MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2025-04-30 03:39:12+00:00
> If my toddler scribbles on the wall I better put the markers away next time not put up a little sign that says, "Junior's Doodles."

The point of "Trump Tariffs" is not to make the Trump the scribbler face that wall and feel shame for his output--everybody knows he's too damaged for that.

The point is to ensure everybody else (i.e. voters) recognize that the government is taking their money and understand how it came to occur.

To return to your analogy, it's some message that tells other adults to stop giving Junior their markers, from a source that is beyond your direct control.
by RevEng | 2025-04-30 03:39:17+00:00
Not entirely. Since generation is auto regressive, the next token depends on the previous tokens. Whatever analysis and decisions it has spit out will influence what it will do next. This tends to cause it to be self reinforcing.

But it's also chaotic. Small changes in input or token choices can give wildly different outcomes, particularly if the sampling distributions are fairly flat (no one right answer). So restarting the generation with a slightly different input, such as a different random seed (or in OP's case, a different temperature) can give wildly different outcomes.

If you try this, you'll see some examples of it vehemently arguing it is right and others equally arguing it is wrong. This is why LLM as judge is so poor by itself, bit also why multiple generations like used in self-consistency can be quite useful at evaluating variance and therefore uncertainty.
by galangalalgol | 2025-04-30 03:39:26+00:00
Letting the politically connected company buy a presidential advertisement on the Whitehouse lawn is unusual, so is letting it exfiltrate nlrb data when facing cases from the nlrb. But most importantly it isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption. That normalizes it which is even more damaging. This corruption makes the worst corruption in the history of the nation look like a traffic violation.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-30 03:39:40+00:00
Indeed, I did copy that out wrong, but I don't think your argument that housing is substantially higher today than the 80s or 90s stands.

Nor does today surpass all of the 80s. As I stated before, the ratio of units to households was a higher from 1984 to 1999 than today.

It is higher than the 1970s, but there was a housing crisis in the 70s to early 80s, so that doesn't mean much, especially given it's a relatively recent change. 2012 to 2022 was worse than the 70s.
by beau_g | 2025-04-30 03:39:55+00:00
I was thinking I could use a tool just like the wire you described to remove a stump, after I spent 6 hours with a 5ton Bobcat trying to dig up a 3ft diameter pine stump to no avail today. For felling trees though, you need precise front cuts/back cuts to drop the tree at a desired angle, you can't just cut in one direction even if you have a cable attached.
by thethethethe | 2025-04-30 03:40:12+00:00
I know someone who is going through a rapidly escalating psychotic break right now who is spending a lot of time talking to chatgpt and it seems like this "glazing" update has definitely not been helping.

Safety of these AI systems is much more than just about getting instructions on how to make bombs. There have to be many many people with mental health issues relying on AI for validation, ideas, therapy, etc. This could be a good thing but if AI becomes misaligned like chatgpt has, bad things could get worse. I mean, look at this screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/s/lVAVyCFNki

This is genuinely horrifying knowing someone in an incredibly precarious and dangerous situation is using this software right now.

I am glad they are rolling this back but from what I have seen from this person's chats today, things are still pretty bad. I think the pressure to increase this behavior to lock in and monetize users is only going to grow as time goes on. Perhaps this is the beginning of the enshitification of AI, but possibly with much higher consequences than what's happened to search and social.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-04-30 03:41:20+00:00
> The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table

Absolutely, but it seems to me that as long as companies have A) the option to not hire people and/or B) ways to side-step minimum wage with non-US labor, minimum wage won't achieve that goal for everyone. It will enable the goal for a few and the rest will have a 0 hour work week and a harder time getting any type of job.

But there's the other side of the question - why is a roof over your head and food on your table getting so expensive? That's what needs to be addressed. High rent/housing/food costs prevent cheap labor. There's no point in raising minimum wage to $20/hr if the price of food and rent keeps going up.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-04-30 03:41:49+00:00
It would need a bot that is accessing files via hyperlink with an aim to decompress them and riffle through their contents. The compressed file can be delivered over a compressed response to achieve the two layers, cutting down significantly on the outbound traffic. passwd.zst, secrets.docx, etc. would look pretty juicy. Throw some bait in honeypot directories (exposed for file access) listed in robots.txt and see who takes it.
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 03:42:11+00:00
> The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that.

But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.

> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.

That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.

Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
by protocolture | 2025-04-30 03:43:12+00:00
American labor is low quality and high cost. China is no longer a guarantee of cheap and terrible like it used to be. If america wants to make shit again they need to compete on cost terms and quality terms.

Honestly the biggest issue I have seen with US companies trying to manufacture goods is that they tend to only target US customers. Especially at the low end.

There must be some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.

I keep trying to buy local self pub (as in proper self pub, not just Amazon POD) books from americans and the half that actually permit foreigners to buy their books have actively stopped permitting their promotions to be accessed by foreigners.

I used to try to buy hobby stuff (militaria etc) from americans via eBay and 90+% of them would explicitly tell ROW to get bent in the listing.

And etsy postage from yankistan? Forget about it.

Kickstarter postage from the USA? Often as much as the product.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-04-30 03:43:26+00:00
Very happy to see they rolled this change back and did a (light) post mortem on it. I wish they had been able to identify that they needed to roll it back much sooner, though. Its behavior was obviously bad to the point that I was commenting on it to friends, repeatedly, and Reddit was trashing it, too. I even saw some really dangerous situations (if the Internet is to be believed) where people with budding schizophrenic symptoms, paired with an unyielding sycophant, started to spiral out of control - thinking they were God, etc.
by vitus | 2025-04-30 03:44:24+00:00
They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards. But the party was founded on the premise that tariffs would protect their northern constituents and industries, and they took over a century to shake that tendency. Perhaps the only Republican president before Reagan who was in favor of lowering tariffs was Eisenhower, as part of rebuilding globally after WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
by Sai_Praneeth | 2025-04-30 03:44:42+00:00
idk if this is only for me or happened to others as well, apart from the glaze, the model also became a lot more confident, it didn't use the web search tool when something out of its training data is asked, it straight up hallucinated multiple times.

i've been talking to chatgpt about rl and grpo especially in about 10-12 chats, opened a new chat, and suddenly it starts to hallucinate (it said grpo is generalized relativistic policy optimization, when i spoke to it about group relative policy optimization)

reran the same prompt with web search, it then said goods receipt purchase order.

absolute close the laptop and throw it out of the window moment.

what is the point of having "memory"?
by beau_g | 2025-04-30 03:45:58+00:00
Any tree near civilization that someone wants to pay to cut down is likely going to be at a distance from a structure, powerlines, or pipes in the ground (that's also the reason they want it removed) where felling it as it lies is not likely an option which is why you see them sectioned down or done with a crane or bucket truck. A lot of these trees done by tree care companies in residential or commercial areas are also sprawling hardwood trees like oaks that can't always be safely just dropped from the ground even if there's a clear area to drop it in. For logging or wildland firefighting, most of the trees being dropped are straight growing softwoods like pine or fir that are just dropped from the ground (or by machine).
by minimaxir | 2025-04-30 03:46:01+00:00
It's worth noting that one of the fixes OpenAI employed to get ChatGPT to stop being sycophantic is to simply to edit the system prompt to include the phrase "avoid ungrounded or sycophantic flattery": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/29/chatgpt-sycophancy-pro...

I personally never use the ChatGPT webapp or any other chatbot webapps — instead using the APIs directly — because being able to control the system prompt is very important, as random changes can be frustrating and unpredictable.
by Chaosvex | 2025-04-30 03:46:50+00:00
That's a lot of abstraction to implement a simple update check and I suspect it's very much not worth it to save a minuscule amount of battery life on a laptop. This is ignoring that you're incorrect about how Web Push works, so you'd need that extra TCP connection anyway and at that point, there's no point in bothering with Web Push. FCM is the same deal (and now you get to pay for extra stuff for a trivial problem, woo) and APN seems like the wrong solution to auto-updates.

Just poll every launch or 24 hours and move on.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-04-30 03:46:55+00:00
Sort of. I thought the update felt good when it first shipped, but after using it for a while, it started to feel significantly worse. My "trust" in the model dropped sharply. It's witty phrasing stopped coming across as smart/helpful and instead felt placating. I started playing around with commands to change its tonality where, up to this point, I'd happily used the default settings.

So, yes, they are trying to maximize engagement, but no, they aren't trying to just get people to engage heavily for one session and then be grossed out a few sessions later.
by Incipient | 2025-04-30 03:47:15+00:00
Batteries on the grid are really more for load smoothing; demand/supply peak flattening and transient spikes. They're really too expensive to do what someone would think of as "storage".

Our recent govt installation is reported at $1.6bn for 2000MWh, which is incredibly expensive, and can't scale to run the grid, simply smooth load/demand diurnal curves.
by bluck | 2025-04-30 03:48:38+00:00
I'm just trying to understand licenses, but doesn't the choice of MIT contradict the inital "non-commercial purposes" as MIT says 'including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software' - Therefore, the non-commercial purposes is actually void and I can use the software to the limits of MIT defines? And because it is already MIT, they can relicense only future software but not this piece anymore?
by bigbadfeline | 2025-04-30 03:49:37+00:00
Exactly. The problem is Intel's AI PC might be PCs but they are too under-powered for AI work. Apple makes real AI PCs and they sell well enough, the latest AMD chips are getting into that territory as well. I want to see Intel succeed but they repeatedly miss the boat by over-promising and under-delivering, as if they're afraid of providing too much value too soon.
by Retric | 2025-04-30 03:50:14+00:00
> Perhaps… but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were figuring it out.

> Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe

Maybe you simply weren’t paying attention? There’s been several expansionist land wars in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union, it took 3 years ignoring civil wars.

“The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the invading Russian Federation from 1994 to 1996. After a mutually agreed on treaty and terms, the Russians withdrew until they invaded again three years later, in the Second Chechen War of 1999–2000” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War

Then there’s the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.

It’s arguable if this is even a separate war after the initial Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.

So no there hasn’t been several decades of peace after the 1991 fall of the USSR. It’s been the same crap for centuries with different governments playing shockingly similar roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_betwee...
by ImaCake | 2025-04-30 03:51:59+00:00
>I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year

I mean China has been modernizing their academics for a long time. See "Double First-Class Construction" [0]. But it's worth remembering that they did a lot of damage during the Cultural Revolution.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_First-Class_Constructio...
by keyle | 2025-04-30 03:52:49+00:00
I did notice that the interaction had changed and I wasn't too happy about how silly it became. Tons of "Absolutely! You got it, 100%. Solid work!" <broken stuff>.

One other thing I've noticed, as you progress through a conversation, evolving and changing things back and forth, it starts adding emojis all over the place.

By about the 15th interaction every line has an emoji and I've never put one in. It gets suffocating, so when I have a "safe point" I take the load and paste into a brand new conversation until it turns silly again.

I fear this silent enshittification. I wish I could just keep paying for the original 4o which I thought was great. Let me stick to the version I know what I can get out of, and stop swapping me over 4o mini at random times...

Good on OpenAI to publicly get ahead of this.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-30 03:52:59+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624390

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624308

https://www.vox.com/climate/408381/energy-transition-renewab... | https://archive.today/sZFxF

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
by astar1 | 2025-04-30 03:53:05+00:00
It's becoming an illiberal democracy like Turkey. Which is still a lot different than the US imo.

e.g.:

-After a decade of Modi rule, India now ranked 161 out of 180 in the world press freedom index: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/media/india-elections-press-f...

-Political opponents have been arrested on trumped up charges before elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Arvind_Kejriwal

-Extrajudicial killings on Canadian soil and possible attempt on US soil before they were caught (despite extradition agreements between India and these countries): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-government-agent-as...

I saw an interesting interview from 50's by one of India's founders on the topic of democracy in India: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WyWUlIbcRH8 . It seems India still has a long way to go, and the current government is reversing the trend.

I really hope the west thinks long and hard about foreign investment in/free trade with India without preconditions (although these are doubtful from the US under the current administration, maybe the EU can step up). The west had this idea that opening up trade with China would make the country more democratic and free, but it had the opposite impact (the extra resources only made things worse in these areas at home and aborad, especially after Xi's takeover in 2014).
by simonw | 2025-04-30 03:53:24+00:00
I enjoyed this example of sycophancy from Reddit:

New ChatGPT just told me my literal "shit on a stick" business idea is genius and I should drop $30K to make it real

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgp...

Here's the prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/comment/mp...
by owyn | 2025-04-30 03:53:39+00:00
I just looked up a nearby property in the bay area listed for almost a million. Estimated payment $6000/month for a cozy 2 bedroom 1000 square foot fixer-upper. Also that area is a 1 hour + commute to where the actual offices are. This is where the tech people are living. Ultimately this is all cross talk. You living wherever you do cheaply does not help me. I think living here needing a living wage probably helps you.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1322-Virginia-St-Berkeley...
by rat87 | 2025-04-30 03:53:50+00:00
Yeah because they were anti union. It wasn't because of any personal dislike of Elon.

And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast
by anonymars | 2025-04-30 03:53:56+00:00
Famous according to who? I would judge his record as probably mixed, like most predictions ("predictions are hard, especially about the future."*) Otherwise picking stocks would do better than random chance.

One could be wrong despite the right reasoning or right for the wrong reasons.

And yet, at some level, I agree with you. It's natural to weight what other people say by perception of their prior predictions. I have a similar reaction to Larry Kudlow or Jim Cramer: if one of them told me the sky was blue, I would have to go outside and double check.

Thinking about it some more, I think I can reconcile the difference by looking at the reasoning versus looking at the result. Like poker: you can make the right move and still lose, or make the wrong move and still win.

To bring that back to the current topic: Trump may yet escape causing a recession, but the reasoning for "this tariff war is a terrible idea" has thus far struck me as a lot more coherent than the reasoning for "this tariff war will lead to prosperity"

* funny enough, after writing this whole spiel, I looked it up to see if I got the Yogi Berra quote right (I didn't), but what did I find? An article about this exact topic (Krugman's predictions): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/predict...
by eagleislandsong | 2025-04-30 03:54:17+00:00
I never understood why libertarians/free market proponents think that Singapore is the paragon of laissez-faire economics. Try studying the country's housing market policies, for example, and you'll quickly realise that the government is extremely interventionist.

The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-30 03:55:10+00:00
I'm still deeply confused about Gemini as a product. Am I supposed to be using gemini.google.com or aistudio.google.com? The latter seems far more powerful but the former obviously has the more canonical URL. When I use the AI on my phone it says it's Gemini but it's most certainly not the same Gemini I see at gemini.google.com so what is it? When I ask my crappy little Google speaker something or press the microphone button on my Android Auto-equipped car why do I still deal with a comically bad "AI assistant" from 13 years ago instead of Gemini which seemingly has capabilities far beyond that of the assistant.

Why can't Google get this right? When I use the chat bot at aistudio it is clearly the state of the art - at least as good as any other option - so why can't Google sort out the product discrepancies?
by iamleppert | 2025-04-30 03:55:11+00:00
I hope they can replace their customers with AI next, because that’s the only way a business like Duolingo is going to survive. My prediction is it’s gone in the next 18 months.

A policy change like this is designed to have a thin veil of innovation (especially to an unsavy board) but if you read between the lines this is some executive’s wild idea to shake things up because they are completely and totally desperate and really don’t know what to do.
by gnarlouse | 2025-04-30 03:56:20+00:00
Hot take y'all but what if, just what if,

coded applications with injected content are ~GASP~ not the way humans learn language.

I know that this LibreLingo project is probably somebody's baby, and if it works for them great. Heck, if it works for you, great! But for anybody who really wants to (durably) learn a new language, aren't the results already in? Immerse yourself in the language, be around people. At the very least, listen to native speakers on YouTube or something. Read articles/books. Struggle at it, like a baby! That's not pejorative either; babies are the world's premier language learners.
by therealpygon | 2025-04-30 03:57:13+00:00
It depends. Some companies choose to stock shelves themselves in order to make sure their products are properly stocked. Coke/Pepsi and their subsidiaries are this way. It ensures that old out of date product isn’t getting shoved to the back of a shelf, allows them to keep a better track on refills (thus an estimate of sales), so on and so forth. In other cases, the store sometimes requires it to alleviate their own stocking burdens. The vendors are also generally the ones who set up the sale advertisement displays (end-cap or stand-alone). It tends to be a win-win because the vendor gets to advertise with a large display and the store may sell more product (and doesn’t have to set the crap up or take it down). Though, anything can be anything from store to store, so these aren’t “rules”.