sateesh

That is the point I am making: how hard communication is, grokking reality as whole are some of the core themes of the story (is what I felt). The movie doesn't focus on these aspects at all, maybe these are hard to adapt in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.

I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole. Also did you watch the movie first and read the story or the other way. I read the story first and then watched the movie with lot of anticipations, and was tad disappointed.

The article do mentions why they don't use multimodal retrieval. Also I think this approach is cheaper (compute wise) than multimodal retrieval. From the article:

  Multimodal retrieval does not suit this domain. CLIP-style embeddings wash out exactly the fine detail that matters in charts, tables, and annotated screenshots, and short technical queries ("how do I configure X") give too little signal to match against image vectors

What if the team they're interviewing for doesn't has any parents. I think probably it is fine to ask about their life/interests outside of work. But if the interviewee isn't comfortable answering those it is better not to push

I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.

If the article was intended to be an intro to "Raft" algorithm I would've agreed with your sentiment. But this is what the article starts with:

  Understanding Raft can be tough. In fact, I’ve seen   conversations recently on social media in which actual technical leaders of infrastructure companies demonstrate a lack of understanding (!). Point being, you’re not alone.

Anyway I now notice that the article was written in 2023, probably I'm being too pedantic.

privacy for one.

I don't know of how digital IDs are used etc. in other countries and how ubiquitous there usage is. (One ID I'm aware of is social security numbers (SSN) is U.S, but that is considered as PII data and usually companies take steps to protect/mask them). But citing that this is how it is done elsewhere is just an appeal to tradition/common practice and not necessarily addresses the points I had made.

What you are proposing is too sweeping, it is not just privacy that suffers. Making a single ID (whose attributes can't be changed) an entire identity of a person is a very risky one. This makes it a single point of failure and in cases like an ID theft, misuse the affected person suffers gravely, and onus will be on them to prove who they are, a Kafkaesque nightmare it would be.