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Don't be put off by the reported high-cost

Make it possible->Make it fast->Make it Cheap

the eternal cycle of software.

Make no mistake - we are on the verge of the next era of change.


Great project and excellent initiative to learn about embeddings. Two possible avenues to explore more. Your system backend could be thought of as being composed of two parts: |Icons->Embedder->|PGVector|->Retriever->Display Result|

1. In the embedder part trying out different embedding models and/or vector dimensions to explore if the Recall@K & Precision@K for your data set (icons) improves. Models make a surprising amount of difference to the quality of the results. Try the MTEB Leaderboard for ideas on which models to explore.

2. In the Information Retriever part you can try a couple of approaches: a.after you retrieve from PGVector see if you can use a reranker like Cohere to get better results https://cohere.com/blog/rerank

b.You could try a "fusion ranking" similar to the one you do but structured such that 50% of the weight is for a plain old keyword search in the metadata and 50% is for the embedding based search

Finally something more interesting to noodle on - what if the embeddings were based on the icon images and the model knew how to search for a textual descriptions in the latent space?


A few items that did not make it into the list:

1) Adani is very close to the current ruling party and the PM - deploying his extensive business network and assets (in various forms) to help get the PM elected (2014) and then re-elected. A bit of googling will reveal the vast scale of politico-corporate nexus between these two - extending all the way back to when they were chums in Gujarat - the Indian state of the PM

2) The only reason the Adani Group has not been hauled up in-front of multiple regulators and law-enforcement agencies on a constant basis is because of #1 above

3)Adani ports seem to be curiously immune to investigations despite literal TONS of drug seizures [1]

4) There were multiple stories of forced resignations being used by the companies across its workforce to trim costs during the pandemic and avoid paying hefty severance per India's strict labor laws

5)A lot of the public sector banks in India are purported to be under pressure to not recall loans or issue fresh loans on demand to him - essentially a federal backstop to all his liabilities - enabling crazy levels of debt

[1] https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/adani-ports-says-its-termina...


The article has lots of factual arguments going. But it misses the 1) point you mentioned. Regardless of whatever people like to believe, that guy isn't going crash and burn, go bankrupt or anything like that.

It's fairly simple for the government to bail him out. They already did that to Anil Ambani. It doesn't even have to be a direct payout, there are always 'projects' you can give and pay them some 1000% extra money compared what it would otherwise cost. In other words a government(tax funded) bailout is easily doable and will be done, when the need arises. In many ways the party is just giving money to itself(Electoral bonds).

Just to complete the argument, don't expect any backlash against the government either. The current ruling party enjoys nearly 'no prior conditions' based support from their constituency regardless of whatever they do, no matter big a disaster unfolds. And this is going to be the case for the foreseeable future(think decades).

To summarise, whatever fraud this is, no matter how big the impact of this on the Indian economy. In fact even if takes down the whole set up with him. He is just going to emerge from this fine. And the government will bail him out without any consequences for them.


> It doesn't even have to be a direct payout, there are always 'projects' you can give and pay them some 1000% extra money compared what it would otherwise cost. In other words a government(tax funded) bailout is easily doable and will be done, when the need arises. In many ways the party is just giving money to itself(Electoral bonds).

I'm reminded of this: https://www.economist.com/asia/2022/12/20/can-indias-richest... / https://archive.is/zPgHY

> Many of the slum’s thousands of cottage industries, which churn out textiles, leather and metal goods by the truckload, will also be relocated within Dharavi’s boundaries, even if they may have to downsize. Those considered to be polluting will be excluded. Whatever former slumland remains will be for Mr Adani. Superbly located on three suburban railway lines, an upcoming metro line and adjacent to Mumbai’s prime commercial district, it could be worth 30,000-40,000 rupees ($360-480) a square foot at today’s rates, reckons Gulam Zia of Knight Frank India, a property firm.


India's case is unfortunately a lot more worse. The reason why this sort of corruption gets an easy pass is because the public is not necessarily against corruption. They like to imagine themselves as temporarily embarrassed 'millionaires' type of section. While the discussion is always on the lines corruption being bad, its only used in the context of looking better.

Pretty much everyone wants a government job, or any job where they can make money through bribes. Major Indian cities run dozens of coaching class cram schools to prep people for civil services jobs. Becoming corrupt is an aspirational thing in India. This is an elephant in the room nobody wants to discuss. Your ordinary Indian walking on the street deeply aspires to be corrupt. Only thing next to this is the desire for managerial jobs in private firms. Because this is how you get by life giving orders and not doing any work.

The only reason why the protests against the previous governments was so intense was not because of corruption. The overall polarising movement that started in the 1980s from the destruction of Babri Masjid means there is a long running and developing trend among India's electoral masses to consolidate on the lines of religion. This means other things aren't all that important. This also means to win elections, you need money from all these big corporate payers. Their corruption goes ignored, and in many is even perfectly acceptable.


Its more an inequality story than a corruption story. Corruption is always a side effect of inequality.

If an ambitious, energetic kid is born in a slum or some backward area and doesn't see legitimate ways to access resources/climb the ladder, chances are very high the kid will take shortcuts. That's the nature of high energy, ambitious people. These people, purely based on the drive they have, influence the behavior of the rest that surround them.

When such people are identified early, and given the right guidance/resources the outcomes are totally different.


When the only perceived options are to swindle or be swindled, what are people supposed to aspire to?


+100. The short sellers are going to find out, to their dismay, how deeply intertwined Adani group is with the ruling party. Call it what you will, corruption/nepotism/favourtism etc., the net result is Adani group and BJP need each other and there's no way in my life time the ruling govt is going to let it fail for all the reasons you mentioned above.


Adani also owns a majority stake in NDTV Group now : https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/indias-ndtv-f...


The AWS scaling series https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/scaling-on-aws-part-1-... gives you a very nice primer on this exact situation. You may or may not opt to use AWS - the fundamental concepts would translate well over other cloud providers or even on premises.

Then you can follow along parts 2, 3 &4 to scale up by factors of ~10 or more -

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/scaling-on-aws-part-2-... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/scaling-on-aws-part-3-...


This was somewhat predictable. I will be really interested in another piece of data. When we re-open fully (whatever that means) and people get back on the roads perhaps even more than they used to will it reset the waiting times because of excess collisions and more fatalities?


A lot of the suggestions in this post are "idempotent" only in the sense of the specific use case that the author is interested in. Please do not take this advise to be generally applicable for the uses of "idempotent" or in general to mean best practice while writing bash scripts.

The advice such as replace rm <FileName> with rm -f <FileName> could lead to Disaster depending on the scenario. So a HUGE YMMV


Finally! Now please also admit that the TouchBar is a colossal failure that only a few niche users grew to like and either:

1) Ditch it completely - return the Fn key row back but add button for Touch Id (a. la the new MacBook Air) OR

2) Invent a better version with Haptic Feedback so that Touch typists get a FEEL for hitting keys instead of moronically having to look down to ensure that they did not F* things up


The housing and culture aspects mentioned are the very small tip of the dark side iceberg.

Some of the other aspects: 1) The weaponization of profiling and targeting capabilities

2) Complete eradication of of the cultural notion of "Privacy" :- most people coming of age today think nothing of sharing the most private info in search of a few baubles (Likes, discounts, whatnot)

3) Pervasive and inescapable monitoring in every facet of our lives

In short - all of the preconditions are there for a venal system that might give rise to a (technologically)ultra-capable fascist.


[flagged]


Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


So we can't talk on here about how we have a President now that sees fit to strip away people's citizenship?

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturaliz...

We can't talk about how he's rolling back promises to soldiers to score political points?

https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d

How his DHS is conveniently losing documentation on children they've forcibly separated from their parents?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos...

Why do we see ourselves as separate from this conversation? Are we not people living with this? Seeing this happen to our neighbors? The people that serve and make our food?


It isn't that we "can't talk on here", it's that threads are flameprone and vulnerable to initial conditions. If the initial condition is, say, a cheap swipe with 'fascist', the discussion is likely to flare into ideological battle. That gets the blood pumping but otherwise benefits no one. Overheated political rhetoric, such as your comment contains, isn't much better. All it generates is more of the same, from people who either share your feelings or don't. None of that is in keeping with either the spirit of this site or its rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so it's off topic here.

What initial conditions make for good discussion? Two things: first, a substantive article that contains information rather than just rhetoric. Flamey rhetoric is a sugar high and our minds need something to chew on. Second, initial comments that earnestly engage with the information in the article (as opposed to potshots or pre-existing talking points). When those things are present, politicized topics can be ok for Hacker News. They can still degenerate into flamewars, though, in which case they become off topic again.

Edit: dismayingly, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which violates the site guidelines, and gotten nasty in the process, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323529 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323169, which I probably would have banned you for had I seen it. We ban accounts that do these things, for the same reason: it degrades the site well below the level needed for not going up in flames. Would you please stop using HN this way?


The initial conditions for this discussion were poor, granted, but these are real, tangible concerns. It's not something ideological or abstract for me when people fail to critique systems that can literally drag my friends away from their promising careers in science and technology.

The links I provided were substantiative evidence regarding the present administration's actions. I'll try to attach my substantiative responses to less flame-prone initial conditions in the future.

The tone I struck in the examples you cited was short, granted. I will do better.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.


All of this stuff is important, it's just not the topic of this forum.


I'm a Canadian, so no to your 5th question.


*for very loose and liberal definitions of "facism"


If you reduce your definition of fascism only to actual, original Italians and Germans in the 1930s and 40s, you completely disregard lessons that we should never forget, to remain always vigilant against the causes of that era. It doesn't somehow show respect for those who fought it then to shout down anyone who thinks comparable things might come to pass in our present time.

I understand you think it seems childish to accuse certain practices today of being fascist, but you must also understand that by the time it's clicking its boots and saluting a dictator in front of columns of tanks, it's a little too late to make the comparison in a useful way. Unfortunately it requires a bit of imagination to work with an uncertain future, as is always the case.


The touch bar is useless - worse than useless

1) No haptic feedback if I hit a key - did I hit it? just terrible for touch typists

2) Context switching according to an app - now you expect me to remember another whole new way to interact in addition to on-screen and keyboard short cuts - WHY?

3) Should I look at the keyboard or not - if not then why do the glowy keys on the keyboard keep distracting me? If yes then WTF is the screen for?

4)Do all Apple products have this or not? Why is there no external keyboard with TouchBar?

Complete misfire on Apple's part (Reference : Currently use MBP 15 latest version for work)


A large number of users are not touch typists and do not remember keyboard shortcuts. They look down at the keyboard when typing. Those users will love the touch bar.


Then don't call it pro.


I've seen many professional programmers typing with two fingers while looking at the keyboard.


I do this and even though I'm not a touch typist, there is a sense of position information about keys in my mind. However with the touch bar (I'm assuming, having never used one for longer than 2 minutes), even that sense will not help.


Is there really a large overlap between people looking down at the keyboard, and people buying a professional machine?


I think so. One of the best programmers I know types quite slowly, often glancing down. He's the author of some very popular open-source work. Many thousands of programmers build on his code daily.


I really miss touch feedback as well. The TouchBar wouldn't have been such a disaster if it provided feedback.


This is a very pernicious take on AI (and Amazon's usage of said AI). Amazon has hired 300000 professionals wohoo! more jobs!

All those jobs are poorly paid, very labour intensive have almost zero benefits and usually not full time. If AI is giving us these kinds of jobs for the many for the instant gratification of consumers then we are worse off NOT better-off.

Face it - the Advent of better AI (Robots, Driverless cars, etc) will lead to massive job losses and disruption of (currently) well paying jobs - the technology is advancing much faster than the ability of "blue collar" worker to retrain or adapt.

It is indeed a "massive failure of imagination" - of the author to understand the real world limitations.


If folks are interested in this subject, Kurzgesagt recently put out a great video on this subject: https://youtu.be/WSKi8HfcxEk


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