 is a fascinating time capsule, and interesting in its own right. He was a family friend and I always admired his singular commitment to this important and underappreciated work.
Powell has mentioned[0] that the Fed is unable to affect fiscal policy, which is the fastest and best solution to certain economic crises. Does this bring the Fed closer to being able to simply give people money?
If you get a lot of value out of the pull request view, you might enjoy adding partial committing to your workflow. Rather than committing entire directories or folders at a time, you can page chunk by chunk through uncommitted changes, committing only the ones you select. You'll easily spot those stray logging statements you don't want to commit. (You can also discard chunk at a time by using partial checkout/restore.) If you have, for example, two pairs of backend/frontend changes that you want to commit logically rather than simply according to their directory structure, partial committing is handy.
It's just `git commit -p` (and `git checkout -p`). It's not exactly a deep cut, but I encourage people who are familiar but don't use it to give it a try.
Even if you do benchmark something, maintainability can be more important than a marginal performance improvement.
I've seen this happen a lot with JavaScript, particularly in the last 5-10 years as JS engines have developed increasingly sophisticated approaches to performance. Today's optimization can be tomorrow's de-optimization. Even given an unchanging landscape of compiler/interpreter, tightly-optimized code can become de-optimized when updated and extended, as compared to maintainable code that may not suffer much performance degradation upon extension.
I asked ChatGPT if it understood the rules of the board game Codenames; it did. I described the board and asked it to play the role of the Spymaster, and it provided a pretty solid clue.
By coincidence, the median estimate and world population are both fairly round numbers: 20M deaths on a planet with 8B people. Put another way: 1 in every 400 people on earth died from this disease. It's hard to process.
I appreciate a provocative title, but I think the practical lesson in almost all cases is the inverse: fixing race conditions can introduce performance bottlenecks.
As an environmentalist, I have plenty of friends who are interested in degrowth, or even actively promote the concept. Curiously, however, none of them are interested in moving to one of the many rural counties in the US currently undergoing degrowth.
Something that people may not see immediately is that flatMap is more general than map and filter. Say, for a contrived example, that you'd like to filter out the even numbers in an array, and then double the odd numbers that remain. Instead of:
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].filter(n => n % 2 === 1).map(n => n * 2)
QuotaPath | Engineers of all experience levels | Full-time | Philadelphia, PA and Austin, TX | Remote OK, near either city gently preferred, US and Canada only | https://www.quotapath.com
Sales compensation plans can be shockingly complex. Too often, salespeople are forced to use unfriendly accounting software or to pass around buggy Excel spreadsheets. At QuotaPath, we’re solving this problem in a new way by creating a platform that’s built for salespeople, not accountants or executives. Onboarding to QuotaPath doesn't involve writing any code or any formulas. Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we’re working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users. We’re looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development. If you’re interested in having a big impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. At present, we're 45 people, including 13 engineers. We just raised a series A and we have a lot of runway and even more market opportunity.
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
I'm the co-founder and CTO, and you can email me directly at eric at quotapath dot com — mention that you're coming from HN :)
Some of the largest companies in the world are named after fruits, misspelled big numbers and rainforests, but even with that set of comparands, this seems a bit silly.
I've always wanted to explore the word2vec space to find the most sparsely populated region, then (assuming you can train some sort of reverse vec2word model) coin that word that the English language was apparently sorely lacking.
QuotaPath | Engineers of all experience levels | Full-time | Philadelphia, PA and Austin, TX | Remote OK, near either city preferred, US and Canada only | https://www.quotapath.com
Sales compensation plans can be shockingly complex. Too often, salespeople are forced to use unfriendly accounting software or to pass around buggy Excel spreadsheets. At QuotaPath, we’re solving this problem in a new way by creating a platform that’s built for salespeople, not accountants or executives. Onboarding to QuotaPath doesn't involve writing any code or any formulas. Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we’re working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users. We’re looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development. If you’re interested in having a big impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. At present, we're 29 people, including 7 engineers. We just raised a series A and we have a lot of runway and even more market opportunity.
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
I'm the co-founder and CTO, and you can email me directly at eric at quotapath dot com — mention that you're coming from HN :)