How are these even graded? Qwen3.6-35B-A3B gets high marks for a pelican with a gaping hole in its bill?

edit: Just noticed its feet are disconnected from its legs as well (but right on the pedals!). Pardon my French but that's Chinese af.

I think it's just that it's more of a visceral lizard-brain thing than a logical thing. Like how you can go through life eating meat every day, then someone sits you down and tells you the horrors of that industry and shows you a cow being butchered, and you go oh that's horrible, and then most likely put it out of mind and continue eating meat.

"It's the way of the future, it's the way of the future, it's the way of the future..."

History is rife with examples of "what's old is new again." Human nature and our psychological and social issues are basically constant throughout history. Good examples like this are always worth noting but, as you note, it's nothing very new, I'm sure one of the Greeks said something similar.

Getting it working was a "holy shit, we can actually model this complex real-world phenomenon pretty well with a few relatively simple calculations" moment. I went from a static blue skybox to a full day-night cycle just like that.

I was using XNA (Microsoft's C# gamedev platform) and following Riemer's excellent series of tutorials, which have been preserved here[0], but I don't see anything about scattering. I might have gotten that bit from somewhere else. I do recall reading papers with math equations.

[0] https://github.com/SimonDarksideJ/XNAGameStudio/wiki/Riemers...

This article[0] says "Data changes are usually much less frequent than queries, so incurring an initial cost of processing data into an index is a fair price to pay for instant searches afterwards."

Is that what you're referring to with cache replacement? There's no way to quickly update the index?

Wikipedia says "The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts."

I'm gathering that there are applications which are ok with that limitation? Generally there is communication and awareness between industry and academia, if everyone really needs cache replacement for it to be useful, why have they not attempted to account for it? What is the cause of the total disconnect you describe?

[0] https://blog.mapbox.com/a-dive-into-spatial-search-algorithm...

I mentioned nuclear physics because it's a wonderful union of theory and practice. The experimenters need theories to test, and the theorists need their ideas tested.

Contemporary AI is massively driven by research. There are a handful of influential papers from the past few years that have gone right into practice. Industry players have famously invested in their own academic divisions.

People like having a job and a paycheck and accomplishing units of utility. But kludging together some libraries and maintaining another CRUD app isn't all that important or interesting in the grand scheme of things. The Von Neumann architecture and asymptotic analysis are, though.

I will grant you that the current form of the education system, especially in light of how easy it is to engage with the primary resources nowadays, is massively inefficient and needs an overhaul to provide more individualized learning. Something like Alpha School is promising in this regard. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if a kid today learns entirely "on their own" with an AI teacher...neither them nor the AI accumulated that knowledge, and we still need that infrastructure of people contributing to advancing and refining the shared knowledge base.

Academia is about pure learning about the world in a very deep and philosophical sense. It's about underpinnings and history and giving you the abstract tools to reason about things. Academics are often aggressively against learning practical things to solve a specific business problem. Which is what industry is all about. I think it's easy to take a degree program for granted, but it's difficult to understand how your brain would be different had you not done it (assuming one did apply themself and attempt to get its value. If you just cursed it the whole time yeah it probably was a waste.)

You will learn some things through trial and error entirely on your own of course, but you will also take a lot of time independently re-learning things that are well known. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm a huge DIYer. Sometimes you have to try and see for yourself. But I do acknowledge that I could have learned a lot faster about, e.g., carpentry, as an apprentice, than I did mucking about in my backyard with youtube videos. I think the concept of "balance" is more important than taking sides on this matter. They're both incredibly useful tools to be used in conjunction. Read the manual. Then go muck around. Then read the manual again and go, "oh now I get what they were talking about."

I think what I'm learning from this is that a lot of the "entirely self-taught" folks don't realize how much they've benefited from "thinkism" and standing on the shoulders of giants.

And yet, the field of architecture is still highly valuable. Without those designs, there would be a lot more problems. Try building something complex without a design. You're going to waste a lot of time and materials. My point there was that it's not like the digital world where mistakes and trial and error and rethinking things can sometimes cost almost nothing.

Theoretical design is pretty worthless until you try it out. Until then it’s just an idea or hunch you have....ignoring all the years of trial and error that built a base of experience already

Lots of (smart) people have tried lots of things, there is a ton to learn from that, you're calling it worthless and taking it as an assumption at the same time.

It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...

The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.