MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jach | 2025-05-11 00:38:04+00:00
It's important to try and de-googleify your life if only so you don't get caught up in making such an exaggerated sky-is-falling point. All of these could literally vanish tomorrow and the world would go on, they all have their alternatives, some of them arguably superior. For some, the near term pain would be greater than for others -- even just on my personal level I'd be caught with my pants down for email, because while I have over the years moved a lot of email addresses to something at my own domain name, I haven't done it for all of them, and I'd still need to update the forwarding to not-google. Not a huge deal though. A big one you didn't even list that's more important than several you did combined is Youtube, but again there are alternatives.

The world would change, but I think quite a bit less than you seem to think. To put it another way, the world was undeniably changed by Google, but the change has been done, and they're no longer necessary to keep the biggest changes from reverting. (I'd be more worried about SBCL development if google flights' backend couldn't find a new home -- the product itself has tons of competition + just going directly to airlines.)

In actual reality, of course, these things don't disappear overnight, making the pain of switching much, much less for businesses and individuals heavily dependent on some of these things. Even if "google collapsing within a few years" was likely (they have something like a third or more of annual operating expenses saved as cash on hand), a few years is more than enough time. If a business can migrate off of Salesforce or SAP (it can be expensive and time consuming but you can do it!), it can migrate off these.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-11 00:38:06+00:00
> Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s.

Actually it was mostly created by the huge post-WW2 boom due to the fact that the US was quite literally the only country left standing, the only country not devastated by war, and the holder of much of the world's wealth in the form of gold reserves (collecting much of the gold that Europe had in store--you thought we did it for free?)
by dekhn | 2025-05-11 00:39:04+00:00
We had both an Apple II+ and a Commodore 64 at school when I was about 10 and I just couldn't get into the C64- the slow disk drive (IIRC it's the bus that's the bottleneck) meant minutes of waiting for programs to start. While the Apple II+ would usually load things very quickly. In many ways the Apple was inferior (see the comparison chart in the linked article) but everything about it just felt "right" to me.

I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
by tracerbulletx | 2025-05-11 00:40:15+00:00
Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality.

If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-11 00:40:43+00:00
> Um, because building out direct sales means we will have to hire a bunch of people, expend a huge amount of our revenue, and have a decent probability that we will completely fail and take the company with it.

> But, yeah, that's visionary!

Not doing those things may well allow your competitor to capture more of the market, use that revenue to out-build you, then take over your market share as well.

It's entirely possible that "grow faster than the competition" is the only viable survival tactic.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 00:41:33+00:00
Re: the "beast" of Revelation

For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away".

This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it.

So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.
by EventH- | 2025-05-11 00:43:46+00:00
Modern physics and biology really do not conflict with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul but only describe in further detail the operations of the body.

The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.
by kragen | 2025-05-11 00:45:34+00:00
> So my TV Terminal, for accessing the ARPAnet, was uppercase only.

I never realized that the most influential personal computer was specifically designed to access what would later become the internet. That's astounding.

(The first internetworking experiments that I can find records of were done as part of the ARPANet project, and some of the protocols and even many of the port numbers we use today in TCP/IP are from ARPANet.)

I also had no idea that Woz had built his own CPU out of discrete logic in 01970. I still haven't done that myself 55 years later!
by Krssst | 2025-05-11 00:46:44+00:00
> It's nice to have an alternative to Apple, but that's the only good thing about it. Using Android reminds me of the old Windows. Very unstable. Full of spyware/bloatware.

Being free to run whatever code we want as users (F-droid is a treasure). Plus actually having a "disable animations completely" button to remove unneeded slowness.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-11 00:46:59+00:00
These seem like guesses. From the descriptions on the website I would have said the first three are public style social networking and the latter three are a sort of collaboration thing closer to project management tools.

But I don’t know!

Are these mutually exclusive or can you run all at the same time? Can a “social” talk to a “community”? Is an “ember” actually able to do anything by itself? Can a “social” talk to a Mastodon instance?
by tdpvb | 2025-05-11 00:47:03+00:00
These studies are correlative but not casually conclusive. As in, yes there are genes that seem correlated with people who exhibit ADHD symptoms, but that doesn't mean the counterfactual is also true: "everybody with these genes will have ADHD, no matter what".

For example, if that were true then the DSM would describe a genetic test for ADHD, not an open-ended dragnet of multiple choice, "cherrypick from these 18+ descriptions of behavior".
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-11 00:47:06+00:00
It's falconry with eagles instead. The bird actually catches the prey, no guns involved. The dogs flush out the prey and drive it into a position where the bird can get it. The human trains the animals and manages the hunt.

Here's a video about a Texas falconer demonstrating the general process. https://youtu.be/tWp7XcPc1gg
by caseyy | 2025-05-11 00:47:47+00:00
> AI can be just as good as talking to a friend when you don’t have one

This is not true, and it's not even wrong. You almost cannot argue with such a statement without being ridiculous. The best I can say is: natural language synthesis is not a substitute for friends.

If we are debating these things, it's evidence we adopted LLMs with far too little forethought.

I mean, on a technicality, you could say "my friend synthesizes plausible language, this can do it, too. So it can substitute a little bit!" but at that point I'm pretty sure we're not discussing friendship in its essence, and the (emotional, physical, social, etc) support that comes with it.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-11 00:48:14+00:00
> The biggest risk is with privacy

No, the biggest risk is that it behaves in ways that actively harm users in a fragile emotional state, whether by enabling or pushing them into dangerous behavior.

Many people are already demonstrably unable to handle normal AI chatbots in a healthy manner. A "therapist" substitute that takes a position of authority as a counselor ramps that danger up drastically.
by slumberlust | 2025-05-11 00:48:52+00:00
It sounds like you're arguing we should invest more in the population's education? I'd agree with that.

> how come immigrants from Haiti/other 3rd world countries come to the poorest rural towns in USA and make it work, while US citizens drown in drugs and crime?

Any source(s) on this? First I'm hearing of this correlation.
by leptons | 2025-05-11 00:49:04+00:00
>Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should

If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code.

The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was garbage coming through,I couldn't upload or download, and it was caused by the slow ROM serial code. I hacked my favorite terminal program with my own assembly language bit-banged serial driver, and then the 2400bps modem worked flawlessly. The same is true for the slow disk drive serial code. To my knowledge, that wasn't caused by any flaw in the hardware, it was just slow driver code.

Everyone I knew had a Fastload cartridge, but I was in "the scene", so maybe not the average user back then.

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58317
by anyfoo | 2025-05-11 00:49:07+00:00
Ah. Is that why LFSRs (linear feedback shift registers) and specifically PRBS generators (pseudo-random binary sequences) produce Sierpinski triangles as well?

PRBS sequences are well-known, well-used "pseudo-random" sequences that are, for example, used to (non-cryptographically!) scramble data links, or to just test them (Bit Error Rate).

I made my own PRBS generator, and was surprised that visualizing its output, it was full of Sierpinski triangles of various sizes.

Even fully knowing and honoring that they have no cryptographic properties, it didn't feel very "pseudo-random" to me.
by Rochus | 2025-05-11 00:49:31+00:00
Java played a pivotal role in popularizing object-oriented programming, because it was intentionaly designed to be simpler and safer than C++, and it was rapidly adopted as the primary teaching language for OOP in universities and colleges worldwide. OOP languages before Java were either niche (Simula, Smalltalk) or, in the case of C++, considered complex and less accessible for beginners. Java introduced millions of new programmers to OOP concepts, much more than any older language.
by viraptor | 2025-05-11 00:51:33+00:00
> These studies are correlative

Once you have population studies from millions and include separated/not twin studies to exclude environment differences, you really need strong arguments and theory why the inheritance is not the mechanism here.

> but that doesn't mean the counterfactual is also true: "everybody with these genes will have ADHD, no matter what".

Nobody claimed that. That's not how genes work. That's not how any(?) inheritable disease works. The whole paper is about quantifying the chances. Even the most basic thing like eye colour has a random element to it.

> if that were true then the DSM would describe a genetic test for ADHD

There's no simple mapping and the candidates for complex interactions are in 200+ range the last time I've seen. There's no "you have this one gene, you have ADHD" and nobody claimed that. The work on narrowing down how exactly the candidates interact / get expressed is still ongoing, so hopefully one day we will have a genetic test.
by fibers | 2025-05-11 00:51:41+00:00
- Google Maps - this would be a big loss but at least this will open the field for Apple Maps and OSM (and I wonder if a competitor will be able to properly leave OSM as is an perhaps integrate traffic data like with Waze or another product like it)

- Google Mail - I dumped gmail after Google google'd GDomains and sold it to squarespace so I moved to proton - Google Drive - lol, this is a literal multibillion industry with dropbox, box.com, etc - Google Docs - lol, maybe high schoolers will finally use paper and pencil now? either way proton docs looks promising and perheps a new competitor will take the space - Google Groups - email listservs are still a thing, use that - Google Forms - this seems like a serious loss but surely there will be another competitor - Google Cloud - there are better ways to do on prem now, either way you can use AWS or Azure - Google OAuth - ok this one will be a big loss but also people need to get it together that google isnt mail. - Google Search - this product has been going through a collapse since pre covid give me a break - Google Analytics - lol - Chrome - web standards have been cannibalized by google already so like who cares at this point. just switch to Firefox - Android - another major loss but it still suffers from fragmentation, hopefully Chinese competitors fill the void? - Android Auto - lol - Fitbit - lol didn't they just release an update where you cant export your data anymore - Google Fi - another MVNO that may die out? I mean cricket is still good right? - Google Fiber - a genuine loss and hope they will be treated with care but probably not given the large legacy telcos that will acquire it - Google Flights - another major loss? but even as someone who loves flying it is becoming an untenable situation given the current regime in the White House and ATCs getting knocked out - Google Translate - another major loss but this can be solved with LLMs - Google Pay - lol - Waymo - lol
by k310 | 2025-05-11 00:51:45+00:00
"White Genocide," [0] a bogus conspiracy theory that this bolsters.

> White genocide is a political myth based on pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and ethnic hatred, and is driven by a psychological panic often termed "white extinction anxiety".

> Objectively, white people are not dying out or facing extermination. The purpose of the conspiracy theory is to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda in support of calls to violence.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_th...
by bloaf | 2025-05-11 00:52:33+00:00
This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following:

Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."

Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.

But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.

So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.

So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".

But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
by kristjansson | 2025-05-11 00:52:55+00:00
One sets off for a morning drive on Thanksgiving. Upon entering the freeway, they find the normally traffic-congested road smooth and free-flowing. The journey takes a little more than half the time it usually would. They exclaim "Wow, the roads are empty this morning!"

I'm playing a bit of devils advocate, but it's not inconsistent to observe a typically congested resource X operating at a fraction of its capacity, and note the observation with "wow, X is _empty_".
by stubish | 2025-05-11 00:53:04+00:00
I'm curious why pumping the water out, creating a vacuum for water to rush in, is better than pumping air in for water to displace.

I had assumed it would be cheaper to have large underwater balloon connected by a hose to a pontoon, and use air. Rather than install and maintain at depth the pumps and a giant concrete sphere able to withstand that sort of pressure.

Have I got the economics wrong? Or is there an efficiency gain from dealing with a liquid rather than compressible gas?
by no_wizard | 2025-05-11 00:53:48+00:00
> Most CEOs plan and hope for it

I don’t think so, at least, it’s not their main motivation.

For most, I imagine the VC fueled free period is to lock up customers and increase you have their sensitive data, you start making moves so you can start to charge them, usually a fairly hefty sum. It’s a classic lock in strategy.
by rafram | 2025-05-11 00:54:21+00:00
> > [...] the MAGA political message itself was not welcome, but people of all political beliefs are. Talks with MAGA titles would not be automatically rejected, but instead authors would be required to change the title if the talks were accepted.

> I have to say this is quite Orwellian indeed

I have to say that this person has no idea what Orwellian means.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-11 00:55:00+00:00
> The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.

While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.
by fknorangesite | 2025-05-11 00:56:23+00:00
Of course; no one said otherwise.

The Pulp Fiction context is a [imo, poor] defense of the name from the original team - saying that's where they picked it from, as opposed to the ableist slur. It was the mid-90s at the time, after all, and there was an Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction poster in half the dorm rooms in the damned country at the time.

So, now we're back to the comment you're responding to: even if it is genuinely just about Pulp Fiction, is that any better?
by yubblegum | 2025-05-11 00:56:28+00:00
I used to be firmly in the component oriented camp. The reality of the matter is that the conceptual (mental) model doesn't really represent the reality of composing with reusable components.

All Lego components have the same simple standard mechanism: friction coupling using concave and convex surface elements of the component. Unix pipes are the closest thing we have to a Lego like approach and there the model of "hooking pipes of bytes from sources to sinks" actually represents what happens with the software.

With components and APIs, unless we resort to some universal baseline (such as a small finite semantic API like REST's "verbs") that basically can marshall and unmarshall any arbitrary function call ('do (func, context, in-args, out-args, out-err)' the Lego metaphor break down very quickly.

The second issue are the modalities of 'interactions' between components. So this is my first encounter with "Sans-IO" (/g) but this is just addressing the interactions issue with a fiat 'no inter-actions by components'. So Lego for software: great overall expression of desired simplicity, but not remotely effective as a generative concept and imo even possibly detrimental (as it over simplifies the problem).

Now we have 2 different pieces of software tech that somewhat have managed to arrive at component orientation: using a finite set of predefined components to build general software. One is GUI components, where a small set of visual components and operational constructs ("user-events", etc.) with structural and behavioral semantics are used to create arbitrary visual interfaces for any ~domain. The other is WWW where (REST verbs of) HTTP also provide a small finite set of 'components' (here architectural) to create arbitrary services. With both, there is the tedious and painful process of mapping domain semantics to structural components.

So we can get reusable component oriented software (ecosystems) but we need to understand (per lessons of GUIs and WebApps) that a great deal of (semantic) glue code and infrastructure is necessary, just as a lot of wiring (for GUIs) and code frameworks (for WebApps) are necessary. That is what something like OSGi brings to the table.

This then leads to the question of component boundary and granulity. With things like DCOM and JEE you have fine grained components aggregated in process boundaries. The current approach is identifying process boundary as component boundary (docker, k8, microservices) (and doing away with 'application servers' in the process).
by galangalalgol | 2025-05-11 00:56:40+00:00
Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.
by jameshart | 2025-05-11 00:58:34+00:00
It's a more sophisticated perspective than you're giving it credit for.

They're not disputing that google has provided all these services, they're arguing that google's ability to subsidize them prevents market solutions for these same problems being produced.

The internet is, in this view, somewhat of a planned economy with Google as the central planning committee. You get google's maps and google's docs and google's search, rather than a maps marketplace, a docs marketplace, and a search marketplace.

Google is able to enforce this on the market because it holds a unique position where it can extract a significant amount of the value generated in the internet economy in 'ad taxes'.
by stunningllama | 2025-05-11 00:58:56+00:00
On my info page (https://brandonli.net/semisim/info) there's a list of things my simulation can and can't do. After taking a look at the paper you mentioned, I think simulating it may very well be possible, however it might take a bit of effort. As for graphene, its band structure is different enough that I don't think it would work.

Note that my simulation is intended for educational purposes only, not scientific research.

- Brandon