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The power of proximity to coworkers [pdf] (pallais.scholars.harvard.edu)
Unsuprisingly less experienced coders benefit from exposure to more experienced coders. Interesting questions raised by this, for myself at least, * how do hybrid schemes work out: some home, some office, less commute overall? A HN submission yesterday on Australian studies showed remote work being mostly loved in AU, having little productivity impact either way for many, having significant benefits for for people with spectrum / social issues. * has any tried junior coder meetups with experienced coders "out of office"? Co working at one home or another, at public libraries, etc.
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>how do hybrid schemes work out: some home, some office, less commute overall? I think it depends on the type of work. I work as a support engineer for business stakeholders. Business stakeholders don't work in "Sprints", and always want to get anything ASAP. In that sense, if I want to maximize my value to the company, in-office is the best. But frankly, I don't like that, so working remote is the best for me, IN THAT PERSPECTIVE. However, I do love the snacks in office, and I want to keep my job, so hybrid works the best for me. The stakeholders get to bug me from time to time in 3 days per week, and I book as many meetings as I can in those 3 days, and bring a non-fiction just to breath a little better. I just wish Toronto has cheaper housing though, so I can live closer to the office.
Hybrid vs in-person is a meaningless debate. Once you’re hybrid, you’ve restricted your candidate pool to an hour’s drive radius around the office. The damage has been done at that point.
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Depends where you live - Australia has a lot of FiFo work, Fly In Fly Out on minesites and for various kinds of office work. There's certinly people I know that live several hundred km away from a capital city, work remote, and come in for two or three days to catch up with everbody once a fortnight, once a month, etc. It helps to have a wider PoV perhaps.
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Virtually all the "hybrid" companies I've seen have 2/3 day in-office, 3/2 day remote schedules for office work. That doesn't necessarily apply to say, the employees working loading docks and shipping, but a couple days a month feels different enough to justify its own term.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden (andyljones.com)
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Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.
> 90% of the horses in the US disappeared Where did they go?
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they grew old and died ?
Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
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Ctrl-F 'lines', 0 results Ctrl-F 'code', 0 results What is this comment about?
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Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...
So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.
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gonna tell claude to write all my code in one line
funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats. even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline. so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.
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Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution. Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an important role too but solving the "too many people live in too few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless) The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there. Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much. But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well
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It's interesting to see Cyberpunk 2077 became somehow relatable more and more.
>in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. Think of it another way. It's not that these things are more expensive. It's that the average US worker simply doesn't provide anything of value. China provides the things of value now. How the government corrected for this was to flood the economy with cash. So it looks like things got more expensive, when really it's that wages reduced to match reality. US citizens selling each other lattes back and forth, producing nothing of actual value. US companies bleeding people dry with fees. The final straw was an old man uniting the world against the USA instead of against China. If you want to know where this is going, look at Britain: the previous world super power. Britain governed far more of the earth than the USA ever did, and now look at it. Now the only thing it produces is ASBOs. I suppose it also sells weapons to dictators and provides banking to them. That is the USA's future.
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But the us is China's market, so the ccp goes along even though they are the producer. Because a domestic consumer economy would mean sharing the profits of that manufacturing with the workers. But that would create a middle class not dependent on the party leading (at least in their minds, and perhaps not wrongly) to instability. It is a dance of two, and neither can afford to let go. And neither can keep dancing any longer. I think it will be very bad everywhere.
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Yep. My grandma bought her house in ~1962 for $20k working at a factory making $2/hr. Her mortgage was $100/m; about 1 weeks worth of pay. $2/hr then is the equivalent of ~$21/hr today. If you were to buy that same house today, your mortgage would be about $5100/m-- about 6 weeks of pay. And the reason is exactly what you're saying: the average US worker doesn't provide as much value anymore. Just as her factory job got optimized/automated, AI is going to do the same for many. Tech workers were expensive for a while and now they're not. The problem is that there seems to be less and less opportunity where one can bring value. The only true winners are the factory owners and AI providers in this scenario. The only chance anybody has right now is to cut the middleman out, start their own business, and pray it takes off.
Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries. Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.
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> Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries. What do you mean? Several Asian cities have housing crises far worse than the US in local purchasing power, and I'd even argue that a "cheap" home in many Asian countries is going to be of a far lower quality than a "cheap" home in the US.
Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us. But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless. I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimised machine dominated bunkers. Sure maybe we'll need to throw a few food rations and bags of youthful blood down there for them every once in a while, but otherwise we could live in an economy that works for humanity instead.
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The thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is power and privilege , and they won't be getting either of that in those bunkers. They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us alone.
The universal weight subspace hypothesis (arxiv.org)
> Principal component analysis of 200 GPT2, 500 Vision Transformers, 50 LLaMA- 8B, and 8 Flan-T5 models reveals consistent sharp spectral decay - strong evidence that a small number of weight directions capture dominant variance despite vast differences in training data, objectives, and initialization. Isn't it obvious?
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Not really. If the models are trained on different dataset - like one ViT trained on satellite images and another on medical X-rays - one would expect their parameters, which were randomly initialized to be completely different or even orthogonal.
It's basically way better than LoRA under all respects and could even be used to speed up inference. I wonder whether the big models are not using it already... If not we'll see a blow up in capabilities very, very soon. What they've shown is that you can find the subset of parameters responsible for transfer of capability to new tasks. Does it apply to completely novel tasks? No, that would be magic. Tasks that need new features or representations break the method, but if it fits in the same domain then the answer is "YES". Here's a very cool analogy from GPT 5.1 which hits the nail in the head in explaining the role of subspace in learning new tasks by analogy with 3d graphics. Think of 3D character animation rigs: • The mesh has millions of vertices (11M weights). • Expressions are controlled via: • “smile” • “frown” • “blink” Each expression is just: mesh += α_i \* basis_expression_i Hundreds of coefficients modify millions of coordinates.
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It does seem to be working for novel tasks.
> So, they found an underlying commonality among the post-training structures in 50 LLaMA3-8B models, 177 GPT-2 models, and 8 Flan-T5 models; and, they demonstrated that the commonality could in every case be substituted for those in the original models with no loss of function; and noted that they seem to be the first to discover this. Could someone clarify what this means in practice? If there is a 'commonality' why would substituting it do anything? Like if there's some subset of weights X found in all these models, how would substituting X with X be useful? I see how this could be useful in principle (and obviously it's very interesting), but not clear on how it works in practice. Could you e.g. train new models with that weight subset initialized to this universal set? And how 'universal' is it? Just for like like models of certain sizes and architectures, or in some way more durable than that?
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It might we worth it to use that subset to initialize the weights of future models but more importantly you could save a huge number of computational cycles by using the lower dimensional weights at the time of inference.
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Prior to this paper, no one knew that X existed. If this paper proves sound, then now we know that X exists at all . No matter how large X is, one copy of X baked into the OS / into the silicon / into the GPU / into CUDA, is less than 50+177+8 copies of X baked into every single model. Would that permit future models to be shipped with #include <X.model> as line 1? How much space would that save us? Could X.model be baked into chip silicon so that we can just take it for granted as we would the mathlib constant "PI"? Can we hardware-accelerate the X.model component of these models more than we can a generic model, if X proves to be a 'mathematical' constant? Given a common X, theoretically , training for models could now start from X rather than from 0. The cost of developing X could be brutal; we've never known to measure it before. Thousands of dollars of GPU per complete training at minimum? Between Google, Meta, Apple, and ChatGPT, the world has probably spent a billion dollars recalculating X a million times. In theory, they probably would have spent another billion dollars over the next year calculating X from scratch. Perhaps now they won't have to? We don't have a lot of "in practice" experience here yet, because this was first published 4 days ago, and so that's why I'm suggesting possible, plausible , ways this could help us in the future. Perhaps the authors are mistaken, or perhaps I'm mistaken, or perhaps we'll find that the human brain has X in it too. As someone who truly loathes today's "AI", and in an alternate timeline would have completed a dual-major CompSci/NeuralNet degree in ~2004, I'm extremely excited to have read this paper, and to consider what future discoveries and optimizations could result from it. EDIT: Imagine if you had to calculate 3.14159 from basic principles every single time you wanted to use pi in your program. Draw a circle to the buffer, measure it, divide it, increase the memory usage of your buffer and resolution of your circle if necessary to get a higher precision pi. Eventually you want pi to a billion digits, so every time your program starts, you calculate pi from scratch to a billion digits. Then, someday, someone realizes that we've all been independently calculating the exact same mathematical constant! Someone publishes Pi: An Encyclopedia (Volume 1 of ∞). It becomes inconceivably easier to render cones and spheres in computer graphics, suddenly! And then someone invents radians, because now that we can map 0..360° onto 0..τ, and no one predicted radians at all but it's incredibly obvious in hindsight. We take for granted knowledge of things like Pi, but there was a time when we did not know it existed at all. And then for a long time it was 3. And then someone realized the underlying commonality of every circle and defined it plainly, and now we have Pi Day, and Tau Day, because not only do we know it exists, but we can argue about it. How cool is that! So if someone has discovered a new 'constant', then that's always a day of celebration in my book, because it means that we're about to see not only things we consider "possible, but difficult" to instead be "so easy that we celebrate their existence with a holiday", but also things that we could never have remotely dreamed of before we knew that X existed at all.
They are analyzing models trained on classification tasks. At the end of the day, classification is about (a) engineering features that separate the classes and (b) finding a way to represent the boundary. It's not surprising to me that they would find these models can be described using a small number of dimensions and that they would observe similar structure across classification problems. The number of dimensions needed is basically a function of the number of classes. Embeddings in 1 dimension can linearly separate 2 classes, 2 dimensions can linearly separate 4 classes, 3 dimensions can linearly separate 8 classes, etc.
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The analysis is on image classification, LLMs, Diffusion models, etc.
I have a real soft spot for the genetic algorithm as a result of reading Levy's "Artificial Life" when I was a kid. The analogy to biological life is more approachable to my poor math education than neural networks. I can grok crossover and mutation pretty easily. Backpropagation is too much for my little brain to handle.
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> Backpropagation is too much for my little brain to handle. I just stumbled upon a very nice description of the core of it, right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M&t=133s Almost all talks by Geoffrey Hinton (left side on https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/ ) are in very approachable if you're passingly familiar with some ML.
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Backprop is learnable through karpathy videos but it takes a lot of patience. The key thing is the chain rule. Get that and the rest is mostly understanding what the bulk operations on tensors are doing (they are usually doing something simple enough but so easy to make mistakes)
Wouldn't this also mean that there's an inherent limit to that sort of model?
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Not strictly speaking? A universal subspace can be identified without necessarily being finite. As a really stupid example: the sets of integers less than 2, 8, 5, and 30 can all be embedded in the set of integers less than 50, but that doesn’t require that the set of integer is finite. You can always get a bigger one that embeds the smaller.
What's the relationship with the Platonic Representation Hypothesis?
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Same hat, except 18 months later, assuming it survives peer review, reproduction, etc. (or: "The newer one proposes evidence that appears to support the older one.") https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987
Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far (grocerydive.com)
I had a wonderful retro futuristic dream about an automated Costco warehouse a few weeks ago. It was one of the less weird dreams so I still remember it clearly. Basically, each section is like a closed areas with some windows. Customers order at the computers by the windows and flash their membership cards. Robots glide left and right to move 10 samples to the customer, in an arm with rotating clips. Customers can press a button to rotate the samples, observe them, and place an order by pressing a button. Samples not chosen are temporarily stocked at the window as a “stack”. In each closed section, there are humans who monitors and maintains the robots, and occasionally fetch samples when robots stop working (hopefully it too often, you know those 9s). At the exit, a human worker assembles the packages and hand them to the customers with a smile. Customers have a last chance to return unwanted items. Why was it a retro futuristic dream? Because the customers have the option to go into a bakery to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea, some cake and socialize with fellow customers. All of them looked like the men and women from advertisement from Fallout 4. I’d like to shop or even help build one of these.
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That was Best store in the 1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Products
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What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well. [1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-pictures1949/
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You've reinvented the Soviet grocery store, but with robots instead of people and with a $7 cup of coffee.
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I remember those stores as I came from a similar background. One vital difference is that they all have workers who have a straight face and don’t give it a fuck about customer service. Then in the 90s they were all washed away by the new ones.
I thought about this a lot with parking spaces, nobody like big, open, tree-less parking lots. Why not just build them up adjacent to the grocery store. The answer is $. It costs too much and land is cheaper than building up (In most places).
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All recent HEBs have dedicated grocery pickup staging space. I chatted with a staffer once. It is like its own little grocery store where they keep selections of hot, cold and room temperature bags of selected groceries temperature controlled until the orderer comes and they put them together and bring them out. The ones in Bellaire and Meyerland are two level with parking (aka flooding space) below the store and a smaller parking lot on the second level with the store. Bellaire also has a fancy fuel cell setup for some reason. The single level HEB in Montrose(ish) was built into the site of an old complex of charming but nearly abandoned standalone quad/duplexes with many mature oaks. They seem to have retained nearly all of the trees on the grounds in greenspaces within the parking lot and entryway. Here's some street view of Montrose. They also had a bike air and repair system when it opened. I'm not certain if it stayed in good repair itself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KxHAvDqKca4E8L8a7
Then put the warehouse on the first floor and put the store on top. Lots of big cities have grocery stores with parking garages under them, doesn’t seem much different.
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Inner city high rise construction is entirely different from tip-up and bolt together single-story box stores in the suburbs.
TIL Ocado is supposed to be an automation/robotics co. I associate it more with delivery vans that seem to be in no particular hurry (unlike uber eats / DPD / UPS etc)
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it's just a wheeled bot that's driven by a joystick by some offshore person /s
McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.
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Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.
I love it when people invent things to force everyone perform self service and call it 'progress'.
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I like it, I order on my phone before I get to the place and just pick it up. Any reason to like the old way is just nostalgia in my head.
I watched a show over 20 years ago that showed a fully automated robotic kitchen at McDonalds. I can only assumed they have continued to evolved it and perfect it as the technology has improved. I think it’s simply a question of when it hits the tipping point on cost. There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.
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I imagine kitchen robots are harder than they might sound. Kitchens are rough environments for machines. They are hot, greasy, and steamy. And everything that comes in contact with food needs to be able to be taken apart, washed, and sanitized at least daily.
Sounds like they just put them in the wrong places. > Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw. > “Ultimately those were hard places to make this model work,” said Fenyo. “You didn’t have enough people ordering, and you had a fair amount of distance to drive to get the orders to them. And so ultimately, these large centers were just not processing enough orders to pay for all that technology investment you had to make.”
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“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway” In the AI analogy, never underestimate the productivity of a human when dealing with a giant pile of groceries. You can throw all the AI and robots you can at something but sometimes a $20 an hour human picking from stacks of goods and produce simply destroys it in raw economics
But I think in the cities Kroger grocery stores serve as the fulfilment centers, so they don't need robotic ones. There's probably still room for automation, but it might have to be different than warehouse automation.
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Using a retail store for fulfillment means orders are accepted for items that are out of stock. the ordering system doesn't have reliable inventory info. Then the customer gets a partial shipment. This is the curse of Safeway grocery ordering.
I like not going to the store more. Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections. It might be difficult to transition that particular incentive to robots, but the point is that delivery items don't have to suck. The only thing I really still pick out by hand every time are beef briskets. Pork shoulders tend to be uniform enough that randomly picking a cryovac works out, but there's a good bit of variation in brisket that makes a difference with the final product, at least when the brisket is prepared with a smoker. YMMV
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>Because tips are important to the income of delivery shoppers, I find that I generally get good produce selections Wait, you tip to get a good selection of produce to be delivered to you? This is very bizarre to me.
Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks (blockclubchicago.org)
The escooters also are supposedly equipped with cameras and other deterants. Has anyone ever gotten in trouble for kicking them in to a bush when they are in the way?
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A few years ago I was visiting a friend of mine in Ft. Lauderdale. We wanted some scooters to ride around on but there were none near him, so we drove and grabbed some off the sidewalk in downtown and threw them in the drunk and went back to his house. Heh they were beeping and vibrating like how you’d imagine some AGI would while being kidnapped. When we got them out at his house we scanned using the app and they unlocked no problem. (I think these were Lime scooters)
I had this exact same experience in ravenswood this weekend. I was walking to breakfast and one of these bots was blocking the entirety of the shoveled part of the sidewalk. I had to make may way into the snow to inch around the bot just so I could continue to use the sidewalk. I had guessed it was stopped because it came to an unshoveled portion of the sidewalk. If it can't traverse that, it's not made for this city I'm not fundamentally mad as these bots. But if they don't figure out how to make them work with other pedestrians, then I'm going to start cheering on any vandalism delivered upon them.
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Shoulda knocked it over to make room. Can't wait for the ADA lawsuits.
Valid points by those concerned with taking over the sidewalks. I will also say, people riding electric scooters shouldn't be zooming along at 20mph (or pedal bikes) on sidewalks either, which are a true safety hazard. And on the other side, much better for our environment, to have a lighter weight robot delivering a burrito than a 2,000lb vehicle, in terms of net energy consumption/expenditure.
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The economies of scale of a 2,000 lb (electric) vehicle are probably such that they use far less carbon than an individual delivery robot on a per-delivery basis
God forbid someone would use their own two legs to walk and eat that burrito at the restaurant /s The extend to which some people get food delivered is absurd. I'm sure there exceptions and reasons and everything, but seriously.
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> extend to which some people get food delivered is absurd More than getting uppity online about others' personal dining choices?
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help (blog.jim-nielsen.com)
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Simply put: icons in menus are helpful to me. Deal with it.
Somewhat tangential: > What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines (as pointed out to me by Peter Gassner). > They have an entire section in their 2005 guidelines titled “Using Symbols in Menus” 2005?? Guidelines evolve.
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Here's from 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027235952/https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/menu-anatomy/ > Use text, not icons, for menu titles. Only menu bar extras use icons to represent menus. See Menu Bar Extras. It’s also not acceptable to use a mixture of text and icons in menu titles. > Avoid using custom symbols in menus. People are familiar with the standard symbols. Using nonstandard symbols introduces visual clutter and could confuse the user. The notable thing here is how recent of a shift this is, and how longstanding the prior rule was. Navigating internet archive is slow/tedious, but I think the rule/guideline was explicitly called out in the guidelines up until a year or two ago. So it was probably the guideline for ~20 years on macOS and has just now been changed.
I could care less! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22820457 https://web.archive.org/web/20150406073147/https://jarrettheather.com/wordcrimes/
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https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-less-is-not-as-irrational-or-ungrammatical-as-you-might-think.html I tend to assume that anyone who objects to “I could care less” has never lived in the New York City area. See the mention of Yiddish in the above link. But for some who object to it, that’s the issue: it’s a shibboleth of a culture they’re not part of.
This a really interesting and persuasive read for me. I've been thinking about this topic as part of brainstorming a simple design system and I had come to the conclusion that the inconsistency of not having icons for every menu item was a big annoyance. After seeing how descriptive the icons are in older menu examples compared to the abstract blobs in newer menus, I have to admit I might be wrong. At the very least, ensuring that the icons themselves are as illustrative as possible about the intended outcome of its selection is necessary. It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. Microsoft Office has the Autosave toggle switch that serves some of this purpose, but it could definitely be better. I also think about the Zune UI where sometimes a menu consisted only of the icons. How do you enable unique menu designs like Zune without icons for everything?
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>It also makes me think about the classic Save icon: the floppy disk. That was certainly descriptive at its origination, but is it still so? In the age of natively storing documents in the cloud or copying to a USB drive, it seems like we might want more than one save menu or an appropriate icon for where the file resides on the single Save menu item. It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes. Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion. Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it. Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.
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