MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-05-23 13:58:38+00:00
Thanks for explaining. More specifics:

The University (and many other universities) has been engaging in overtly illegal discrimination on the basis of sex, race, and creed in hiring, grants, and I'm sure many other areas. There were many job postings where the CVs of white men were never looked at, because of their skin color and sex. There were many grant-funded opportunities (often federally-funded) where a white man, or a man, or a straight person would not have a chance because of those characteristics. Oh, and I should mention "diversity statements", now called "belonging statements". These are political tests: regardless of your skin color and genitals, if you don't sing the right political song you have no chance. This was a first line assessment at many places (e.g., UC Berkeley). This was all overt in that it was openly talked about, people would send emails to the effect "this job opening must go to a brown woman", etc. People generally, somehow, even Americans, didn't understand it was illegal. I would be greeted with quizzical looks if I enlightened them! (in casual conversation, of course, never officially!). This is all for hiring and similar. Students are different, and since the end of affirmative action Harvard has been still doing everything it can to continue discriminating against e.g. East Asians and Whites, which is of course illegal.

You risked losing your job for expressing an uncool belief (e.g., Carole Hooven: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2024/02/15/carole-hooven-wh...). Of course, they will try to force you to resign before actually firing you, which would leave open the possibility of legal problems. This may be a sort of "why not, it's a small thing, just say it" to a chemist, but to an endocrinologist or social scientist it can be intolerable.

Compelled speech was on the table, too, which is a bright line we have so far, as a society, have managed not to cross. Harvard and other elite universities were crossing it, and the Biden admin's Title IX rules overtly crossed it (by forcing you to use someone's preferred pronouns). A bad look, to put it mildly.
by diggan | 2025-05-23 13:58:52+00:00
> Doing backups and validating backups is very error-prone and time consuming

Right, but regardless of using a managed database service or self-hosted database, this is something you probably are doing anyways, at least for a production service with real users. Sure, the managed service probably helps with you with the details of how the backup is made, where it's stored, and how the restore process happens, but you still need to validate your backups and the rest, so replicate that process/experience with your self-hosted setup and you're nearly there.
by AquinasCoder | 2025-05-23 13:59:16+00:00
I recommend some of his other works: Whose Justice, Whose Rationality and Dependent Rational Animals.

It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.
by johnecheck | 2025-05-23 13:59:17+00:00
You misunderstand the bitter lesson.

It's not about specialized vs generalized models - it's about how models are trained. The chess engine that beat Kasparov is a specialized model (it only plays chess), yet it's the bitter lesson's example for the smarter way to do AI.

Chess engines are better at chess than LLMs. It's not close. Perhaps eventually a superintelligence will surpass the engines, but that's far from assured.

Specialized AI are hardly obsolete and may never be. This hypothetical superintelligence may even decide not to waste resources trying to surpass the chess AI and instead use it as a tool.
by hansvm | 2025-05-23 13:59:26+00:00
- It eliminates one way of forging results. Without stating the seed, people could consistently fail to reproduce your results and you could always have "oops, guess I had a bad seed" as an excuse. You still have to worry about people re-running the simulation till the results look good, but that's handled via other mechanisms.

- Many algorithms are vastly easier to implement stochastically than deterministically. If you want to replay the system (e.g., to locally debug some production issue), you need those "stochastic" behaviors to nonetheless be deterministic.

- If you're a little careful with how you implement deterministic randomness, you can start to ask counterfactual questions -- how would the system have behaved had I made this change -- and actually compare apples to apples when examining an experimental run.

Even in your counterexample, the random seeds being reproducible and published is still important. With the seed and source published, now anyone can cheaply verify the issue with the simulation, you can debug it, you can investigate the proportion of "bad" seeds and suss out the error bounds of the simulation, etc.
by mrbigbob | 2025-05-23 14:00:03+00:00
I agree, it was very annoying hearing how great the economy was doing when inflation and just the general cost of living rose significantly starting with covid and when anyone tried to have a talk about that a lot of people would just parrot how great the economy was doing and everyone they knew was doing fine. thats great for you but that doesnt mean what your experiencing is what a lot of other people are.
by mcphage | 2025-05-23 14:00:03+00:00
> The Democrats refusing to admit the economy was terrible for working people was enough.

That's a fine topic for a real conversation, but it was 100% not what the person I replied to was talking about.

> Of course it will be worse now.

Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
by jagraff | 2025-05-23 14:00:24+00:00
Very interesting. From my read, it appears that the authors claim that this attack is successful because LLMs are trained (by RLHF) to reject malicious _inputs_:

> Existing large language models (LLMs) rely on shallow safety alignment to reject malicious inputs

which allows them to defeat alignment by first providing an input with semantically opposite tokens for specific tokens that get noticed as harmful by the LLM, and then providing the actual desired input, which seems to bypass the RLHF.

What I don't understand is why _input_ is so important for RLHF - wouldn't the actual output be what you want to train against to prevent undesirable behavior?
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-05-23 14:00:37+00:00
This debate is exhausting because there's no coherent definition of AGI that people agree on.

I made a google form question for collecting AGI definitions cause I don't see anyone else doing it and I find it infinitely frustrating the range of definitions for this concept:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDF5_CMSjHZDDexHkc...

My concern is that people never get focused enough to care to define it - seems like the most likely case.
by jjulius | 2025-05-23 14:01:56+00:00
> If you are checking across groups, you are managing N group chats and texting all of them.

Exactly! I have different groups of friends and acquaintances with different tastes, interests, senses of humor, etc.

I appreciate moving between them and interacting directly with them very much. It never feels like I'm "managing" anything, nor does it feel like work. It feels like community.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-23 14:02:46+00:00
> they increasingly attempt HTTPS to a site first even if linked/typed as http

And can generally be configured by the user not to downgrade to http without an explicit prompt.

Honestly I disagree with the refusal to support various APIs over http. Making the (configurable last I checked) prompt mandatory per browser session would have sufficed to push all mainstream sites to strictly https.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-23 14:02:47+00:00
Only fedora can put stuff in their flatpak repository presumably. That makes them a gatekeeper. Why is a repository needed? If it was the same, Mozilla would be able to put a flatpak file for Firefox on their website and it would be the preferred way to install Firefox.

Of course everybody (including Mozilla) can create their own repository and then you can install from any repository you like. But how is that different than just downloading whatever and installing that? And that's more of a hypothetical. Mozilla doesn't do that and doing such things is not common.

What Apple and MS enforce via signatures is that what you install and run was produced by somebody with a valid certificate that passed their screening.

The problem flatpak hasn't solved is that the likes of Mozilla still have no good way to distribute the most recent version of their application to all Linux users. So they put a tar ball on their website instead.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-23 14:02:51+00:00
I would be interested to know more about the authors employment.

As a small business owner, my DR plan is oriented to reasonably preventing getting locked out or screwing things up for customers in the event of an emergency.

I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do leading SOC 2 Type 2 audits at a large firm.

Our auditors handed us a bunch of templates that they had purchased from an even larger firm. They said we could adopt them verbatim, but that we should at least read and probably modify them.

Management was… stressed… that we had paid close to $100,000 for that to be their policy “analysis”. I was tasked to read through all their templates and sort out what was and wasn’t necessary, compare to how we actually did business and what we gave two shits about, and produce work that closed the gap. (That’s another story; turns out it’s really hard writing policy for a business where both (active) founders and the CEO are looking for different things.)

It helps to plan for abstract scenarios, like “we lost the office but the people are alive”. Or “we lost all facilities and people in this state, but not the next one over”.

It also really helps to have management who understands the reality that not everything can be planned for, and that any DR strategy worth its salt has some kind of line in the sand beyond which you can’t do anything.
by subjectsigma | 2025-05-23 14:03:14+00:00
Yeah, I totally believe that. I imagine they showed it on video once and definitely did it every month for four years without anyone at the mall management asking questions, or ever once being seen.

Either way it doesn’t matter. Even if they did everything completely by the book within their moral framework, they are still taking something and keeping it for themselves.

Imagine if they had bought out an old strip mall, church, etc. and converted it into a makerspace, an art studio, a shelter, a daycare, etc., and ran it off donations. Think about how much more powerful of a message that would be. Yes, we can defeat capitalism, by reclaiming space and giving it back to a community which is self-supporting. Go forth and build things for others instead of yourself.

Nope, was much edger to sit around in a concrete room and play video games, though. Needed the rush of pretending to be a movie star and going where you’re not supposed to. If you want something, just take it.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-23 14:03:41+00:00
I got curious. If you put 1 picogram into Einstein's equation, you get about 90 joules of energy on annihilation. That's a bit more than half the energy delivered by a 90mph baseball or about half the energy of a defibrillator pulse.

Or wait, do you double it since you're annihilating a picogram of matter and antimatter?

Either way, that's a bonkers amount of energy from picograms of mass.
by troyvit | 2025-05-23 14:03:50+00:00
> Package maintainers aren't born that way, they become that way by volunteering, just like most everything in Linux.

I feel like there's a constant tug of war on this issue. If you leave it up to app developers then they have to package their app for N distros. If you leave it up to the distro maintainers then they have to compile N apps for their distro. I don't envy either group given how different distros are and how varied apps are in quality, methodology, etc.

I look at Podman. In my opinion it could be (could have been?) a huge disruptor, but its RedHat (or Fedora or CentOS or whatever the hell those guys do now) versions are way higher than versions for other distributions, which creates for me (just a home user) an interoperability problem between all my different Linux boxes. RedHat if anybody has the resources to fix this but I guess they'd rather try to use it as a way to force adoption of their distro? I don't even know.

Both the apps and the distros are volunteer-heavy. App packaging is a big job for either side. I'm still hopeful that Flatpak can help that job
by taneq | 2025-05-23 14:04:37+00:00
This reminds me of game design (and especially MMORPG game design) where, while the designers are attempting to offer "meaningful choices", the mindset of the player base makes it so that anything (talent point, piece of gear, specialisation, profession, whatever) is either worthless (and you're an idiot for using it) or it's mandatory (and it's so unfair how much work it requires to obtain). There's no in-between.
by palata | 2025-05-23 14:04:42+00:00
> you want distro maintainers to compile and package every single pieces of software under the sun

No. I want people who will actually use the package to package the software they need, and distro maintainer to supervise that.

> Because it was packaged by people who know little about erlang

Yep, people who won't use Erlang shouldn't package Erlang. But on the other hand, developers who won't use Erlang on platform X shouldn't package Erlang on platform X.

The "we absolutely need flatpak because otherwise it fundamentally doesn't work" philosophy is, to me, very close to saying "we must consolidate everything under one single OS. Everybody should use the exact same thing otherwise it doesn't work". That's not what I want. I want to have freedom, and the cost of it is that I may have to package stuff from time to time.

If you don't want to contribute to your distro, choose a super popular distro where everything is already packaged (and used!). Or use macOS. Or use Windows. You don't get to complain about Alpine Linux not having a package you want: you chose Alpine, that was part of the deal.
by rowanG077 | 2025-05-23 14:04:44+00:00
I agree that restricting the hero pool is a huge simplification. But they did play full 5v5 standard dota with just a restricted hero pool of 17 heroes and no illusions/control units according to theverge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/13/18309459/openai-five-dota...). It destroyed the professionals.

As an ex dota player, I don't think this is that far off from having full on, all heroes dota. Certainly not as far of as you are making it sound.

And dota is one of the most complex games, I expect for example that an AI would instantly solve CS since aim is such a large part of the game.
by Bostonian | 2025-05-23 14:05:13+00:00
It sounds like the author is reinventing modern Fortran, which has array operations but also fast loops.

`Here’s my extremely non-clever idea: Let’s just admit that loops were better. In high dimensions, no one has yet come up with a notation that beats loops and indices. So, let’s do this:

Bring back the syntax of loops and indices. But don’t actually execute the loops. Just take the syntax and secretly compile it into vectorized operations. Also, let’s get rid of all the insanity that’s been added to NumPy because loops were slow.`
by oneplane | 2025-05-23 14:06:09+00:00
It's bonkers if you don't need it, just like JSONx (JSON-as-XML) is bonkers if you don't need it. But standards aren't for a single individual need, if they were they wouldn't be standards. And some people DO need these variations.

Take your argument about order of operations or algorithms. Just because you might not need to do it in an alternate order or use a legacy (and broken) algorithm doesn't mean nobody else does. Keep in mind that this standard isn't exactly new, and isn't only used in startups in San Francisco. There are tons of systems that use it that might only get updated a handful of times each year. Or long-lived JWTs that need to be supported for 5 years. Not going to replace hardware that is out on a pole somewhere just because someone thought the RFC was too complicated.

Out of your arguments, none of them require you to do it that way. Example: you don't have to supply d, dq, dp or qi if you don't want to. But if you communicate with some embedded device that will run out of solar power before it can derive them from the RSA primitives, you will definitely help it by just supplying it on the big beefy hardware that doesn't have that problem. It allows you to move energy and compute cost wherever it works best for the use case.

Even simpler: if you use a library where you can specify a RSA Key and a static ID, you don't have to think about any of this; it will do all of it for you and you wouldn't even know about the RFC anyway.

The only reason someone would need to know the details is if you don't use a library or if you are the one writing it.
by skybrian | 2025-05-23 14:06:15+00:00
I don’t think you need to write it yourself, since there are also libraries that implement specific algorithms for pseudo-random number generators, if if you’re worried, you could pin or vendor the dependency.

But it’s true that if the algorithm isn’t specified then the implementation is free to change it, and probably should change it sometimes, to ensure calls don’t depend on it being fixed.

(Reproducibility is normally about what happens when you use the same version of everything.)
by nothercastle | 2025-05-23 14:06:48+00:00
Someone posted a link to a blog that I can now no longer find that broke down the cost of nuclear power and showed that even at 0$ cost for power generation it wasn’t competitive and that solar is dirt cheap in comparison. Really changed my perspective. The same thing with blog posts on energy grid, peak load and power source management. This sort of discussion never seems to hit mainstream.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-23 14:07:26+00:00
The fallout from a bomb is going to depend on its design.

In a typical thermonuclear bomb, most of the yield is still from fission, so there are lots of fission products. The purpose of the fusion is to generate neutrons to more thoroughly fission the fissionable material.

However, it's possible to design thermonuclear bombs with greatly reduced fission fraction. The extreme example of that were the Ripple tests, which the US conducted shortly before atmospheric tests were banned. These involve a secondary without a fission "spark plug", where carefully tailored implosion cause the density/temperature at the core of the secondary to reach conditions for fusion ignition, in a way very similar to how inertial confinement fusion reactors are imagined to work. The most extreme of these has been reported to derive 99% of its yield from fusion reactions. If the neutrons from these are absorbed in something with low activation the fallout could be greatly reduced.
by MrLeap | 2025-05-23 14:08:37+00:00
I wouldn't bet against him. "The Bitter Lesson" may imply an advantage to someone who historically has been at the tip of the spear for squeezing the most juice out of GPU hosted parallel computation.

Graphics rendering and AI live on the same pyramid of technology. A pyramid with a lot of bricks with the initials "JC" carved into them, as it turns out.
by mrbigbob | 2025-05-23 14:09:03+00:00
if there are harvard alum are cheering this on they are morons without a doubt. Trump couldnt care less about truth seeking in the slightest he just wants complete and full control with his delusional backwards thought process. you can want change on something but that doesnt mean that when another individual/goverment comes along theyre going to change something for the better.

people were unhappy with bidens handling of israel so they voted for trump and where did that get them?
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-23 14:09:08+00:00
Robotics to navigate the physical world seems more impactful than some pin/glasses product to provide a passive audio/visual interface to the chatbot doesn't seem so earth shattering either though.

What would you do with a 10x or 100x smarter Siri/Alexa? I still don't see my life changing.

Give me a robot that can legitimately do household errands like the dishes, laundry, etc.. now we are talking.
by soci | 2025-05-23 14:09:08+00:00
> Fundamentally, I believe in the importance of learning from a stream of interactive experience, as humans and animals do, which is quite different from the throw-everything-in-a-blender approach of pretraining an LLM. The blender approach can still be world-changingly valuable, but there are plenty of people advancing the state of the art there.

It's a shame that pretrained approach leads to such good enough result. The learning-from-experience, or what should be the "right" approach, will stagnate. I might be wrong, but it seems that aside from Carmack and a small team, "the world" is just not looking/investing on that side of the AI anymore.

However, I find it funny that Carmack is now researching for such approach. At the end of the day, he was the one who invented Portals, an algorithm to circumvent the need to reproduce the whole 3D world and therefore making 3D games computationally possible.

As a side note, I wonder what models are to come once we see the latest state of the art AI Video training technologies, in synch with the joystick movements from a real player. Maybe the results are so astonishing that even Carmack changes his mind on the subject.

EDIT::grammar & typos
by palata | 2025-05-23 14:09:10+00:00
I don't know what Devault says, but here is my opinion: do not ship something you don't understand/test/use yourself.

Distros should not package random open source projects they don't use/understand, and developers should not package their project for distros they don't use/understand. For both, it's like shipping untested code and the conclusion is always going to be "you should all run the same system I do" or "we should all have the exact same system, let's implement Flatpak".

Developers should package their project for the distros they support (often that's just Ubuntu). Random people should package the open source projects they want to use in their distro of choice (the more popular the distro, the higher the chance that someone else has done it already). All that under the supervision of distro maintainers.
by brookst | 2025-05-23 14:09:13+00:00
The theory is that it isn’t present in the corpus of training data, so AI won’t use it. Maybe sort of kind of true, but probably more performance art than actual proposal.

In the unlikely event there was uptake, websites would regex emdashes into amdashes to appear human, AI would train on that, and we’d be looking for a different secret signal.
by tipofthehat | 2025-05-23 14:09:34+00:00
Tangentially related: as a non-developer I have started trying to hack/extend Anytime Podcast player to become a light language learning app, for supporting using native level resources for intermediate learners.

The idea is to give me vocab, phrases and idioms with timed with a transcript to appear just before the audio, with some feedback on understanding and a simple learning model of users level, vocabulary, strengths and weaknesses etc

I've made a start using whisper and some simple Bayesian modelling but if anyone more technically gifted wants to steal my idea they're more than welcome... As it's going to take a while for little old me.