The Courier and the truck; complement and substitute Although people say “this time is different”, there is something in common. In the ancient ancient times, if you needed a parcel moved across the country, you hired a body. The good courier had good strength to carry the parcels, strong legs, deep lungs, and a tolerance for going without (too much) rest. Those were the metrics. Speed was a property of the person, so you paid for the person who had the most of it....
Long time ago I read a quote from Habu1(as shown in the screenshot): The true talent is the ability to carry on with passion, even when it probably won’t pay off. (not translated word by word) I was a teenager and it did not make any sense to me. How could passion be the true talent? Look at those geniuses like Gauss, Mozart, John von Neumann! What they have done is not something that could have been done by normal people....
After the huge attention gained by deepseek R1, I have seen a good amount of people immediately went to looking for censorships (which are expected to exist), laughed at it, and looked down on it. They totally missed the points and these behaviors made them look like slaves of their very own defense mechanism1. Deepseek did make some techonological breakthroughs. Indeed the censorship is a defect of such a great product....
Disclaimer: The author’s knowledge about the legal system by no means applies to anywhere outside of his homeland. But what is legal or illegal should be similar enough for the discussion below - at least for first world countries, I guess. That said, the author is not a lawyer and does not have accurate knowledge of any concrete laws. But one does not need to know (too many of) them for this article....
Ladder of abstraction Well the title is obviously a tweak of the “ladder of abstraction”. For those who does not know, “ladder of abstraction” refers to the classic essay by Bret Victor. I am kind of stealing this terminilogy for the reader to visualize climbing up and down on the ladder of abstraction to make it easier to explain the nature of different jobs. The main question this blog post deals with is:...