It's closed, but the planned events are on-going till 31st of December 2026. If there is an event in the list that suits you're agenda, you can still see the museum.
(Do note I try to go to Berlin once or twice a year to visit friends - so the news of the (more impending than I realized!) closure of the Hoyerswerda museum simply made me get this fall's visit booked...)
I haven't been to the Deutsches Technikmuseum since October 2024, so I'll probably make another visit there.
I'm not familiar with Stellar 7, but from a gameplay video it does look somewhat similar. Funny you should mention tanks, because that same day I had Claude build a Battlezone-inspired tank game: https://linsomniac.github.io/tankzone/
In many markets the market is too consolidated and the consumer doesn't actually have an option that isn't a scam, but in those cases the solution shouldn't be to regulate the oligopolies while leaving them in place to buy off the regulators or weasel their way out of the rules with expensive lawyers, it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
In other markets there is competition, but in those markets the competition actually works. As soon as you have enough suppliers that at least one of them isn't scamming the customer, who is going to patronize the other ones by choice?
> it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
You could still have massive projects like semiconductor fabs and steelworks but they would have to be collectives of dozens of (competing) smaller companies. Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals but would it be be outweighed by greater market dynamism as no one company can dominate a sector and crush out competition and innovation?
Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
> I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
What you want is a maximum market share percentage, and for it to be something like 20%, with the market definition never including products that aren't actual substitutes for each other, e.g. the market is never "brake pads", it's "brake pads for Honda Civic", but that could still have a dozen independent suppliers or more.
> Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals
It's not obvious that this is even a thing at that scale. Economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) have diminishing returns once the fixed cost contribution per unit is already small, whereas diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, entity size exceeding Dunbar number, office politics, etc.) gets worse with size, and the latter comes to dominate long before anything reaches the scale of a global monopoly.
> Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Let worker salaries always be deducted in the year they're paid out instead of the existing nonsense where R&D money which is already spent can't immediately be deducted.
> Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
Why is it impossible to do? The US or EU alone or any large enough coalition of other countries together could make the rule apply to anyone who wants to sell into that market, because they have an economy large enough that either the incumbents would comply or having excluded them for not complying, the market size would be enough to sustain new domestic suppliers.
Sarcasm is the problem? What an insane take. You'll need to explain that one for us lol.
Perhaps you meant "their (sarcastic) implication that the only solution is regulation is the problem"? I would agree. I just chose one thing to use in my sarcastic comment and believe there are multiple solutions – I'm glad it's sparked a sub thread.
The nature of sarcasm is to put up a straw man so weak that it falls over on its own rather than needing you to knock it down. The problem, of course, is that it's a straw man.
In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good. But the problem there is the lack of competition rather than its presence, and the markets that actually have vigorous competition do pretty well.
I really do have to admire your determination to make sarcasm the real problem on this topic. Take my upvote!
> In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good
Voters have supported politicians that have implicitly or explicitly supported conditions to enable oligopolies: reduced r
or no competition/market authorities, weak M&A oversight, increased subsidies, regulatory capture, etc
What happened to VERIFYING an answer? Does nobody do that anymore?
When I ask an LLM, I trace the sources, and see if they make sense.
More often than not the sources don't actually say anything about the topic in particular...
> It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind.
Exactly. Which is why "treat an LLM like a human expert who can answer your question" doesn't work. It's more like a human bullshitter who makes up convincing looking answers, and tries to please you. If the answers have actually some grounding in the training material, that's useful as some kind of holistic google, but often it's not.
> What happened to VERIFYING an answer? Does nobody do that anymore?
The problem with medical advice is that you may not be competent to verify the answer, right?
I agree that asking 5 LLMs to vote and trusting the answer is totally the wrong approach, of course. But LLMs (and traditional material) can help getting more informed. For instance, instead of going to your doctor with the LLM diagnosis and trying to convince the doctor that the LLM is right, you can try to build your own understanding of the problem and go ask the doctor to explain to you what you understood correctly and what you misunderstood.
If you have some understanding, it's harder for a specialist to bullshit you. But you need your own critical thinking and you need to put effort into actually learning something, blindly trusting and repeating what LLMs say doesn't help.
Or more specifically in this case: the patient was obviously insisting on a diagnosis and treatment based on ... a slightly hurting shoulder, with zero visible or detectable phenomena.
So the doctors gave him what he wanted: a treatment ... and Claude told him the treatment was a placebo. Correctly, I might add.
Yeah, it is absolutely not what the patient wanted to hear. BAD doctors! Except ... no, not really.
Hmm that's not what I read from the article. The author says the opposite, actually:
> [the orthopedist] suggested I get an MRI, which the clinic conveniently had available. [...] This, of course, means little to me, but their suggested course of treatment was extensive; [...] Coming out of the clinic, I had the feeling they had jumped the gun.
The author also says:
> They injected me with Traumeel, which is registered in Germany as a homeopathic medicine "without a therapeutic indication".
I personally wouldn't want to be injected homeopathic medicine "without a therapeutic indication" without even knowing it is homeopathy.
And my recent experience with multiple doctors at multiple hospitals is that just like LLMs, you shouldn't blindly trust them. Sometimes they make mistakes, and in my experience they never, ever admit it (maybe even to themselves).
So trying to get informed "on the internet" (including with LLMs) feels sane to me, but that's worth what it is worth.
What concerns me in the article is that they have GPT make a diagnosis, Claude review it, and somehow seem to assume that if both LLMs agree, they must not be completely wrong. Just like for code, it takes an expert to leverage an LLM to take an expert decision. A beginner can leverage the LLM to understand the problem better, but they never reach the level of expert just from that.
Unfortunately it's part of lowering the confidence towards doctors, and the solution to that is to try and get informed and ask another doctor. And of course they don't like it if you say "I already asked someone else but I don't trust doctors in general, so I am now asking you to test the both of you".
Quite the opposite. The doctors are disagreeing with the LLM, and when the patient doesn't accept, they're putting in a minimal lie in the deontologically accepted way.
This seems to be to be near the opposite of what a sycophant (ie. an LLM) would do.
I've also noticed the opposite problem: Sometimes the LLM, when asked a detailed question (probably with some lead-in), pushes back in a way that betrays that they fell back to general tropes without really considering the nuances of your specific context.
This happens many times, and I usually have to lead the LLM through a chain of reasoning to prove to it that its objection, through generally sound, do not apply to my specific situation.
Someone not as well versed in the subject matter would think the LLM found a smoking gun (which they love to do), and be led on a wild goose chase.
As you say, often you check up on the LLM's "reasoning" and it doesn't follow at all, or you can easily get it to contradict itself with just as much certainty as it had about its previous convictions.
It is very scary to me that people are entrusting potentially life-altering decisions to these things.
Nope, and I actually learned about application of category theory to programming language in university.
I tried to get an idea about the main points, and then stumbled over
> a thing is what you can observe of it.
>
> [...]
>
> Content addressing is extensionality made physical (chapter 11): two values indistinguishable by observation are not merely equal, they are the same slot
That only works in a category because you have enough (a countably or uncountably infinite number) functions that you can compose and "test" so you don't need (or don't care) about the "value" itself.
But on a real computer that doesn't work, because you can't go beyond a countable number, and even then you run into the halting problem pretty soon. So equality in this model is not computable. Which is sort of bad if you want to somehow store values "in the same slot" just based on observability. It might work for string literals, and even for concatenated strings, but not in general.
Picking some random lattice (a lattice is a partially ordered structure with some extra conditions) as a base of addressing doesn't help...
So yes, crackpot AI slop. The words sort of make sense, but there's nothing solid behind it, and as soon as you look at details it falls apart.
And of course Rust and TypeScript were heavily influenced by Haskell... they just don't mention it and call things differently, to avoid the "monads are scary, I need to write a tutorial" effect. Though it's less about monads and more about things like type classes.
Rust's influence was OCaml, not Haskell. Its first compiler was written in OCaml. Its syntax directly looks like OCaml and C++ had a baby. It's got ML smells all over it. Haskell is not the sum of Hindley Milner-esque languages.
Personally, never enjoyed Haskell's syntax (or lack of it) and tendency to overthinking. But I did enjoy SML/NJ and OCaml to some extent.
Haskell type classes are not classes (like Java or PHP classes); they are comparable to Rust traits -- which are different from PHP traits which are comparable to Java/C# interfaces (with default impls; if you just want contracts you have... PHP interfaces).
A fundamental difference is that you can instantiate/implement a type class (or Rust trait) for any* type, compared to interfaces where each class declares the interfaces it implements. You can therefore create generic (forall) instances, higher kinded type classes, etc.
> Actually in modern Java you can simulate type classes approach with a mix of interfaces and default methods implementations.
Can you? The beauty of traits/type classes is that you can attach them to any type - in a world where 90% of the functionality of any piece of software is supplied by dependencies - external types which you cannot change - this is a vital feature.
Failing that, there are always Clojure, Kotlin and Scala on the JVM, which expose language features to achieve the same, which you naturally can mix and match with plain old Java.
Why the reference to “modern Java” then? Writing adaptor classes is not “modern Java” nor does it involve using “a mix of interfaces and default methods implementations”.
I was responding to your original claim and I’m well aware of such facilities in both Kotlin and Scala - having used both extensively. I was genuinely curious if the latest Java was in the process of adding support for trait/typeclasses - so I don’t understand why you’d bother to reply with something that completely changes your original claim.
The point is that algebraic data types are common in functional languages. "Maybe" is just an example of an algebraic data type, there's tons more.
If the article says "functional programmers should take a look at Zig", and Zig makes algebraic data types hard, then maybe they shouldn't use it.
If you even say "the annoyingness is a feature, use zig the way it is intended to be used" then that's another signal for functional programmers that they won't be able to use zig the same way they use functional languages.
zig doesnt make algebraic types hard. algebraic types are exceptionally easy and also safe. and unlike rust, named in a way thats friendly to c devs.
zig makes stupid metaprogramming tricks on algebraic types annoying (not hard).
so, being precise: zig is not necessarily annoying for fp programmers (my main tool of trade in Elixir). zig is made to be annoying for architecture astronauts.
Also, this museum is closer to Dresden than to Berlin...
[1] https://zuse-computer-museum.com