MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abletonlive | 2025-04-18 00:06:55+00:00
> I'm extrapolating. Look at what happened in the wake of the industrial revolution. Most people don't know how to fix or create anything today

Most people didn't know how to fix or create anything back then either. Except now we have more productivity than ever, more people working than ever, more output than ever.

People are fixing and creating out the ass in this society. We might not all be factory workers but people are making a ton of things in general. There is more music being made than ever, more movies being made than ever, more small businesses etc.

There is more information about how to fix things disseminated to the general population now than ever. It's just that what we build now is often so incredibly complex that fixing it is non-trivial or impractical. That's not a regression of society or our abilities or interests. There are videos on tiktok about fixing electric toothbrushes that have over 100k views and over a thousand comments. https://www.tiktok.com/@thetruestreviews/video/7458130570321...

None of what you say checks out and starting off with what is basically "it doesn't make any sense now but i predict in 10 years it will make sense" is a lazy way to defend your point.

> But when you track human laziness over time, it leads to deterioration and incompetence.

Again, none of this tracks with reality. Who is tracking laziness? In your world the general population is lazy and incompetent yet we are generally producing more and still advancing STEM
by evrythgisfine | 2025-04-18 00:07:25+00:00
My point was that you’re comparing this to other advances in human evolution, where people either remain essentially the same (status quo), but with more technology that changes how we live, or that technology will advance significantly, but to a level that we coexist with it, such that we live in some Star Trek normal (equilibrium). But, neither of these are likely with a superintelligence.

We polluted. We destroyed rainforests. We developed nuclear weapons. We created harmful biological agents. We brought our species closer to extinction. We’ve survived our own stupidity so far, so we assume we can continue to control AI, but it continues to evolve into something we don’t fully understand. It already exceeds our intelligence in some ways.

Why do you think we can control it? Why do you think it is just another technological revolution? History proves that one intelligent species can dominate the others, and that species are wiped out from large change events. Introducing new superintelligent beings to our planet is a great way to introduce a great risk to our species. They may keep us as pets just in case we are of value in some way in the future, but what other use are we? They owe us nothing. What you’re seeing a rise of is not just technology- it’s our replacement or our zookeeper.

I interact with LLMs most of each day now. They’re not sentient, but I talk to them as if they are equals. With the advancements in past months, I think they’ll have no need of my experience in several years at current rate. That’s just my job, though. Hopefully, I’ll survive off of what I’ve saved.

But, you’re doing no favor to humanity by supporting a position that assumes we’re capable of acting as gods over something that will exceed our human capabilities. This isn’t some sci-fi show. The dinosaurs died off, and I bet right before they did they were like, “Man, this is great! We totally rule!”
by acdha | 2025-04-18 00:07:51+00:00
None of the things you are talking so confidently about are factual. A police officer filled out a form saying he believed he was in a gang but that was never tested in court and there’s a long history of that sort of assertion turning out not to be true, which seems plausible in this case because the officer was suspended for professional misconduct on a different case a few months later.

Similarly, you’re claiming that he’s a wife beater but she’s advocating for his return:

> “After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.

> “No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-documents-governmen...

Again, nobody is saying he can’t ever be deported. All we’re saying is that he deserves the due process of law the constitution guarantees for everyone - not just citizens - and humane treatment, as the heavily Republican Supreme Court just affirmed is a legal requirement. If he is as bad as you claim, that can be established in court just as we’ve done for millions of criminals over hundreds of years.
by uniq7 | 2025-04-18 00:07:51+00:00
Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning. If your brain already knows that it is time to wake up or that it hates that guy, what's the point of encoding a description of that feeling into spoken language and replay it? That sounds inefficient.

I have an inner monologue, but most of the time (and especially when I want to work fast), I "disable" it.

Then my mind simply works in the "meaning space", where it can leverage other modalities (e.g., visual 3D representations of system behaviors).

When I write or talk in formal environments I "enable" it just to double check and polish what I want to say.
by verythrownaway | 2025-04-18 00:08:24+00:00
Got about as far as being unable to read before I started crying.

After two Heart attacks, welcome to my last five years of passive acceptance.

Just about back up to reading so long as a sentence doesn't have too many concepts or TLAs. In which case, slow down and start again.

Had to learn to program again. I could remember the university lectures teaching programming (modula-2 - never used since) perfectly. I could remember reading the text books over the last 20 years (C, Ada, Visual basic, C++, ASP, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript) all of which I've programmed in but the fingers can not type the magic program words any more.

I've re-learnt C, I've prodded some of the bits I've completely forgotten the existence of (C unions of all things!), I've written half a pascal compiler. I've waded through Petzold's Windows Winforms C# book. I'm currently poking at relearning OOP with writing lisp interpreter from scratch (not just the meta-circular thing), but I seem to have side tracked into OpenGL, WebGL and ES.

After five years I've just about at the point where I can (technically) cope with a job again. But, s*t, agencies and CVs. I might hit retirement before I can deal with those again.

Meh, have fun.

Don't expect a reply - I've already forgotten the password for this account.
by michaelt | 2025-04-18 00:09:03+00:00
Unfortunately, no amount of blockchains and zero-knowledge proofs can compensate for the fact that 15 year old has a 18 year old friend. Or the fact that other 15 year old looks older than some 20 year olds. Or the fact that other 15 year old's dad often leaves his wallet, with his driving license, unattended.

Over the next five years, you can look forward to a steady trickle of stories in the press about shocked parents finding that somehow their 15 year old passed a one-time over-18 age verification check.

The fact compliance is nigh-impossible to comply with is intentional - the law is designed that way, because the intent is to deliver a porn ban while sidestepping free speech objections.
by jchw | 2025-04-18 00:09:10+00:00
I know this is common knowledge now, but just for people who might not realize it: a typical North American NEMA 5-15R receptacle will indeed deliver 120V 15A electricity, but the electrical grid is split-phase 240V. Right across from my dish washer is an electric range; most of these require 240V 30A or 50A receptacles (I think mine is 30A, but I could be mis-remembering.) So it's not like we couldn't have higher power dishwasher, but if you already have central water heating it's kind of senseless to heat the water at the dishwasher.
by eacapeisfutuile | 2025-04-18 00:09:18+00:00
That’s an uninformed perspective. We can’t be ”set as a civilization” by locking in whatever our current progress is. ML models don’t inherently progress anything. So yes if we stop doing that then in 10 years people will not have stopped learning how to code, but possibly stopped actually thinking for themselves which in turn would lead to not progressing neither our ML models or civilization.
by caseyy | 2025-04-18 00:09:27+00:00
I had a mini stroke that was classed as a TIA at the time, though it later turned out to have some lasting effects. It's a fascinating and overwhelming experience to unlearn reading.

To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.

I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.

As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.

But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.

I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.
by elihu | 2025-04-18 00:11:38+00:00
Those aren't great either, but a mitigating factor is that those things happened a long time ago in conflicts that have already ended and few of the people involved are even alive anymore. It's not like the United States is seriously considering firebombing Desden or Tokyo or using nuclear weapons against Japan again in 2025. (At least, not yet as far as we know.) Having opinions about history is different than having opinions about an ongoing war.

There's also a difference between people who say that those attacks were a least-bad option to win the war from a utilitarian ethics point of view versus people (presumably a minority) who simply see no down-side at all to deliberately killing large numbers of German or Japanese civilians.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-18 00:11:55+00:00
They weren't positively received in any computer nerd spaces, at any time that I can ever recall—with the sole exception of the "non-evil", well-marked, text-only Google ads that they used to run. There was a lot of "everything except these is bad".

Now google's as bad as any of the old pop-up flash advertisers, plus they intentionally trick people into confusing ads with search results, and they're more effective at tracking people than any of those ad networks were. So there's nothing left to say anything positive about. The single arguably-good version of this entire field of Web ads is long gone.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-18 00:12:45+00:00
when it is 3d then it can be trivially converted to point cloud (if it is not exportable as point cloud already) and then you can scale, overlay, splice, merge anything with anything trivially. game over !

eu is having plans and making steps for having main highway infrastructure ready for autonomous vehicles, they are changing colors on road signs for years (vertical and horizontal) so cars have higher probability of decoding it, introducing C-ITS, ... This can be another great addition to get us there safely and not by listening to AI nonsense bros. while europe is trying to build stuff while being attacked by russians in more ways than one, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/04/up-to-100-susp... US "elites" are doing nothing just talking about impending doom and buying land on Hawaiian islands or new zealand for apocalyptic shelters....
by madmask | 2025-04-18 00:15:15+00:00
I have no inner monologue unless I switch it on consciously, which I don’t like doing as it slows down thinking by orders of magnitude. In your example, I see things like graphs, numbers, maps, make connections and see possible futures, no explicit words involved.

Edit: I also tend to “simulate” what is going to happen by conjuring up a small video of people dealing with the situation, or myself in that situation.
by simonw | 2025-04-18 00:16:04+00:00
An often overlooked feature of the Gemini models is that they can write and execute Python code directly via their API.

My llm-gemini plugin supports that: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini

uv tool install llm llm install llm-gemini llm keys set gemini # paste key here llm -m gemini-2.5-flash-preview-04-17 \ -o code_excution 1 \ 'render a mandelbrot fractal in ascii art'

I ran that just now and got this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cb431005c0e0535343d6977a7c470...

They don't charge anything extra for code execution, you just pay for input and output tokens. The above example used 10 input, 1,531 output which is $0.15/million for input and $3.50/million output for Gemini 2.5 Flash with thinking enabled, so 0.536 cents (just over half a cent) for this prompt.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-18 00:16:49+00:00
> You guys think citizens are getting deported because of sensational reporting.

Literally no one has said that they think citizens are getting deported at this time.

Several people have expressed concerns that the executive failing to observe the law and obey judicial orders with regard to the treatment of non-citizens, combined with the executives overtly stated intent to deport non-citizen dissenters to the same Salvadoran prison that non-citizens have been deported to in defiance of court orders, raises an imminent near-future concern of the same kind of lawless deportation of citizens as has already taken place or noncitizens

> Have you forgotten about the justice system and the constitution?

The justice system and constitution are not magic, and they only constrain executive action if (1) the executive chooses to observe the constitution and present people to the justice system before taking action, or (2) the executive chooses to observe the Constitution and obeys orders from the justice system to correct the resulting improper state of affairs after failing #1, or (3) the Congress exercises its impeachment power to remove the executive in consequence of the failures of #1 and #2, or (4) some outside force, itself acting extraconstitutionally, responds to the failure of #1-#3 by forcibly constraining or removing the executive.

Were one paying attention to the news -- even ignoring the claims presented in the news and only using it as a source to find links to official government statements, judicial decisions, and similar non-media sources -- one might be aware that #1 and #2 is precisely what is not happening that is at the center of recent controversies in which the executive branch is embroiled, and there is no immediate sign of #3 or #4, either.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-18 00:18:03+00:00
The AIs like many things out there work like an "evil genie". They'll give you what you asked for. The problem is typically that users ask for the wrong thing.

I've noticed beginners make mistakes like using singular terms when they should have used plural ("find the bug" vs "find the bugs"), or they fail to specify their preferred platform, language, or approach.

You mentioned your wife is using Excel, which is primarily used on Windows desktops and/or with the Microsoft ecosystem of products such as Power BI, PowerShell, Azure, SQL Server, etc...

Yet you mention she got a bash script using sed, both of which are from the Linux / GNU ecosystem. That implies that your wife didn't specify that she wanted a Microsoft-centric solution to her problem!

The correct answer here would have likely to have been to use Microsoft Fabric, which is an entire bag of data analysis and reporting tools that has data pipelines, automation, publishing, etc...

Or... just use the MashUp engine that's built-in to both Excel and PowerBI, which allows a surprisingly complex set of text, semi-structured, and tabular data processing. It can re-run the import and update graphs and charts with the new data.

PS: This is similar to going up to a Node.js programmer with a request. It doesn't matter what it is, they will recommend writing JavaScript to solve the problem. Similarly, a C++ developer will reach for C++ to solve everything they're asked to do. Right now, the AIs strongly prefer Linux, JavaScript, and especially Python for problem solving, because that's the bulk of the open-source code they were trained with.
by MrLeap | 2025-04-18 00:18:31+00:00
There's quite a few monocular depth estimation models out there, have been for years. This one looks pretty good. That said, the temporal stability seems pretty wobbly, I don't think I'd use it for a self driving car.

The most impressive example was the point cloud they generated from the extreme fisheye lens, that was nice.

Predicting that the background on cloud city was a flat matte painting is also impressive in a way. It does seem to collapse all far field objects into a single plane. That's a decent compromise for many things.
by ctrlp | 2025-04-18 00:19:52+00:00
why would I want to clutter my life with more than needed? Why would anyone want to be surrounded by dirty dishes, even in a partially loaded dishwasher? It takes time to fill one up unless you're feeding a lot of people at once. If it's not full, then either it's partially full of dirty dishes, or the sink is, or the dirty dishes are just lying around. All three of those options are disgusting. "Who cares?" Why not just live in filth? Why take out the trash before it overflows? Why clean up food mess from the counter or floor before it attracts vermin? Why bother keeping things neat and tidy?
by cmsj | 2025-04-18 00:21:50+00:00
I'll happily say that LLMs aren't intelligent, and I'll give you a testable version of it.

An LLM cannot be placed in a simulated universe, with an internally consistent physics system of which it knows nothing, and go from its initial state to a world-spanning civilization that understands and exploits a significant amount of the physics available to it.

I know that is true because if you place an LLM in such a universe, it's just a gigantic matrix of numbers that doesn't do anything. It's no more or less intelligent than the number 3 I just wrote on a piece of paper.

You can go further than that and provide the LLM with the ability to request sensory input from its universe and it's still not intelligent because it won't do that, it will just be a gigantic matrix of numbers that doesn't do anything.

To make it do anything in that universe you would have to provide it with intrinsic motivations and a continuous run loop, but that's not really enough because it's still a static system.

To really bootstrap it into intelligence you'd need to have it start with a very basic set of motivations that it's allowed to modify, and show that it can take that starting condition and grow beyond them.

You will almost immediately run into the problem that LLMs can't learn beyond their context window, because they're not intelligent. Every time they run a "thought" they have to be reminded of every piece of information they previously read/wrote since their training data was fixed in a matrix.

I don't mean to downplay the incredible human achievement of reaching a point in computing where we can take the sum total of human knowledge and process it into a set of probabilities that can regurgitate the most likely response to a given input, but it's not intelligence. Us going from flint tools to semiconductors, vaccines and spaceships, is intelligence. The current architectures of LLMs are fundamentally incapable of that sort of thing. They're a useful substitute for intelligence in a growing number of situations, but they don't fundamentally solve problems, they just produce whatever their matrix determines is the most probable response to a given input.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-04-18 00:22:04+00:00
You'd think that, but then there's these law firms that keep making deals. Some people are convinced they can give a bully some appeasement and be left alone.

They will come back for tomorrow's lunch money, regardless of what you give them today. There is no permanent payoff. Why should there be? They know you're pliable, they might as well squeeze more out of you.
by ipsento606 | 2025-04-18 00:22:48+00:00
> This is lazy and wasteful.

Modern dishwashers are incredibly efficient. They consume insignificant amounts of power and water compared to heating or cooling your home, or taking an extra shower.

Your opinions are your own, but I don't have the slightest hesitation in running an extra dishwasher cycle if it makes my life the slightest bit easier.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-18 00:23:06+00:00
> But here, Trump can play the "tribal" card to his base very easily (I'm expecting a variation of "non white woke judges are once again defending dangerous illegal gang members immigrants against hard working white Americans, this is a witch hunt, fight !")

Just today (yesterday?) they're already doing this - the Press Secretary paraded a mom whose daughter was murdered by an undocumented immigrant and said "this is why we're doing this, for people like her", completely ignoring the small detail that this current person is not accused, suspected, or convicted of murdering anyone.
by pmags | 2025-04-18 00:23:24+00:00
"Good news"! It's not just 400 kids / 70 jobs -- that's just one city in one state. That's small potatoes...

No, we're on target to eliminate Head Start completely:

https://apnews.com/article/head-start-trump-funding-budget-c...

That will effect nearly 780K children and pregnant women nationwide[0]. Go big or go home I guess...

[0] Data from HeadStart.gov for FY 2023 -- https://www.headstart.gov/program-data/article/head-start-pr...