MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiimshort | 2025-05-22 03:35:33+00:00
I have been wondering about the use of diffusion techniques for text generation, it is nice to see Google release a model that, seemingly, validates some thoughts I had.

Most folks I have seen experimenting with AI are either using a paid service or running high-grade hardware (even if consumer-level). The best I have in my current repertoire is a 5700XT and am not able to upgrade from that yet. The limitation, though, has at least also given some more significant insights into the shortcomings of current models.

Model sizes have gotten quite large and coherence seems to mostly have scaled with the density of a model, leaving the smaller models useful for only smaller tasks. Context size is also extremely important from my experiments with long-running dialogues and agent sessions, but a smaller GPU simply cannot fit a decent model and enough context at the same time. I do wonder if diffusion techniques will allow for a rebalancing of this density-to-coherence connection, letting smaller models produce chunks of coherent text even if limited by context. From my viewpoint it seems it will. Mixed tool call + response outputs also have the potential to be better.

Speed is also another problem I, and everyone else, has had with modern LLMs. The nature of cycling around the input with a new additional output each time is time consuming. On an older GPU with no AI-specific hardware it is an eternity! Being able to at least track 0-100% progress state would be an improvement from the current solution. At the moment one must simply wait for the LLM to decide to stop (or hit the max number of inference tokens). I am hopeful that, even on lower-end GPUs, a diffusion model will perform slightly better.

This does now beg several questions. If we are processing noise, where does the noise come from? Is there a good source of noise for LLMs/text specifically? Is the entire block sized beforehand or is it possible to have variable length in responses?
by al_borland | 2025-05-22 03:36:47+00:00
Sorry. I hope you can understand the skepticism. There are a lot of people in the health space just looking to make a quick buck, so my BS meter is always on high (as are many others). This is something you’ll need to contend with at launch. I’m not saying this is you, but extraordinary claims will always meet resistance, especially if it doesn’t seem like something is being hidden.

I just took a look at more of the site. I’m not sure if changes were made based on feedback, or if the site has remained the same, but it mentions tones being used to single the brain to adjust. This was what I was looking for, but you seemed to dance around it in the comments (or maybe I somehow missed it in the blog post and comments?). If you can mention it on the website, I’m assuming it’s not part of the FDA restriction.

Having learned that, I’d have a follow up question. I sleep with a white noise machine. Others may live in a city with street noise at all hours of the night. Will something like a white noise machine, or street noise, mask (or interfere with) the tones the headband is making, or dampen the impact it has? I wouldn’t want to give the white noise up, as it has helped me a lot, especially in unfamiliar environments. It gives my brain something neutral to focus on while trying to fall asleep, instead of activating at every little house or street noise that might be going on.

One of my biggest issues is going to bed and then falling asleep. If I fail to do that effectively, I wouldn’t even get to the part where the headband could do its thing. If it takes longer to fall asleep using this, does the effectiveness mean a person can feel as rested, with similar performance (memory, etc) on less sleep? The blog stressed how time sleeping is the wrong metric, but would this cut the amount of sleep a person needs, or would they still sleep for a similar duration, just with better quality? I don’t think sleep duration can be thrown out, as people need to organize their life around sleep.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-22 03:38:24+00:00
> I don't think many people want to subscribe to 20+ Patreons for $5 apiece, as much as they might like to support those authors

I don’t think any bundle will take off. People like getting direct support, and people like giving direct support and getting individual messages in return. (Furthermore, creators know that as soon they help this hypothetical platform get enough traction it will immediately turn and arbitrage against them by paying less and less per user and obscuring the metrics.)

There is only a limited number of mods you can play with, and a number of creators you really want to support. Many people have no problem with that number. (Sometimes their parents have, but that’s another matter.)

One thing I missed is that in addition to gamers paying for mods or community there is the good old “slap an ad on mod page”.

You are right in that you are competing against your fellow creators and that it is a saturated market. That is exactly why if you make something millions of people install you really don’t want to make the knowledge too accessible and spend time on any activity that literally takes food off your table.
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-22 03:39:18+00:00
Who else feels this product is "stupid"? Alan? Lisa? Josh? Yana? Katy?

And did it "piss off" anyone else? Alan? Lisa? Josh? Yana? Katy?

And who else felt this product is "messed up"? Alan? Lisa? Josh? Yana? Katy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E
by __loam | 2025-05-22 03:39:22+00:00
This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI.

One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.
by hansvm | 2025-05-22 03:39:29+00:00
Yes, as with all of these models. The only architectures which struggle with that feature are those which have a strong "distributed" aspect to their computations, where it can take much more work than programmers typically expect to ensure you're actually performing equivalent computations.

When executing any of them on GPUs or other accelerators though (dLLMs or otherwise), you do have to remain cognizant of chip-specific approximations and deviations from the standard. That can be actual issues on the chip (a famous one comes to mind where some f16 or f32 computation passed through an intermediate, undocumented f8), or it can be issues with how your software compiles to a chip (e.g., (a+b+c)+(x+y+z) is not the same as (a+b)+(c+x)+(y+z) with floats, so you have a lot less freedom to lay out your computations in a way that fits the chip nicely).
by Papazsazsa | 2025-05-22 03:39:31+00:00
Professions die in the face of competition, that's nothing new.

What's more perilous is that the internet will soon cease to be a useful way to access and distribute knowledge, and has been transformed from a resource for learning and sharing into a clear-cut forest which nobody will replant.

But hey, at least sama got a new gruebel forsey.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-22 03:40:29+00:00
A small side note about submission titles (also in light of the "do not editorialize" guideline): it may not be evident that www pages can have non-matching "titles" and "headings" - and that reflects e.g. on RSS text.

In this case, for example:

Page Title: «Indian police are trying to ‘read minds' of suspects, over neuroscientists' objections»

Heading: «Mind reader? // A forensic technology developed in India sifts brain recordings for clues to a suspect’s guilt or innocence. Many neuroscientists are skeptical, but it is catching on in other countries»

...This could be sometimes confusing for moderation (including community moderation - the "flag" feature): there have been cases of sensationalistic or excessive forms that appeared to be editorializing from the submitter, while they were just literal originals not matching what was immediately found in the page...
by wileydragonfly | 2025-05-22 03:40:33+00:00
Meh, went through one of those services, (Buyee?) had to give them direct access to my PayPal to set up the account. Won my auctions and that shipping magically went from $40 to $300. Drawn instantly. I filed a fraud complaint with my bank, which I immediately won, and they suddenly started trying to counteroffer at $80. For two years. Anyway, hope they’re enjoying that crate of 80s video games.
by Arnavion | 2025-05-22 03:42:40+00:00
All RISC-V consumer boards running Linux also use DT. RISC-V is also working on getting ACPI but primarily for the sake of servers, just like with ARM where ACPI is primarily used for servers (ARM SBBR / ServerReady).

ARM Windows laptops only use ACPI because Windows has no interest in DTs, but under Linux these devices are still booted using DT. I don't know for sure, but the usual reason is that these ACPI implementations are hacked up by the manufacturer to be good enough to work with Windows, so supporting them on Linux requires more effort than just writing up the DT.
by plaidfuji | 2025-05-22 03:42:50+00:00
It honestly may depend on how bad it is and how you react to it. For me, it was causing almost a constant panic-level reaction for weeks. I couldn’t sleep without heavy drugs, and I would wake up sweating and on edge. Just non-stop. I took a fair bit of time off work because of how hard it was to focus. So suffice to say I was willing to try anything.. and the meditation aspect was necessary for me beyond just reducing tinnitus. But I can’t see how it would make things worse, at least not in a permanent way.
by stefanpie | 2025-05-22 03:43:26+00:00
I am not the original author, but I posted this since it mirrors some experiences I have had in my PhD so far submitting papers. This kind of tweaking in paper and writing even happens when writing the first draft or sometimes even in the conception of the research idea or how to go about the implementation and experimentation.

There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or more praised it will be once it's accepted. This simply alludes to the fact that many times reviewers can be bothered with seeing value in certain ideas or topics in a field unless it is "novel" or the paper is written in a way that is geared towards them, rather than being relegated to "just engineering effort" (this is my biased experience). However, tailoring and submitting certain ideas/papers to venues that value the specific work is the best way I have found to work around this (but even then it takes some time to really understand which conferences value which style of work, even if it appears they value it).

I do think there is some saving grace in the section the author writes about "The Science Thing Was Improved," implying that these changes in the paper make the paper better and easier to read. I do agree very much with this; many times, people have bad figures, poor tables or charts, bad captions, etc., that make things harder to understand or outright misleading. But I only agree with the author to a certain extent. Rather, I think that there should also be changes made on the other side, the side of the reviewer or venue, to provide high-quality reviews and assessments of papers. But I think this is a bit outside the scope of what the author talks about in their post.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-22 03:44:16+00:00
The irony is in their scraping of all data within their significant radius, and yet the likes of twitter and facebook barely let you access anything of thiers without a login.

If they're scraping data from everywhere to feed their beast, then their data must also be open and scrape-able.

This does not, however, help the current situation where they sit upon the shoulders of millions of creative folks and provide no credit whatsoever, whilst also (actively or passively - by their existence and capability) attempting to make those very same creative folks redundant.

Will there be such a thing as AI stagnation if and when creative works for "it" to digest either are no longer created or no longer accessible to 'the great crawlers'?

Maybe artists can sell their works for ingestion in this scenario? Maybe that should already be the case...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-22 03:44:48+00:00
The stock market runs on feedback loops where people are trying to outguess other people that are also trying to outguess the other, that's why it's so wild.

Stocks are the worst example. Trendlines for AI has been pretty reliable for the last decade and we have a North Star that proves we haven’t hit the limit. If a human brain can exist then such intelligence artificial or not can also exist.
by al_borland | 2025-05-22 03:45:45+00:00
It just requires the political will to make it happen. Sadly, politics in the US is currently more about fighting against each other than finding common ground to move things in a positive direction. Until that changes, you’re right, it won’t change.

On a local level, I have seen some attempts. I have some protected bike lanes around me, and the nearest big city is putting in a 20+ mile greenway around the city for bikes and pedestrians. These things were unheard of 20 years ago. However, all of this stuff has to reach a certain tipping point before the average person will use it. It’s a very much “build it and they will come” situation… and until that tipping point, everyone will simply be upset by the road diets, because the incomplete vision isn’t offsetting any traffic yet.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-22 03:45:53+00:00
How utterly uninspiring and boring compared to the designs of talented Winamp skinners of yore. Look, I get it. Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.

The Winamp skinning era represented something fundamentally different from today's design philosophy. It was about personal expression, creativity, and making your tools reflect your personality rather than conforming to a universal aesthetic. When users could fundamentally alter their software's appearance, they became co-creators rather than passive consumers. That's a very different relationship with technology than what we have now, and I hate it.

https://skins.webamp.org
by nprateem | 2025-05-22 03:47:56+00:00
Finally an AI story here so I can post about leaving Anthropic.

Sorry guys, yes, Claude is the best model, but your lack of support for structured responses left me no choice.

I had been using Claude in my Saas, but the API was so unreliable I'd frequently get overloaded responses.

So then I put in fallbacks to other providers. Gemini flash was pretty good for my needs (and significantly cheaper), but failed to follow the XML schema in the prompt that Claude could follow. Instead I could just give a pydantic schema to constrain it.

The trouble is the Anthropic APIs just don't support that. I tried using litellm to paper over the cracks but no joy. However, OpenAI does support pydantic.

So i was left with literally needing twice as many prompts to support Gemini and Anthropic, or dropping Anthropic and using Gemini with OpenAI as a fallback.

It's a no-brainer.

So you guys need to pull your fingers out and get with the programme. Claude being good but also more expensive and not being compatible with other APIs like this is costing you customers.

Shame, but so long for now...
by godelski | 2025-05-22 03:49:48+00:00
> people are not uninformed, they're primed to fall for it

Maybe you are, but I'm smart and only an idiot could fall for such a definitely super obvious trap! I know because I read this post hoc and with all the insights and context given via an article!

I think the biggest trap is ourselves. Maybe the best thing that needs to change culturally is admitting that anyone can be caught by these traps. Doesn't mean you're dumb, naive, or anything is wrong with you. It's a game of asymmetry and it's always much easier to see when all the cards are face up on the table. We're not always operating at 100% either. It'd be crazy to expect someone to be operating at full capacity at all times. We all make mistakes, right? Nothing to be embarrassed about.

The belief that there's something wrong with you for falling for such a trap only helps the conman. In fact, it is something they rely on!
by somenameforme | 2025-05-22 03:50:57+00:00
They do a lot more than just that, but a lot of the process is kept confidential. There's a huge cat and mouse game between cheaters and the sites so they try all sorts of things including only using second tier moves, and even 'blundering' but only in winning positions such that the blunder doesn't risk the outcome of the game. Some cheaters also only use the bot in certain parts of the game. In the extreme case you might have very strong players who are cheating (like in a money event) using only the comp eval. So they don't have an easy job at all.

Here, for example, is one of the more well known and easy meta-indicators of cheating: Humans spend more time on difficult moves than on trivial ones. Cheaters will typically spend a comparable amount of time on a trivial forced move, and the start of an exceptionally deep combination. And an even bigger tell is that said exceptionally deep combo may be followed by a couple of forced moves, yet he will again take just about the same amount of time to play those moves.
by MPSFounder | 2025-05-22 03:53:54+00:00
I have a problem with this. In the old days, people did research for the sake of research, and mostly out of Europe came the greatest scientific works we have seen. I did my PhD in the US, and it is very unfortunate that "gaming" publications and focusing on "grants" is the meat of research. Before I get criticized, I was part of this process at a top 10 university and I am a proud American. It is because of this pride that I must show tough love. I chose to move away from academia without a postdoc because I hated it. I wanted to do research and contribute to work that pushes my field forward. Most (90% of those I met, and I dare say 99% of international students) only wanted a PhD for selfish reasons (entry to US market, salary bump, changing fields, access to RnD jobs, etc). Perhaps I am naive, but I wish more people did research for the sake of research. The only Clay prize went to a Russian who hated academia. Perhaps there is some truth in the fact the immortals in science are not those churning conference papers, but those laying seeds a la Laplace, Einstein, etc. I want to see more of those, because this is what will move the field forward. It is not manipulating metrics to improve a neural network for one use case, while knowing (and not sharing) it fails in every other instance. This is my second beef with research. When something is tried but does not work, it is not shared. Someone else will try and fail, and this build up will overall slow everyone down. I wish we were more accepting of failed trials, and of not knowing the answer (sharing results without the theory is OKAY. It is OKAY if someone else comes up with it using your results. Having spent many years in a PhD, I can confirm the vast majority unfortunately do not share my point of view. And I hope I do not come across as bitter, it frankly makes me sad.
by notaharvardmba | 2025-05-22 03:54:16+00:00
LLMs are just a statistical analysis of a large body of written information. The proprietary part is mostly the training. It’ll end up being similar to OSM vs Google maps vs HERE. You can get close with crowd/open sourcing, but you can get significantly better at any given point in time by investing millions or billions. At some point the commodity version will be good enough and then no one will invest any more and we’ll stall out for a while until someone succeeds at the next moonshot.
by toast0 | 2025-05-22 03:54:21+00:00
Everybody sets traffic to Do-Not-Fragment. Nobody wants their routers to fragment packets anyway; you might as well ask to get a notification when too big packets are dropped.

Nobody wants to have their servers reassemble fragments, it's too much work; many servers just drop any fragments they do get. I ran servers pushing 20 gbps of downloads, and would receive on the order of two fragments per second. It looked legitimate, so I preferred not to disable fragment assembly, but I'd set the reassembly buffer as small as possible; there's no need to keep more than say 16 fragments... if you're getting more than a handful of fragments, it's ddos and that one guy with a weird network will just have to deal. They probably can't use any other sites anyway.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-22 03:54:43+00:00
Alright, let’s rephrase it to be a bit more pedantry-proof: A Linux-based FOSS analogue of Recall built on a self-hosted LLM of the user’s choice will never actively undermine the user’s privacy or sell them out as long as they’ve vetted all software involved.

There’s always the possibility of vulnerabilities and exploits but that’s not the point.
by motorest | 2025-05-22 03:56:09+00:00
> It's much easier to 100x $1k than to 10x $1m.

China's GDP is the second largest in the world, and is around two thirds of US's. China's economy is growing continuously over 5% whereas the US already discussed facing a recession.

In some metrics, such as PPP GDP, China already towers over the US.

I think you're trying ver hard to diminish the second largest economy of the world at a moment where it's expected to be a few years until it's the single largest.
by Anon1096 | 2025-05-22 03:56:20+00:00
How so? It's already status quo at companies with massive monorepos like Google and Meta. Your IDE connects to a remote computer and you write and run code on it. No more fiddling around with arcane dev env setup processes it's honestly really refreshing and doesn't feel restrictive at all. On the contrary I can nuke my cloud dev environment and bring it up again in minutes without worrying about losing anything.