MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-03 21:31:25+00:00
> They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it "explain itself"?

I can't believe we're still going over this, few months into 2025. Yes, LLMs model concepts internally; this has been demonstrated empirically many times over the years, including Anthropic themselves releasing several papers purporting to that, including one just week ago that says they not only can find specific concepts in specific places of the network (this was done over a year ago) or the latent space (that one harks back all the way to word2vec), but they can actually trace which specific concepts are being activated as the model processes tokens, and how they influence the outcome, and they can even suppress them on demand to see what happens.

State of the art (as of a week ago) is here: https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-mod... - it's worth a read.

> The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it!

That "optimize" there is load-bearing, it's only missing "just".

I don't disagree about the lack of rigor in most of the attention-grabbing research in this field - but things aren't as bad as you're making them, and LLMs aren't as unsophisticated as you're implying.

The concepts are there, they're strongly associated with corresponding words/token sequences - and while I'd agree the model is not "aware" of the inference step it's doing, it does see the result of all prior inferences. Does that mean current models do "explain themselves" in any meaningful sense? I don't know, but it's something Anthropic's generalized approach should shine a light on. Does that mean LLMs of this kind could, in principle, "explain themselves"? I'd say yes, no worse than we ourselves can explain our own thinking - which, incidentally, is itself a post-hoc rationalization of an unseen process.
by defen | 2025-04-03 21:31:43+00:00
Does it matter if they did or didn't? Universities have indisputably lost the mandate of heaven, have they not? Arguing over whether they actually did any of those things is irrelevant, if a politically powerful group of people think they did! None of them have an objective definition, so it's going to come down to values, and universities / academics as a class have alienated themselves from a substantial portion of the population.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-03 21:31:47+00:00
Part of the smoothness here is that scrolling the text is 1:1 once you get down to the sections with colored headers. It demonstrates that it's possible to make a page look fancy like that without "breaking" your intuition of what scrolling "should be."

JS animations obviously don't take the place of video/audio media that you'd play/scrub through.
by creer | 2025-04-03 21:31:51+00:00
> I'm interested in this as a faster intervention than QE.

But BI / UBI's usual argument is that because it would be long term and reliable, it would allow the recipients to make long term choices. Such as taking on an occupation they like rather than one that pays better.

If you make this an intervention medium, you loose this predictability.

The intervention style you discuss has been used during the Covid crisis: just mail checks to people based on last known year income. That's always available. It's not a question of basic income.
by rybosome | 2025-04-03 21:31:58+00:00
Ok - not wrong at all. Now take that feedback and put it in a prompt back to the LLM.

They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback. And when you can describe good code faster than you can write it - for instance it uses a library you’re not intimately familiar with - this kind of coding can be enormously productive.
by mmooss | 2025-04-03 21:32:48+00:00
> You believe it is only the people currently working in manufacturing that want to see America create more manufacturing jobs?

I think working people [edit: a very general, loaded term] want higher-paying jobs, and some of them think manufacturing is good solution. I doubt their dream is working on the assembly line - that's not what people grow up dreaming of, or quit their higher-paying jobs to do.

Political leaders push manufacturing jobs for one reason or another. And I expect much of the support is from unions that want more jobs for their members - so yes, that's people currently in manufacturing.

Is there really demand for manufacturing jobs from the rest of the labor force, rather than any higher-paying, stable job? I don't know.
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-03 21:32:51+00:00
"Disappeared" does strongly imply that those people are dead, because that's what usually to happen to people that the government decides to kidnap.

But then, that's what usually happen to the people that the government decides to kidnap. So the OP's usage is perfectly correct, and the expectation that those people are dead should exist. Including the people that we know that were sent to the concentration camp, because despite nobody claiming it's an extermination camp the leading one does strongly tend to morph into the later.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 21:33:13+00:00
Dedicated memory isn't the issue. Increase DRAM on your card and your bandwidth goes down; increase the bandwidth and your price increases reciprocally. The solution isn't to just solder more memory anywhere it fits, these are well-paid engineers that are working to optimize a complex problem space. The Chinese board fluxers are working with a different class of hardware that regularly ships with dark silicon, binned hardware and die-chopped configurations.

You'll note that Apple didn't just immediately resume shipping systems with 1.5TB of RAM when they revised their own system architecture. It's taken them half a decade to recoup a third of that capacity at the VRAM-level speeds they require to unify the GPU and CPU's memory.
by oa335 | 2025-04-03 21:33:19+00:00
USAID absolutely is an element of the "deep state" in the countries in which it operates.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZunZuneo

Even if without cover CIA involvement, they operates parallel social services that don't answer to a foreign government to advance a foreign governments priorities.

Every Pakistani I talked to (living in Pakistan) has a negative view USAID and foreign NGOs. Why do you think that would be?
by Quarrelsome | 2025-04-03 21:33:21+00:00
This is absolutely shocking. As these tariffs are reflective of trade deficits this administration is taxing the cheapest sources of goods for the American economy in proportion of volume.

This is economic handbrake territory. It will impact every industry that imports goods (as well as many raw materials and components) and will devestate many, if not all SMEs who rely on importing goods to sell to local customers. Fashion retail in particular and drop shippers will have to raise their prices considerably.

While I imagine the ideas behind these tariffs have some sense of justification, the numbers simply don't add up. Manufacturing clothing in the US simply isn't viable at the sorts of scales for mass consumption. For example, you can pick up Levis at Walmart for around $25 that have been manufactured abroad. The Levi Vintage run, which are made within the US, have prices starting at $150. So all this will do is force people will less money to spend an extra ~50% (or $12.5 in this case) on their jeans, as this will still be cheaper than $150. Obviously to entirely succeed at the supposed aim would to create a world where all jeans cost $150 and this would simply mean that most people would not be able to afford jeans.
by popalchemist | 2025-04-03 21:33:22+00:00
While you broadly make a great point, there are psychological dimensions to take into consideration. Some people's personalities are more inclined toward tribalistic thinking and will extend their capacity for empathy only toward their own in-group, while others are capable of expanding the "in-group" to include all of humanity. So while it may be true to say that Republicans care about human rights, it is more accurate to say they care about their OWN human rights, and not the rights of people outside their in-group.

If you want to remove the political labeling from this statement, about 30% of the population "thinks" (or, rather, does not think, but acts) this way, and it is important to realize that the motivating factor differs between them and the other type of human, who cares about people in the abstract.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-03 21:33:29+00:00
>I'm not convinced that AI will ever be good enough to think independently a

and

>Why do you believe that?

What takes less effort, time to deploy, and cost? I mean there is at least some probability we kill ourselves off with dangerous semi-thinking war machines leading to theater scale wars to the point society falls apart and we don't have the expensive infrastructure to make AI as envisioned in the future.

With that said, I'm in the camp that we can create AGI as nature was able to with a random walk, we'll be able to reproduce it with intelligent design.
by dimakrivolap | 2025-04-03 21:34:06+00:00
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by ALLTaken | 2025-04-03 21:34:08+00:00
I remember when google news was fined be the EU for just linking and using some preview + trailer text to actual news websites. The news are owned by a few monopolies and they don't like giving up control.

I received so many Copyright and DMCA takedowns for early youtube videos posted in the early 2010's for no reason except some background music blaring a hit. It had millions of views and NO ADs. Now the ad-infested copies with whatever tricks they use can still be found, while my videos predating all had to be deleted. Google. You like their product? Don't like it too much, it may cease to exist, or maybe just for you for arbitrary reasons and simultaneously remove your access to hundreds of websites via their monopoly on Single-Sign-On.

Then there are those takedown notices for honest negative reviews on Google Maps by notorious companies having accumulated enough money via scams that they now can afford to hire lawyers. These lawyers use their tools and power to manipulate the factual scoring into a "cleansed one".

OpenAI seriously has not received any court orders from all the movie studios in the world? How is that even possible?

I previously posted in a comment that I have video evidence with a friend being eye witness how OpenAI is stealing data. How? Possibly by abusing access granted by Microsoft.

Who is still defending OpenAI and why? There are so many highly educated and incredibly smart people here, this is one of the most glaring and obvious hardcore data/copyright violations, yet OpenAI roams free. It's also the de-facto most ClosedAI out there.

OpenAI is: - Accessing private IP & data of millions of organisations - Silencing and killing whitleblowers like Boing - Using $500B tax-payer money to produce closed source AI - Founder has lost it and straight up wants to raise trillion(s)

For each of these claim there is easily material that can be linked to prove it, but some like ChatGPT and confuse the usefulness of it with the miss-aligned and bad corporate behaviour of this multi-billion dollar corporation.
by mcv | 2025-04-03 21:34:24+00:00
I think this is the case with real engineering companies. My wife works at Rijkswaterstaat, and there engineers bear direct responsibility for projects that are worth lives, and they can make important decisions about those projects for that reason. For example, a couple of years ago an engineer closed a bridge because of a lack of maintenance. Big scandal about the bridge getting closed, but the real scandal was that maintenance was so far behind. Turned out the engineer had warned about this several times before, but somehow those messages didn't arrive at the people in charge of planning and funding maintenance. So that was the process that really needed fixing (and the bridge, of course).
by vladms | 2025-04-03 21:34:45+00:00
> Europe had been on fire off and on for hundreds of years.

The point was that armed conflicts also happened on North American soil (even if consider only USA soil) for long time, so not so different for what happened in Europe. The last period of peace is as much an exception for one as it is for the other given a significant part of the history of the continents.

Also, if we think of countries, there were various European countries that did not participate in or had fights on their territory, during neither WWI or WWII (Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain) and some of those did not have a war on their soil for similar as USA ...
by donnachangstein | 2025-04-03 21:35:09+00:00
It stops being a feature and becomes a bug bordering on retardation when they purposefully ship broken software.

First example coming to mind, TLS is broken in the version of OpenSMTPD that ships with Debian Stable.

Yes you read that correctly.

The version of OpenSMTPD in Debian Stable does not have functioning TLS. It's also not well documented why this is, things just don't work and you are forced to discover why.

It has to do with a broken dependency on their ancient version of OpenSSL. They refuse to patch it because muh stability - it requires a version jump. So you are forced to jump through hoops and install a newer version from backports if you expect TLS to work on your SMTP server.
by cycomanic | 2025-04-03 21:35:39+00:00
Specialized is manufacturing in Taiwan (i.e. they use Merida IIRC?), but Trek manufactures at least partly in China AFAIK, Canyon frames are made in China (unless things changed recently).

Generally, many brands like e.g. Trek manufacture their highest end in Taiwan, but a lot of the mid- to high-level frames are still made in China, admittedly things might have changed since I last looked into this ~5 years ago.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-03 21:35:49+00:00
https://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

Given enough time (... a surprisingly short amount) and enough people creating art (say, about as many as we have had for the last couple hundred years) and indefinitely-long-lived recording, plus very-long copyright terms, the inevitable result is that it's functionally impossible to create anything within the space of "things people like" that's not violating copyright, for any but the strictest definitions of what constitutes copying.

The short story treats of music, but it's easy to see how visual arts and fiction-writing and the rest get at least extremely crowded in short order under those circumstances.
by ajross | 2025-04-03 21:36:02+00:00
Yeah... I wouldn't dare touch this. Probably the worst possible thing to happen to systemd would be a fork. It's an extremely complicated suite of software operating at a maximally exposed security context, and it's all but guaranteed that the small cadre of volunteers doing what amounts to a *BSD port aren't going to understand it deeply enough.

Pick the parts you want in your BSD and clone it. Don't port.
by torginus | 2025-04-03 21:36:04+00:00
Because these people understand human psychology and how to play on fears (of doom, or missing out) and insecurities of people, and write compelling narratives while sounding smart.

They are great at selling stories - they sold the story of the crypto utopia, now switching their focus to AI.

This seems to be another appeal to enforce AI regulation in the name of 'AI safetyiism', which was made 2 years ago but the threats in it haven't really panned out.

For example an oft repeated argument is the dangerous ability of AI to design chemical and biological weapons, I wish some expert could weigh in on this, but I believe the ability to theorycraft pathogens effective in the real world is absolutely marginal - you need actual lab work and lots of physical experiments to confirm your theories.

Likewise the dangers of AI systems to exfiltrate themselves to multi-million dollar AI datacenter GPU systems everyone supposedly just has lying about, is ... not super realistc.

The ability of AIs to hack computer systems is much less theoretical - however as AIs will get better at black-hat hacking, they'll get better at white-hat hacking as well - as there's literally no difference between the two, other than intent.

And here in lies a crucial limitation of alignment and safetyism - sometimes there's no way to tell apart harmful and harmless actions, other than whether the person undertaking them means well.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-03 21:36:22+00:00
These predictions are made without factoring in the trade version of the Pearl Harbor attack the US just initiated on its allies (and itself, by lobotomizing its own research base and decimating domestic corporate R&D efforts with the aforementioned trade war).

They're going to need to rewrite this from scratch in a quarter unless the GOP suddenly collapses and congress reasserts control over tariffs.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-03 21:36:36+00:00
> All the already pleasant Linux desktop needs is the kind of hardware ecosystem polish Jobs’ era Apple used to become relevant again.

I keep hearing this, over and over again. But I plug in my Magic Trackpad to my GNOME desktop and it works fine. My MX Master 3 works great, and avoids the gesture emulation mode that makes it feel sluggish on Mac. My Nvidia hardware has better driver support on Linux than anywhere else, my Android handset integrates with the desktop better than it ever did on Windows or Mac, my XM4s support the LDAC codec that my iPad and Macbook won't. My old Thinkpad still gets frequent updates and supports all the same software it had at launch.

What people really want is brand identity - I get it. It's fun to play as part of the "in-group" fighting against some well-defined evil like Microsoft. That was part of Apple's marketing from the start, there's no need to hide their light under a technical bushel. But Linux simply isn't that, it's never been about the snide remarks or assumption-reaffirming "I'm a Linux" TV commercials. Linux is simply an open software project, warts and all. There isn't any hardware you can buy (or I would argue, even any hardware you can make) to fix those issues. Switching to Linux a psychological roadblock, even if you consider MacOS to be functionally superior desktop OS.

The situation for OSes today is absolutely pitiful, so I understand where the author is coming from here. But they seem to be going through the final stage of accepting that all computers suck, and you can only choose the least-bad option. We should only be so lucky to live in a world where the Linux desktop isn't confined to platforms with hardware polish. We'd need a new Linux if you Mac pundits ended up writing all the rules for us.
by mjr00 | 2025-04-03 21:36:37+00:00
I "love" this part:

def ensure_dir_exists(path: str) -> None: """ Ensure a directory exists. Args: path: Directory path """

An extremely useful and insightful comment. Then you look where it's actually used,

# Ensure the directory exists and is writable ensure_dir_exists(work_dir) work_path = Path(work_dir) if not work_path.exists() or not os.access(work_dir, os.W_OK):

... so like, the entire function and its call (and its needlessly verbose comment) could be removed because the existence of the directory is being checked anyway by pathlib.

This might not matter here because it's a small, trivial example, but if you have 10, 50, 100, 500 developers working on a codebase, and they're all thoughtlessly slinging code like this in, you're going to have a dumpster fire soon enough.

I honestly think "vibe coding" is the best use case for AI coding, because at least then you're fully aware the code is throwaway shit and don't pretend otherwise.

edit: and actually looking deeper, `ensure_dir_exists` actually makes the directory, except it's already been made before the function is called so... sigh. Code reviews are going to be pretty tedious in the coming years, aren't they?
by spc476 | 2025-04-03 21:36:39+00:00
For adapting code to different versions of libraries for one thing:

#if defined(__SunOS) presult = getprotobyname_r(proto,&result,tmp,sizeof(tmp)); if (presult == NULL) return luaL_error(L,"protocol: %s",strerror(errno)); #elif defined(__linux__) if (getprotobyname_r(proto,&result,tmp,sizeof(tmp),&presult) != 0) return luaL_error(L,"protocol: %s",strerror(errno)); #else presult = getprotobyname(proto); if (presult == NULL) return luaL_error(L,"protocol: %s",strerror(errno)); result = *presult; #endif

The sometimes annoyingly small differences between platforms.
by Avicebron | 2025-04-03 21:36:45+00:00
IANAL, but if OpenAI makes any money/commercial gains from producing a Ghibli-esque image when you ask, say you pay a subscription to OpenAI. What percentage of that subscription is owed to Ghibli for running Ghibli art through OpenAI's gristmill and providing the ability to create that image with that "vibe/style" etc. How long into perpetuity is OpenAI allowed to re-use that original art whenever their model produces said similar image. That seems to be the question.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-03 21:36:48+00:00
> So, to anyone who disagrees with these measures, but agrees that these are issues we ought to solve, what would you propose?

At a high level, the problem is that free trade makes the pie bigger, but causes distribution/inequality problems. So generally speaking, the best measures are going to be those that improve inequality while minimizing the impact to the size of the pie. Raise taxes on the wealthy, increase spending on social programs to the non-wealthy, fund investments in programs that benefit everyone equally. (Public transit, libraries, healthcare, education, etc.)

Tariffs shrink the pie, and I'd heavily bet against those hurt by globalization being those who are able to grab a bigger slice under the current administration.
by brokencode | 2025-04-03 21:37:09+00:00
What in your mind should have happened differently in response to Jan 6?

No widespread fraud was ever proven that could have swayed the election.

Should we have pretended there were major flaws with our voting system just to help you with your feelings?

Or maybe we should have let Trump be president again for no reason just because you were really upset about it.

And did you ever wonder why, if Democrats were able to magically steal the election in even red states like Georgia and Arizona in 2020, they didn’t bother to try it again in 2024?
by thesuitonym | 2025-04-03 21:37:20+00:00
I just don't understand the mentality. Sure, I can see how it can be fun to make an aimbot, and I can see how playing with it for a little while might be fun--or more accurately funny. But I just don't understand why you would routinely sit down with an aimbot. Why not just watch someone else play at that point?
by mmooss | 2025-04-03 21:37:22+00:00
Ruling out money - though domestic companies can cash in from the lack of competition, and it fits the current model of building businesses with large 'moats' so you can enshittify charge rent-extracting prices.

The other usual option is power. I think it's clear that these people will do anything, go to any extreme for power. What is the path from these tarriffs. It's also possible that they made a mistake.

In a different thread I speculated that their plan is to blame their enemies and objects of hatred for the results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575061

But it seems like they need a positive result from this?