MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imposterr | 2025-05-27 00:05:53+00:00
I've stopped using the word "cheap" to describe situations like this as the word has too many negative connotations. I tend towards "inexpensive", "cost-effective", or "low-cost". I find it better describes my intent to describe something as not costing much but not speaking to poor quality which I feel like the word "cheap" has come to imply.
by const_cast | 2025-05-27 00:06:26+00:00
But this is very obviously not what AI is doing. In essence, an LLM is taking works and compressing them and storing them in a big database, to later be reproduced with a touch of non-determinism.

It's closer to archival and compression than captioning. But they're selling it. That's a big problem - you can't just take someone else's work, sprinkle some god knows what on it, throw it in a big pot with other shit you stole, and then reproduce it later. Even if your reproduction is super convoluted and not 100% accurate.
by baby_souffle | 2025-05-27 00:06:40+00:00
> I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs.

It'll depend a lot on who/where/how is doing the screening and what tools (if any) are permitted.

Remember that bogus program for TI8{3,4} series calculators that would clear the screen and print "MEMORY CLEAR"? If the proctor was just looking for that string and not actually jumping through the hoops to _actually_ clear the memory then it was trivial to keep notes / solvers ... etc on the calculator.
by shwouchk | 2025-05-27 00:07:19+00:00
i played a lot with the recent wave of tools. it was extremely easy to get system prompts and all the internal tokens from all providers.

i also experimented with letting the llm run wild in a codespace - there is a simple setting to let it autoaccept an unlimited amount of actions. i have no sensitive private repos and i rotated my tokens after.

observations: 1. i was fairly consistently successful in making it make and push git commits on my behalf. 2. i was successful at having it add a gh action on my behalf, that runs for every commit. 3. ive seen it use random niche libraries on projects. 4. ive seen it make calls to urls that were obviously planted; eg instead of making a request to “example.com” it would call “example.lol”, despite explicit instructions. (i changed the domains to avoid giving publicity to bad actors). 5. ive seen some surprisingly clever/resourceful debugging from some of the assistants. eg running and correctly diagnosing strace output, as well as piping output to a file and then reading the file when it couldnt get the output otherwise from the tool call. 6. ive had instances of generated code with convincingly real looking api keys. i did not check if they worked.

Combine this with the recent gitlab leak[0]. Welcome to XSS 3.0, we are at the dawn of a new age of hacker heaven, if we weren’t in one before.

No amount of double ratcheting ala [1] will save us. For an assistant to be useful, it needs to make decisions based on actual data. if it scanned the data, you can’t trust it anymore.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070626

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733683
by CoolCold | 2025-05-27 00:08:40+00:00
sounds like a nice side project for myself / something new (wth is that hype on Firebase and alternatives?) to look into on weekend like create per-user (likely with some limit of total 10 or so instance) demo env - average sysadmin like me should be able to handle it.

If i'll do something, will let you know if you wish
by const_cast | 2025-05-27 00:08:52+00:00
The express and sole purpose of an LLM is to create output that can be found in it's input. That's what it does.

When you ask for a picture of a cup of wine, you're reproducing an image of a cup of wine that was using in training. Or, more accurately, hundreds of images sort of averaged together.

You can't say this isn't the intention because this is literally the singular use of LLM. They don't do anything else. They don't change your oil. They reproduce input. Just because you don't know exactly what the input was originally (and you, in fact, cannot find out) does not mean that isn't what it's doing.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-27 00:10:24+00:00
> Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years

"Typical classroom experience" hasn't even meant the same thing for thousands of years.

"lecture" used to be centered around reading the source book so that students could copy it verbatim. The printing press was an important piece of "Edutech". Technology has been continuous, and much of it has been applied to impacted the experience of education, not just in the last few years, but over a long window of history. Yeah, what we currently think of as "edutech" is what has been around for only a short time, and hasn't yet been established as part of the consensus baseline -- but that's a moving target.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-27 00:11:02+00:00
Streaming apps are like grocery stores. In both, there is very little value add besides that they aggregate products. And in both the customer wants to get to their product with the least amount of friction possible.

You will notice that in most places, grocery store market has stabilized to an oligopoly, where almost every where multiple grocery stores exist, all of whom offer more or less the same range of products with some variations.

I would imagine if any streaming-app could license any content, the market would evolve to a similar equilibrium. Largely similar products, with some minor variations (some stores offering discount/luxury items at cheap/higher prices). Margins would be fairly low. But most customers will be fine with going to exactly one store/app over and over again.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-27 00:11:09+00:00
> rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults

I have had so many very frustrating conversations with full grown adults in charge of teaching CS. I have no faith at all that students would be able to choose an appropriate method of study.

My issue with the instruction is the very narrow belief in the importance of certain measurable skills. VERY narrow. I won’t go into details, for my own sanity.
by dspillett | 2025-05-27 00:11:26+00:00
> despite a jaw-dropping list of unforgivable offenses from the past few years, he enjoys more support today than he did in 2020. From people as smart as Zuck and Andreesen.

I don't think it is as much support, as not caring enough to be seen to be against, because there are benefits to not being seen as against and previously acting against (it at least bit acting with) has achieved little.

While Shart is in office, and possibly for some time after depending on what the current administration manages to setup over this term, the likes of Zuck have enough to lose by being against three current administration and little to gain otherwise (at least not in the short term).

In a shorter set of words: not support, greed and cowardice pretending to be support.

Not that this changes the right/wrong dynamic of the situation in the eyes of any side…
by barry-cotter | 2025-05-27 00:12:10+00:00
> proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat.

If they don’t catch them they don’t have a business model. They have one job. The University of London, Open University and British Council all have 50+ years experience on proctoring university exams for distance learning students and it’s not like Thomson Prometric haven’t thought about how to do it either, even if they (mostly?) do computerised exams.
by kbolino | 2025-05-27 00:12:51+00:00
The end goal is end-to-end protection with online verification. As far as I can tell, we are already halfway there. The highest level of Widevine protection in use today essentially involves the streaming server having a private encrypted conversation directly with your GPU. That includes a certificate that can expire due to age and be revoked due to suspicion of tampering. If anything is not up to snuff, you'll get downgraded content at best and a ban at worst.

The next logical step is to extend this process down the chain to include every device from the GPU to the display.

In order to make a fake TV work, you'd likely need to take a real TV and hack it. That's going to get increasingly difficult and various watermarking techniques will likely allow it to be identified and blacklisted anyway.
by CoolCold | 2025-05-27 00:13:40+00:00
I'm genially intrigued, how to achieve this, assuming you are on standard Windows Defender setup, not some 3 AV/DLP tools working at the same time on system.

My setup/config has NOTHING special usually - got laptop(s), start bundled Windows (10/11) Pro, run "reset this PC" to ensure fresh like install, use for several years. No magical steps involved or whatever "bloatware cleanup" people do.
by const_cast | 2025-05-27 00:14:48+00:00
The "word salads" were completely made up. It was always a hallucination.

The reasoning is that she's a black woman, so obviously she's stupid, and then we work backwards to word salad. That's how that happened.

In reality, she's very well spoken. 99.99% of all the stuff Kamala says is very easy to understand.

We can cherry-pick clips that represent 0.00001% of her speaking career all day. The fact is she's an educated woman who knows how to publicly speak, and she knows it well. Any other narrative is an alternative reality, sorry.
by proc0 | 2025-05-27 00:17:05+00:00
I said "you can" derive, and I could add "in theory" in the casual sense. I don't have access to these large models, or the training or the time to really analyze these large models to an extent that I can derive their behavior mathematically. My point was that we do know a lot about them, and it's enough to conclude that it's completely different than what humans do with their brains, and this is evident from their output.

> Oh you can't? Well it looks like you're just making an approximation here? Possibly an Hallucination. Sound familiar?

I don't think anyone would call a wrong theory a hallucination. This is also one of those stretched-out terms that makes the discussion harder. Hallucination means seeing something that is not there, and LLMs cannot see in this way... but I'm not saying AI is completely incapable of "seeing" like humans do. My claim is only about the current state of LLMs, but I digress. If I come up with a theory of human thought, it will be based on logical reasoning as we know it, namely how the brain processes thought. I'm claiming something very simple which is that human thought is a very different algorithm than how current LLMs work.

I could grant that LLMs might have component of human thinking, but it still a stretch to call it reasoning or thinking.

> You had to do make several assumptions and leaps in creativity to arrive at your conclusion. It's an hallucination through and through.

Again, it's not hallucination to be wrong when it comes to humans. An average IQ human that understands the world does not "hallucinate" like LLMs. It just doesn't happen unless we play semantics and call any mistake a hallucination, but that's my contention here.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 00:18:33+00:00
When I started college in 1989, my Pascal programming class used a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. I poked around those systems like crazy over the course of two quarters. I don't remember if there was any significant source code exposed to unprivileged users.

During the mid-90s, the Unix Wars were raging and Unix System Labs was suing U.C. Berkeley over the intellectual property of Unix source code. Unix had been written at AT&T Bell Labs, but Berkeley had licensed and forked their own, based on improved networking code, and by this time it was ready to run on i386 systems. In fact, USL had borrowed back some BSD code, allegedly without crediting them. Berkeley had been busy removing AT&T code and replacing it, so they could relicense BSD Unix.

USL, part of AT&T (but later purchased by Novell), contended that Berkeley could not easily make a "clean room implementation" of any kernel code or device drivers, if those programmers had read or worked with original AT&T source code. They told the courts (and journalists) that the programmers might be tempted to reproduce proprietary Unix code, consciously or subconsciously, and therefore, these programmers were permanently "Mentally Contaminated" and Berkeley should not be allowed to continue distributing BSD [BSDi] Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

So when I attended Usenix LISA in 1994, this 3-year lawsuit was at a fever pitch, and someone on the convention floor had manufactured large buttons for attendees to wear, proudly proclaiming "MENTALLY CONTAMINATED", and all the admins and systems programmers had a good laugh about the absurdity of trying to keep a lid on proprietary source code by policing everyone who's ever seen one of its files.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-27 00:19:17+00:00
In terms of "best album when listening all the way through, from start to finish", De-Loused is my number one. The way that they have these phenomenally catchy choruses, and then go off on captivating jams or ambient sound, and then come back to those choruses... chills. One of my big regrets is not seeing that album tour live.

Second album was also very enjoyable for me.
by staunton | 2025-05-27 00:19:32+00:00
You could go further and say that anything a computation could ever possibly do is a matter of using logic to arrive at a conclusion given just the right rules and axioms. That would mean anything going beyond that (potentially "sentience" or "consciousness", possibly even -- as you seemed to suggest -- "hallucination", though apparently a computer program can do it) would have to be "magic" that's impossible to even describe using logic-based science, let alone simulate by a program. (Could we have science that transcends logic?)

My original claim refers to the mundane situations where people get an LLM output which isn't what they wanted and go "see, it isn't reasoning! That's the problem!". For each such instance (or at least most of them), the "rules and axioms" that would have to be used to arrive at the desired conclusion would be different, sometimes incompatible, and in any case the people demanding "that it reason" wouldn't be able to spell those rules and axioms out, often even given years to do it, at least without allowing them to be obviously contradictory or trivially close to the specific conclusion or output they want. (Incidentally, that's why LLMs are interesting in the first place!)

So sure, you can trick an LLM into failing on a syllogism problem, and that does mean "it can't reason" in a certain narrow sense, but I don't think that's what we're actually talking about when someone is contrasting "reasoning" and "hallucinating", which is what I was originally objecting to. That's what I meant when I said that we don't have a coherent concept of what "reasoning" means in general.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-05-27 00:19:43+00:00
This is pretty meaningless data without additional context. Are the graduates employed in the field that they studied? Is a 3.2% unemployment rate that much better than 6.1%, if the employed philosophy majors are actually working low-wage out-of-band jobs that they don't use their degree for?

I don't think this is a strong argument for the narrative (apparently being sold by Microsoft) that AI is automating away all the jobs for computer science grads

Also I can't help but laugh at this quote from the linked HBR article:

"If you want to pursue a career in engineering, you should focus on learning philosophy in addition to traditional engineering coursework. Why? Because it will improve your code." (https://hbr.org/2024/04/why-engineers-should-study-philosophy)

It reminds me of that vibe in the 2010s where they wanted everyone to learn how to code. Michael Bloomberg was coding. What is the point of that? Does it make him a better politician if he becomes a crack Python developer? Either answer, yes or no, is equally idiotic.
by al_borland | 2025-05-27 00:19:46+00:00
I ended up using Exporter from the App Store. I didn't work great. I have an export, but there are a lot of issues with it. I'm finding it is often easier to copy the note and use the Rich Text to Markdown action in Shortcuts, then paste into Obsidian. If I spent more time with Shortcuts there is probably a way to automate this way a bit more.
by MichaelMoser123 | 2025-05-27 00:23:06+00:00
I think publishers will not be pleased about a steep fall in click rates, now publishers still have considerable political influence. What will Google do in the event of serious legal pushback or a renewed drive for antitrust action?

The introduction of AI overviews into Google search will cost quite a lot in compute/other resources, despite heavy caching, therefore this might be a significant bet in terms of costs vs profit for Google. What does Google expect from this feature in terms of business results? This seems to be quite a big bet, but what is actually at stake - in real terms?

Come to think of it: is there now a showdown between Google and Microsoft/OpenAI, where collateral costs are no longer taken into account?
by AfterHIA | 2025-05-27 00:23:44+00:00
I'm not sure that human beings have really gotten to a point that medical ethics is so robust that putting things into people's brains directly is even institutionally feasible outside of a few less invasive obvious use cases; where I have a keen interest is in the potential for taking raw brain data and using it to drive creative applications or record things like dreams and whimsies. I see Steve Mann moving in this direction but I'm not sure where the state of the art is.
by highfrequency | 2025-05-27 00:25:48+00:00
If Bank of America let anyone in the world easily open a checking account, this wouldn’t be a problem right? But they don’t do that, because of regulations and KYC etc.

Similarly, if BoA supported an Ethereum stablecoin but a random bank in Argentina supports a Solana stablecoin, it’s still going to be a pain to transfer money right?

I’m struggling to see how this is a blockchain issue rather than a regulatory + agreement on international standard issue.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-27 00:25:48+00:00
> Oral exams because it becomes obvious how skilled they are, how deep their knowledge is.

Assuming you have access to a computer lab, have you considered requiring in-class programming exercises, regularly? Those could be a good way of checking actual skills.

> Maybe providing the IDE online and observing copy-paste is a way forward. I just don't like the tendency that students can't run software on their own computers.

And you'll frustrate the handful of students who know what they're doing and want to use a programmer's editor. I know that I wouldn't have wanted to type a large pile of code into a web anything.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-05-27 00:26:53+00:00
Don't discount that some people struggle with the object of parenthood more than others. Maybe they'd led a more selfish life, weren't brought up to be yielding, giving, or responsible to others, and their journey required more growth than they'd anticipated.

If they didn't know that they weren't prepared, how could anyone else?

As a younger man, I spent longer than most parents actively raise their children caring for elderly family. A minor difference to child rearing is that when you no longer need you to help your children or change their diapers, it's generally not because they've died.
by roenxi | 2025-05-27 00:28:00+00:00
The "5. The Human Wreckage" section is probably the most interesting - on paper, everyone came out much worse (losers identified are workers, pension holders, shareholders, investors and executives which seems superficially comprehensive).

However it is important to recall that the people who actually made all the money extracting the wealth got out years before, retiring and/or selling stock. They're bystanders now and probably happy to run the whole operation again.

Although as an aside who these people are who think corporate pensions are a good idea is beyond me. People really should be in charge of their own savings in preference to their employer, expecting some random corporation to cover the cost was always a bit crazy even when it seemed sort-of possible that the system was stable. It is easy to have some sympathy but, as a practical matter, it was never going to work and it isn't a surprise that it didn't.
by meroes | 2025-05-27 00:29:08+00:00
2 years of RLHF I don’t see reasoning. It’s clearly a text-similarity game, plus training of course. My mental model to work best is not that I’m interacting with a thing with reasoning. That differs from my mental model of interacting with humans. I would be worse at my job if I interacted with LLMs as if they reasoned.
by chmod775 | 2025-05-27 00:29:20+00:00
It sounds wrong because "since" is generally combined with a point in time, but "a few months" is a duration, not a date. Also the first paragraph switches tense forms, which makes it stand out even more.

Rewriting it to "since a few months ago" seems to be the easiest way to fix this, though my favorite way to express the the same thing is "as of a few months ago".

It should be noted that the author, like most people you're likely to interact with in this bubble, is not a native speaker of English. What matters is getting the message across - which they did.

You'll end up not being very productive if you spend your time pointing all of these little slips out.
by nigeltao | 2025-05-27 00:30:26+00:00
For Wuffs, top level declarations start with either pub or pri (and both keywords have the same width, in a monospace font).

pub status "#blah" pub struct foo(etc etc) pri func foo.bar(etc etc)

Since code is also auto-formatted, you can do things like "show me a structural overview of a package's source code" with a simple grep:

rg -N ^p std/jpeg/*.wuffs

If you want just the exported API, change p to pub:

rg -N ^pub std/jpeg/*.wuffs
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-27 00:31:48+00:00
> with a consistently deployable build stack. So if you want to distribute a .app package, you could use nix to build it, and then people could download it and install/configure it according to some different scheme.

> But if it's trivial to reliably instantiate the build stack, why not just ship that instead and dispense with the special format? Then nobody has to wonder if you slipped some malware in the package before you distributed it.

This suggests to me that either you don't know how .app packaging works on macOS (or various ad-hoc packaging on Linux, such as Firefox or Ardour), or you're making a point that I'm missing.

The whole point of these non-Nix systems is precisely that you just package up bits of the build stack into the thing you distribute, and you reduce or eliminate system dependencies other than such basics as the system C library or X11.
by nh2 | 2025-05-27 00:32:09+00:00
> or make sure that the Session ID field is indexed with a hash-based index

Using a hash index instead of a btree isn't a 100% guaranteed solution because there may be craftable collisions (because e.g. postgres's index hash is not cryptographic) which cause fallback to linear comparison across the values inside the hash bucket:

https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/285739/prevent-timin...

So hashing the ID before the DB lookup is better.
by sevg | 2025-05-27 00:32:25+00:00
The DEB format is powerful and has a lot of conveniences for Debian Developers (eg, it does lots of things automatically for you to reduce boilerplate).

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discover what automatic things are happening and what they’re doing. (If you look at the debian files for a package without packaging knowledge, you often can’t tell how the package is made. Arch Linux PKGBUILD files for example are much easier to understand without prior knowledge.)

This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the documentation is poor as well, which means the barrier to entry is artificially high.

At least that was my impression from a few years ago. Maybe things are better now.