MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-27 04:21:59+00:00
AI — Not a Fortune Teller, But a Mathematician: The Technical Finale This concludes our trilogy exploring AI's true nature, moving from social critique through metaphorical explanation to mathematical reality. Key technical insights:

Introduction of ASLI (Artificial Subjectively-Logical Intelligence) as more accurate terminology Detailed explanation of why AI ≠ calculator: formulas with probabilities vs. formulas with numbers How system prompts act as "magnetic interference" to training data compass Why final outputs are more intuitive results than logical deductions

Core revelation: Each word is an independent probability race. "Hello" isn't retrieved as a unit — it's assembled H-e-l-l-o through separate statistical decisions. Unlike deterministic computation, ASLI works with subjective logic: mathematically sound within its data constraints, but those constraints carry human biases and limitations. Novel framework: Positions doubt as a feature, not bug — "Your doubts are my confidence" suggests human skepticism as essential complement to AI's probabilistic certainty.

Spotify: [https://open.spotify.com/episode/6UaiNydXZqLuy0v37DRTtp]
by bee_rider | 2025-05-27 04:22:00+00:00
I’d probably label something that size a project rather than a homework, although I admit my definition is entirely arbitrary.

IMO the ideal class would be 4 or so students working together on a bespoke project, with weekly check-ins with some grad student teaching assistant. The goal would be to do something interesting and new. Of course nobody ever has enough teaching staff for that kind of thing.
by hxtk | 2025-05-27 04:25:24+00:00
From what I can tell, it also isn't lossless: https://github.com/ross39/new_bloom_filter_repo/blob/main/vi...

This looks like it is not storing the diff for any pixel that had the mean of its r,g,b values change by less than 10, which means that if a pixel goes from pure blue (#00ff00) to pure red (#ff0000) in consecutive frames, it would decode as pure blue in both frames.
by cyberax | 2025-05-27 04:25:36+00:00
My exposure to stainless vs. carbon steel was mostly in the context of nuclear industry, where stainless was used only where it absolutely had to be used.

But yeah, I spent some time looking at spec sheets, and it looks like modern stainless steels are actually quite reasonable for construction. But just too expensive for regular construction, especially compared to regular zinc coating.
by quantadev | 2025-05-27 04:26:24+00:00
Google was just the right idea at the right time. Ranking pages based on how many other pages link to it wasn't a brilliant idea, it was just the most obvious thing to do next. It was an algo that you could basically implement in a weekend. Tons of tech companies are just this. Something done at the right time, that was super easy to implement, by people capable of getting others to try it.
by Dwedit | 2025-05-27 04:26:49+00:00
It's actually somewhat of a challenge to display "Mem cleared" without access to the lowercase font. You have access to any uppercase character, spaces, and BASIC functions. With stat vars, you also get lowercase "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" and "r". And you can display text at a specific row and column.

I ended up displaying "M" "e" "min(" "c" "log(" "e" "a" "r" "e" "d". Then covered up the "in(" with spaces.

Then you lower your contrast for the full effect.
by necovek | 2025-05-27 04:29:29+00:00
Is there a source for a counter claim that there is a majority (or large minority, if you are only contending the "huge" part) of Europeans who have something against the American people?

Note that even running a survey with "negative" question would bias the results in that direction (eg. difference between "how do you rate this?" and "what is bad about this?")
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-27 04:33:20+00:00
This is another one of those little technical debates we all like to have. Most of it comes down to the intent of what it we're trying to achieve and how we place language around it.

If I want to stream something, it traditionally means I want to watch it in (near) real time as it is being downloaded, without necessarily having to store the entire thing. If I am downloading, I want the whole thing first before I watch it and I want to keep all of it.

Depending on the intent, will depend on the technical solution put in place to do that thing well, as there are technical differences. So yes, to watch a movie it requires downloading it in some way shape or form.

Something that doesn't need as much discussion as it gets. One of those "well technically it is..." type of arguments.
by hxtk | 2025-05-27 04:34:33+00:00
The bloom filter lookups here are fundamentally not parallel because they are coupled to a serial iteration.

Ultimately the data they are storing is tuples of (x,y,r,g,b), which means that it is not sufficient to ask "does (x1,y1) pass the bloom filter?" which would be embarrassingly parallel; you have tobe able to match it to an index in your list of (r,g,b) data.

The way this is done is to iterate over all (x,y) in a consistent order for encoding and decoding, and for each (x1,y1), if it passes the bloom filter, then the next (r1,g1,b1) tuple is the pixel data for that pixel.
by dirtbag | 2025-05-27 04:36:10+00:00
> I'm towards the end of one paid month of ChatGPT (playing around with some code writing and also Deep Research), and one thing I find absolutely infuriating is how complimentary it is. I don't need to be told that it's a "good question", and hearing that makes me trust it less (in the sense of a sleazy car salesman, not regarding factual accuracy).

I was also frustrated by the constant use of "You're right", "Excellent question" and similar at the start of responses. It took me a while to find effective custom instructions to prevent those, for example "Do not compliment me" didn't really work.

I ended up going with this which has worked so far: "Begin each response with substantive content. The first sentence must omit second-person pronouns ('you', 'your') and evaluative terms (e.g. 'right', 'great').".
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-27 04:36:22+00:00
My dentist created mine, in house, using his 3D-printer (after scanning my mouth with a stereoscopic camera). I am not sure which type of plastic is used, but I wasn't satisfied with the purchase until we had tried different [softer] plastics.

I prefer/recommend the flexible plastic type, which doesn't last as long but is so much easier to make a habit of wearing (because it is comfortable, unlike the solid plastic which was difficult to <snap> into place around teeth).

The flexible form-fit is so much better than my previous attempt at an off-the-shelf sport mouthguard (the type that you boil and then bite down on == sucks); it doesn't ever fall off my teeth during the night, and requires me to intentionally remove it before morning coffee.

For $350 I get a few years of quality sleep — worth it! I keep a second mouthguard in my toolbox [blue collar electrician] for when I'm experience stress on jobsites...
by jaza | 2025-05-27 04:37:54+00:00
The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb).

AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, Mozart, Gaudi, Buddha, nor (most ironically?) Turing. Just to name a few historical humans whose respective contributions to the world are greater than the sum of the world's respective contributions to them.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-27 04:39:04+00:00
Maybe, but I’ve had partners in wildly different and non-fashionable industries that had similar vacation time.

My friends on an hourly wage don’t get as much but oddly they have way more freedom to take unpaid leave. Their employers would rather let them run off at random for a month than lose them, since they would be immediately employable somewhere else when they came back. This partly reflects the persistently low unemployment rate in the US for vaguely competent people that want a job.
by hxtk | 2025-05-27 04:39:05+00:00
I'm confused by this line here: https://github.com/ross39/new_bloom_filter_repo/blob/4798d90...

It seems like this would make the compression lossy and discard, e.g., transitions from #ffffff to #fffffa, and the line above it where the mean of pixel data is taken would discard, e.g., transitions from #ff0000 to #00ff00 regardless of the threshold used.

Am I misunderstanding the role of that line of code? It doesn't seem like anything that is a 0 in the resulting mask would be encoded into the bloom filter.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-05-27 04:39:31+00:00
My essay-writing process for my MBA was:

- decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of opinions I already possess

- search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.

- write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit of it that best supported the point I want to make.

There was zero learning involved in this process. The production of the essay was more about developing journal search skills than absorbing any knowledge about the subject. There are always enough papers to support any given point of view, the trick was finding them.

I don't see how making this process even more efficient by delegating the entire thing to an LLM is affecting any actual education here.
by wredcoll | 2025-05-27 04:39:31+00:00
What a pile of meaningless buzzwords.

Slashdot's moderation system didn't lead people to think "no one used windows", the userbase just didn't like microsoft.

Beyond that, having to re-debate every single idea every single time it's brought up is inefficient to the point of uselessness. We, as individuals, don't have time to verify every single theory from first principles, so we rely on tools like "moderation" as a heuristic to make progress.
by proc0 | 2025-05-27 04:40:06+00:00
> Making shit up and being wrong is not an hallucination because it comes from humans?

Yes. And no, I am not "hallucinating" this text even if it's wrong. I have a structured pattern of thoughts with beliefs. LLMs don't generate these structured thoughts, a.k.a. logic and reasoning... which since you mention it, Anthropic did do research on this:

> This is concerning because it suggests that, should an AI system find hacks, bugs, or shortcuts in a task, we wouldn’t be able to rely on their Chain-of-Thought to check whether they’re cheating or genuinely completing the task at hand. https://www.anthropic.com/research/reasoning-models-dont-say...

So there is definitely work happening to try to understand and see how LLMs work, and we are finding out it is very different than the human mind. That isn't to say they are not useful, or there will never be an AI that does this. The point is that current LLMs are not moving in that direction, but they give the appearance as if they are. They hype it up as if we will have these junior developers implying we can just interact with them like humans. It's looking more like they are tools that respond to natural language with noticeable limitations, and that is a different framing.
by 0_gravitas | 2025-05-27 04:41:15+00:00
I work for <company>, we lie, in fact, many of us in our industry lie, to each other, but most importantly to regulators. I lie for them because I get paid to. I recommend you vote for any representative that is hostile towards the marketing industry.

And companies are conspirators by nature, plenty of large movie/game production companies manage to keep pretty quiet about game details and release-dates (and they often don't even pay well!).

I genuinely don't understand why you would legitimately "trust" a Corporation at all, actually, especially if it relates to them not generating revenue/marketshare where they otherwise could.
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-27 04:41:36+00:00
The case they described was more like giving it a pen and paper to write down what the user asks to write, and it taking that pen and paper to hack at the drywall in the room, find an abandoned telephone line, and try to alert the feds by sparking the wires together.

Their case was the perfect example of how even if you control the LLM, you don't control how it will do the work requested nearly as well as you think you do.

You think you're giving the freelancer a laptop logged into a Github account to do work, and before you know it they're dragging your hard drive's contents onto a USB stick and chucking it out the window.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-05-27 04:43:36+00:00
I am not too familiar with Catholicism.

But all major religions have multiple strands, and like others, Catholicism also has one or more mystic strands as well. Mystic strands of different religions are thinking man's version of the religion and actually closer to each other that you would guess from the surface level understanding of the religion.

Probably you can find people who believe what you are saying. People believe in strange things.

But if you want to have an intellectually honest discussion about this, you should first try to understand clearly the best possible arguments of the thing you are critisizing.

That is why I asked whether you are interested in understanding the religious point of view. What you are presenting is kind of a straw man version of Catholicism, and I imagine on site like this you will have hard time finding anybody willing to argue about that.

Note also that I have not anywhere said anything about what I believe. I have explained to you a kind of short version what is my understanding of the synthesis of Christian mystical traditions.
by tomyedwab | 2025-05-27 04:51:43+00:00
The comments on this thread are a perfect mixture of Group A, explaining how there is no value in AI tools, and if there was, where is the evidence? And Group B, who are getting value from the tools and have evidence of using them to deliver real software, but are being blasted by Group A as idiots who can't recognize bad code. Why so angry?

I've been writing code for 36 years, so I don't take any of the criticism to heart. If you know what you are doing, you can ship production quality code written by an LLM. I'm not going to label it "made by an AI!" because the consumer doesn't care so long as it works and who needs the "never AI!" backlash anyway?

But to the OP: your standards are too high. AI is like working with a bright intern, they are not going to do everything exactly the way that you prefer, but they are enthusiastic and can take direction. Choose your battles and focus on making the code maintainable in the long term, not perfect in the short term.
by brailsafe | 2025-05-27 04:51:44+00:00
> barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn

This was the impression I got from the app the first time I tried it, which had to be some time before 10 years ago (not that I'd suggest nobody gets any value from it, I assume mileage varies). It just seemed to reduce an inherently arduous and deliberate effort into something that was primarily easy and gratifying. There's a very lucrative market in convincing people they've learnt rather than entertained, whether it's through easily digestible YouTube videos (a trap I've fallen into) or apps that intensely use gamification elements.

There's a difference between the concept of delivering better methods of learning or easier access to good information, and delivery mechanisms that try to make it as fun as scrolling Instagram, in my mind anyway. Coursera actually has some really solid learning paths, and free university lectures are invaluable, but even those aren't effective if you don't deliberately allocate significant time and mental energy into grinding through the stuff you don't understand, and this seems just as true for languages.

So it just always seems like a false promise to me, at least beyond the premise of making it more approachable at the outset, and I guess it doesn't surprise me that things seem to be further going in a lame direction.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-27 04:52:17+00:00
I see that pressure as well. I find that a lot of the problems we have with AI are in fact AI exposing problems in other aspects of our society. In this case, one problem is that the people who do the teaching and know what needs to be learned are the faculty, but the decisions about how to teach are made by administrators. And another problem is that colleges are treating "make money" as a goal. These problems existed before AI, but AI is exacerbating them (and there are many, many more such cases).

I think things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better. If we're lucky, things will get so bad that we finally fix some shaky foundations that our society has been trying to ignore for decades (or even centuries). If we're not lucky, things will still get that bad but we won't fix them.
by Shekelphile | 2025-05-27 04:53:10+00:00
No, what you're seeing here is that the underlying model was trained with private repo data from github en masse - which would only have happened if MS had provided it in the first place.

MS also never respected this in the first place, exposing closed source and dubiously licensed code used in training copilot was one of the first thing that happened when it was first made available.
by rascul | 2025-05-27 04:53:44+00:00
Interesting that something about the Wienermobile came up. The inaugural Ocsar Mayer Wienie 500 was just a few days ago at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was one of the events in the days leading up to the Indy 500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyES63Rgvg
by alexchantavy | 2025-05-27 04:53:50+00:00
> I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

I see both sides of this. When I was a teenager, I went to a pretty bad middle school where there were fights everyday, and I wasn’t learning anything from the easy homework. On the upside, I had tons of free time to teach myself how to make websites and get into all kinds of trouble botting my favorite online games.

My learning always hit a wall though because I wasn’t able to learn programming on my own. I eventually asked my parents to send me to a school that had a lot more structure (and a lot more homework), and then I properly learned math and logic and programming from first principles. The upside: I could code. The downside: there was no free time to apply this knowledge to anything fun
by k_bx | 2025-05-27 04:56:22+00:00
I like how yes.rs has this header to make compiler shut up and not ruin the joke:

#![allow(unused_imports)] // We need ALL the imports for quantum entanglement #![allow(dead_code)] // No code is dead in the quantum realm #![allow(unused_variables)] // Variables exist in superposition until measured #![allow(unused_mut)] // Mutability is a state of mind #![allow(unused_macros)] // Our macros exist in quantum superposition until observed #![allow(clippy::needless_lifetimes)] // Our lifetimes are NEVER needless - they're crab-grade #![allow(clippy::needless_range_loop)] // Our loops are quantum-enhanced, not needless #![allow(clippy::too_many_arguments)] // More arguments = more crab features #![allow(clippy::large_enum_variant)] // Our errors are crab-sized #![allow(clippy::module_inception)] // We inception all the way down #![allow(clippy::cognitive_complexity)] // Complexity is our business model #![allow(clippy::type_complexity)] // Type complexity demonstrates Rust mastery #![allow(clippy::similar_names)] // Similar names create quantum entanglement #![allow(clippy::many_single_char_names)] // Single char names are blazingly fast #![allow(clippy::redundant_field_names)] // Redundancy is crab safety #![allow(clippy::match_bool)] // We match bools with quantum precision #![allow(clippy::single_match)] // Every match is special in our codebase #![allow(clippy::option_map_unit_fn)] // Unit functions are zero-cost abstractions #![allow(clippy::redundant_closure)] // Our closures capture quantum state #![allow(clippy::clone_on_copy)] // Cloning is fearless concurrency #![allow(clippy::let_and_return)] // Let and return is crab methodology #![allow(clippy::useless_conversion)] // No conversion is useless in quantum computing #![allow(clippy::identity_op)] // Identity operations preserve quantum coherence #![allow(clippy::unusual_byte_groupings)] // Our byte groupings are quantum-optimized #![allow(clippy::cast_possible_truncation)] // Truncation is crab-controlled #![allow(clippy::cast_sign_loss)] // Sign loss is acceptable in quantum realm #![allow(clippy::cast_precision_loss)] // Precision loss is crab-approved #![allow(clippy::missing_safety_doc)] // Safety is obvious in quantum operations #![allow(clippy::not_unsafe_ptr_arg_deref)] // Our pointers are quantum-safe #![allow(clippy::ptr_arg)] // Pointer arguments are crab-optimized #![allow(clippy::redundant_pattern_matching)] // Our pattern matching is quantum-precise
by dhqgekt | 2025-05-27 04:56:44+00:00
I am not an expert in any of the relevant disciplines, but I've some ideas, I don't know how right or wrong they are. A conscious being should have an internal model of the observable external world, and given the means, it should be able to interact with the world, observe changes and update its model accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

But to "experience its [own] existence", it needs to have a model of its own internals, observe, improve itself and perhaps preserve its own "values" and integrity. I do wonder what kind of values are needed for intelligent autonomous systems, that they can justify by and for themselves, even in the absense of human beings or presence of other intelligent agents.

I find (human) languages to be inefficient media to store and perform operations from the perspective of an AGI. Feeding lots of text samples to develop logical reasoning abilities, such extravagance I can not accept. Even more so trying to emulate neural networks, which I understand to be naturally analog entities, in digital manner. Can we expect any gain in power efficiency or correctness gains when using analog computers for this purpose? I wonder what we will get to see with analog computers for neural networks, with proper human-language-independent knowledge representation and well developed global (as in being able to decide which way to reason, given its limitations, for efficiency) logical reasoning capabilities, developed by itself from a reasonable basis of principles, that it can justify for itself and avoid the usual and unusual paradoxes. What core set of principles would be sufficient for emerging, evolving or developing into a proficient general intelligent being, when sufficient resources would be available to it? Like "ancestor" microbes evolving into human beings in hundreds of millions of years, but wayyyyy faster and more efficient?
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-05-27 04:57:52+00:00
>In languages like Ruby with default expressions you get the footgun the other way where calling a function with a default parameter can trigger side effects.

Seems fine to me. If the default expression causes side effects, then that's what I would expect.

>This kind of function is fine in Python because it's unidiomatic to mutate your parameters, you do obj.mutate() not mutate(obj).

I first wrote Python over 10 years ago and I never learned this.

How would you idiomatically write a function/method which mutates >1 parameter?