Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age
Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.
To quote McEnroe, commentating Wimbledon this year: "Father Time, undefeated." Djokovic is mentioned in the article and has only just ended his dominant era, and is still ranked 4th in the world at 38. So we did get some very long runs in there, and I would imagine just 3 years ago or so people would have expected some mid to late 20s/early 30s guys like Zverev or Fritz to be having their turn. Both of whom, some asterisks.
Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.
Yeah, this article is quite funny in the context of today's men's tennis landscape, where an entire generation of players (90s born) were effectively blocked from the big prizes by being sandwiched between two generations of all time greats. Money is obviously an important factor in the growth and development of most athletes, but the article seems to be downplaying the importance of inherent talent and ability in sport.
A possible factor on your observation is females athletically peaking earlier.
Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists
Pretty important! More fans mean more sponsorship dollars, which mean better coaches, food, &c, which means better conditioning and training for the match, and thus a higher chance of winning and getting more fans and more sponsorship cycles.
I actually think it’s great. The level playing field can get a bit overrated. Hungary entrepreneurs will intuitively understand the parallels.
That was my first thought, but then again, players with a large fan base are more likely to get a wildcard into an event they don't directly qualify for.
Or players with that potential are likely to get resources investment earlier in the pipeline making them more able to perform well on non-subjective criteria
its possible tennis has become more of an established business now and players are being groomed by cartels as a cog in the machine, compared to the more self made outliers of the past.
I know nothing about tennis, but I think the general point still stands.
Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.
With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.
Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.
Okay, I will take the contrarian position. As I read this I kept waiting for the part where he somehow repays all the hospitality he has received, if not directly to those who gave it, then forward, somehow. Instead, all I got was new-agey rationalization.
To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger. It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!
The things he lists are not reciprocation. The paragraph strikes me as a long-winded way of saying, "It takes a special mindset to beg from others when you're not actually needy." Indeed it does.
One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.
Not only does he rationalize a life of asking for and taking from others, even the very poor, without any material reciprocation, but even admits that he is not sure he would have done the same for another person in his position.
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways.
No. The attitude of humility and gratitude with which one is obliged to receive another's charity is not itself a repayment. The social contract around this kind of hospitality is that everyone gives and receives materially; if you are taking now because you have nothing to give, then the expectation is that you will give to someone else later, not simply walk the earth taking and taking. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and we only all benefit if we all cooperate. Calling a person who takes but never gives back in a material way a "kindee" is just sanctifying the defector.
(EDIT: please note that I'm not advocating against offering hospitality, only against taking it with an attitude that you will neither repay it nor pay it forward, because just the act of accepting it is somehow holy.)
By these quotes, it was created to serve "a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system", and the service of help in studying the garbage traffic was offered in exchange for gaining controll of the address(es).
“Bridging the gap between PhD and SWE” would be a good subtitle for my career.
I started out writing software for scientists, psychologists, first at a university, then a small company. After eight years of that I went to grad school and got a PhD in CS (ML/AI), and did a postdoc, before going into industry, and eventually landed a role in what was then called “data mining”, later “data science”, then “machine learning engineering”. In the beginning when the team was small, we were all generalists, doing both the science work and the engineering. As we grew, specialized roles developed, but I was able to chart a course somewhere between a SWE and a scientist, doing a lot of knowledge work, experiments, measurement, and presentation, but also building common tools that the rest of the team can use.
I’ve been out of the job market for 15 years now, but I think any company that does science and builds software would value your skillset. In fact, when I was shifting from academia to industry, I started out determined to be a “scientist”. After all, what was my PhD for, anyway? But my SWE chops were pretty evident on my resume, and I had a hard time getting traction. Then I got brought in for an interview at a company that had a team of scientists and a team of engineers and they brought me in for a split interview with both teams. It was clear by the end that they wanted me as an engineer, but I was insistent on wanting to be a scientist. They didn’t offer me a job, and I was disappointed. The disappointment was educational for me, and I rewrote my resume to put more emphasis on my SWE skills, and that made it easier to find a role that fit me.
I've been at the same company, and in the same team/dept for all that time. When I started I was in my early 40s with a family and had moved three times in the previous four years, and I was certainly ready to stay put if I liked the job. It turned out that the job was great. We were a small and scrappy team, fighting for recognition in a big company, and we got the recognition and grew explosively. The comp and benefits were good, and the management humane. The growth meant I had opportunities to do new things. I became a tech lead and then a manager. As a manager, I got to see how comp, and promotion, and hiring, and firing worked. And I got a lot more empathy in general for the work that management does that ICs generally never see.
After a few years I got tired and somewhat bored with being a manager, and asked my director to move back to a senior IC role and he facilitated that for me.
TBH, I have always had my doubts about the narrative that short tenures are the norm in tech. It has always sounded to me like a misreading of the statistical distribution: if you were to histogram the length of tenure of every job (person+company) in tech over some period, of course there would be a big hump at the left end. That's natural, because they are short. I myself have three jobs of less than two years and one each of six, eight, and 15 (if you count grad school as a job). So that's 12 years in the the four shorter stints and 23 in the two longer ones.
You don't say what it means for you to have under-emphasized it, or what the consequences were, but my changes mostly consisted of changing the preamble of my resume to be clearer that I was willing to take dev jobs, though I was really only likely to apply in "sciency" roles.
When I said I was disappointed when I didn't get the job in the story above, what I meant was that I was disappointed that they didn't offer me the SWE job, and I kicked myself for telling them I didn't want it. But really I only knew that I wanted it after I didn't get it.
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.
My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
The status quo is not in focus, let alone I would defend it. Your concerns about the status quo are really valid imho, how they should be dealt with would be an interesting other subject, but they are not a concern for the conservative movement, nor are there any signs one could expect even unintended good consequences. As such, as well-intending you might be, it only adds to confusion.
The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
I think the broadcast license is restricted to EUR area. Proton vpn is free though. I recommend to take the hassle, it is a great historical documentary in three parts.
"git doesn't really work ... because docx is a binary blob."
Well, yes, but the binary blob is a zip archive of a directory of text XML files, and one could imagine tooling that wraps the git interaction in an unzip/zip bracket.
The real problem is that lawyers, like basically all other non-programmers, neither know nor care about the sequence of bytes that makes a file in the minds of programmers. In their minds the file IS what they see when they open it in word: a sequence of white rectangles with text laid out on it in specific ways, including tables with borders, etc. The fact that a lot of really complicated stuff goes on inside the file to get the WYSIWYG rendering is not only irrelevant to them, it's unknown.
Maybe the answer here will be along the lines of Karpathy's musings about making LLMs work directly with pixels (images of text), instead of encoded text and tokenizers [1]. An AI tool would take the document visually-standard legal document form, and read it, and produce output with edits, redlines, etc as directed by the user.
Diffing the XML is a complete nonstarter. I've spent years working with the OpenXML format and can assure you it is very complex even for a professional software engineer with 10 years of experience.
The diff of the document (referred to as a "redline") is what lawyers send to the client and their counterparties. It's essential that the redline is legible for all parties and reflects their professionalism.
Moreover, it is not enough to see the structural changes between the versions. A lawyer needs to see the formatting changes between the versions as well which cannot be accomplished by diffing XML files.
Correct. Solely relying on the built in Word Compare tool results in a whole host of version control issues, however, which I outline in detail in my post "On Building Git for Lawyers."
Git supports registering custom diff tools for specific file types [1]
Wouldn't the obvious solution then be to take the tool they already use for redlining (e.g. Word's compare function) and integrate it into a git workflow?
I saw this project on a recent hackernews comment and I had seen some comments there about how it does / can work decently with git features iirc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46265811)
I am interested to hear what your thoughts on recutils are and if perhaps we can have microsoft word/similar to git+recutils like workflow maybe
I thought about it and a tar/zipped git folder which can contain images/other content too which can be referenced with recutils instead of openxml/word document to me does feel an interesting idea
I am not sure but I think that openxml directly embeds data like pictures which can defnitely make it hard for git software to work perhaps but basically I am interested what you think about this/any feedback
You don't seem to be aware of any of the work I'm doing on CSTML (built to replace HTML and XML, and yes, built to be useful for legal documents (even though IANAL)). If you're interested in collaborating to go after the law market, let's talk! You're trying to sneak in a side door. I'm planning to smash down the main gates, the ones you say are impregnable. My investigation says they're not unbreakable, but instead strong and brittle. Many attacks will bounce off, yes, but brittleness means that these are defenses that will shatter before they bend.
Something I've started doing in my workflow is using Pandoc to convert between Markdown and DOCX when authoring long documents. This lets me put the Markdown into Git and apply the Gemini CLI to it. When referencing other documents, I'll also convert them to MD and drop them into a folder so I can tell the AI to read them and cross-reference things.
At the start of the project the Markdown is authoritative, and the DOCX is just for previewing the styling. (Pandoc can insert the text into a layout template with place holders.)
Towards the end of a project I'll start treating the DOCX as authoritative but continue generating Markdown from it, so I can run the AI over it as a final proof-read or whatever.
This is similar to what people used to do with DocBook, but with a more friendly text format and a more AI-friendly "modern" workflow with Git, etc...
If you only stay in hotels alone, it probables doesn’t matter that much to you. Quite apart from questions of dignity, when sharing a hotel room, there are practical conveniences: it’s nice to keep odors contained, and to be able to turn on the bathroom light at night without waking anyone up.
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