MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggm | 2025-05-25 23:06:06+00:00
I don't think Musk had a game plan for this level of net negative outcome. If he has a long range plan, it must span beyond this session of government and he has significant risk in a change in party controlling the system.

It's easy for me to be critical, both because he's distant and because I have no skin in the game. That noted, I think his genius status was misapplied, unearned, and his lack of visible empathy for the real world makes this important: he is a powerful foolish man, he isn't a constructive force at the moment. He's sucking a lot of value out of the system.
by poncho_romero | 2025-05-25 23:06:39+00:00
I don’t mean to come across as an apologist, what has been done and continues to happen is abhorrent. I prefer not to use terms like “good” and “evil” because they collapse so much complexity and nuance into emotionally charged terms. So when I say “they aren’t evil” I mean they didn’t commit these crimes against humanity because they’re akin to comic book villains, but rather because of ideology, humanity’s affinity for greed, etc.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 23:06:43+00:00
> Where is the research on impossible language that infants can't acquire? A good popsci article would give me leads here.

It's not infants, it's adults but Moro "Secrets of Words" is a book that describes the experiments and is aimed at lay people.

> Even assuming Chomsky's claim is true, all it shows is that LLMs aren't an exact match for human language learning. But even an inexact model can still be a useful research tool.

If it is it needs to be shown, not assumed. Just as you wouldn't by default assume that GPS navigation tells you about insect navigation (though it might somehow).

> Again, a good popsci article would actually support these claims instead of simply asserting them and implying that anyone who disagrees is a simpleton.

He justifies the statement in the previous sentence (which you don't quote) where he says that it is self-evident by virtue of the fact that something exists at the beginning (i.e. it's not empty space). That's the "merest truism". No popsci article is going to help understand that if you don't already.
by ClayShentrup | 2025-05-25 23:06:58+00:00
tactical error is GOOD, because it donates more utility to society than that non-strategic voter loses. AND for a lot of not-so-math-savvy voters, an honest score ballot is actually a better vote than a botched attempt to use strategic approval thresholds.

http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6

https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?

it would help you to spend at least 30 seconds researching a complex field like voting methods before asking a deeply misguided question like this.
by johnea | 2025-05-25 23:07:07+00:00
It's a little disconcerting to read this question here.

LLMs do not invent anything. They are trained on sequnces of words and produce ordered sequences of words from that training data in response to a prompt.

There is no concept of knowledge, or information that is understood to be correct or incorrect.

There is only the statistical ordering of words in response to the prompt, as judged by the order of words in the training data.

This is why other comments here state that the LLM is completely amoral, which is not immoral, it is without any concept or reference to morality at all.
by T0Bi | 2025-05-25 23:07:36+00:00
Planning a hobby alpaca farm (3-4 alpacas), very early stage.

Everything from farm related stuff (water, food, shelter, etc.) to self-sufficiency (solar, etc.) to real time monitoring (which cameras, affecting power supply).

Who knows if it'll ever happen, but just planning everything in detail is a lot of fun. Especially with weird regulatory constraints where I'm living, there's a lot to watch out for.

Example: Solar panels at >3m height need building permits. Snow in winter means panels should be set up at a specific angle. So my initial plan of putting the panels on my 2.5m high carport doesn't work. Either lower carport, lower angle, different place or getting a building permit.
by godelski | 2025-05-25 23:07:45+00:00
> There are finite resources to allocate.

The truth of this statement depends on context.

I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.

The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).

This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.

The same is true about the economy in general.

You're right!

> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.

We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...

IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-25 23:08:02+00:00
Hybrid as in a combination of different LLMs. I recommend trying the demo on the site, it should give you an idea of what it's doing. The code is also pretty short.

So those numbers are from an older version of the benchmark.

Coherence is done by:

- Translating English, to the target language, to English

- repeating three times

- Having 3 LLMs score how close the original English is to the new English

I like it because it's robust against LLM bias, but it obviously isn't exact, and I found that after a certain point it's actually negatively correlated with quality, because it incentivises literal, word by word translations.

Accuracy and Idiomaticity are based on asking the judge LLMs to rate by how accurate / idiomatic the translations are. I mostly focused on idiomaticity, as it was the differentiator at the upper end.

The new benchmark has gone through a few iterations, and I'm still not super happy with it. Now it's just based on LLM scoring (this time 0-100), but with better stats, prompting, etc. I've still done some small scale tests on coherence, and I did some more today that I haven't published yet, and again they have DeepL and Lingvanex doing well because they tend towards quite rigid translations over idiomatic ones. Claude 4 is also interestingly doing quite well on those metrics.

I need to sleep, but I can discuss it more tomorrow, if you'd like.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 23:08:16+00:00
Well, I did a rewrite of this app (RiVal.T, an iOS timer)[0], and I'm working on a new release that includes a Watch app (acting as a remote control). Getting the Watch and phone talking reliably is a challenge, but I seem to be stumbling towards success (eventually).

I have a couple of other apps that I have plans for, as well. If I get sick of playing traffic cop, with the phone app, I may take a break, and work on them.

[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/ios-apps/rival-t/
by pasta67 | 2025-05-25 23:09:11+00:00
You clearly have a different understanding for meaning of the words and what is meant by them.

Look, there is no depth in Fortnite, just like there is no deepness in minds of kids that are under 10 and playing it.

Same for other points. Fortnite is arcade shooter - no one is expecting from it realistic mechanics, which would also ruin the game. Fortnite is a niche and it was kids game - some of them have grown up and moved on.
by ClayShentrup | 2025-05-25 23:09:47+00:00
> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.

of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.

just use VSE results.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
by godelski | 2025-05-25 23:09:47+00:00
What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.
by _p2zi | 2025-05-25 23:10:08+00:00
- [Executive Summary](https://keepthefuturehuman.ai/executive-summary/).

- [Interactive Summary](https://interactive.keepthefuturehuman.ai/).

> Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence over the past decade (for narrow-purpose AI) and the last several years (for general-purpose AI) have transformed AI from a niche academic field to the core business strategy of many of the world’s largest companies, with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual investment in the techniques and technologies for advancing AI’s capabilities.

> We now come to a critical juncture. As the capabilities of new AI systems begin to match and exceed those of humans across many cognitive domains, humanity must decide: how far do we go, and in what direction?

> AI, like every technology, started with the goal of improving things for its creator. But our current trajectory, and implicit choice, is an unchecked race toward ever-more powerful systems, driven by economic incentives of a few huge technology companies seeking to automate large swathes of current economic activity and human labor. If this race continues much longer, there is an inevitable winner: AI itself – a faster, smarter, cheaper alternative to people in our economy, our thinking, our decisions, and eventually in control of our civilization.

> But we can make another choice: via our governments, we can take control of the AI development process to impose clear limits, lines we won’t cross, and things we simply won’t do – as we have for nuclear technologies, weapons of mass destruction, space weapons, environmentally destructive processes, the bioengineering of humans, and eugenics. Most importantly, we can ensure that AI remains a tool to empower humans, rather than a new species that replaces and eventually supplants us.

> This essay argues that we should keep the future human by closing the “gates” to smarter-than-human, autonomous, general-purpose AI – sometimes called “AGI” – and especially to the highly-superhuman version sometimes called “superintelligence.” Instead, we should focus on powerful, trustworthy AI tools that can empower individuals and transformatively improve human societies’ abilities to do what they do best. The structure of this argument follows in brief.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-05-25 23:10:29+00:00
A HTML validator for websites and web applications. It’s just not scalable having to do this manually, and having valid HTML is still important. Wrong HTML can cause bugs, and can harm accessibility. This is becoming more important now in Europe with new accessibility laws coming into force next month.

https://jezenthomas.com/2025/05/dont-skip-html-validation/
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-25 23:10:45+00:00
> is not an explanatory model of the weather (the weather is not a neural net)

I don't follow. Aren't those entirely separate things? The most accurate models of anything necessarily account for the underlying mechanisms. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "explanatory"?

Specifically in the case of deep neural networks, we would generally suppose that it had learned to model the underlying reality. In effect it is learning the rules of a sufficiently accurate simulation.
by sour-taste | 2025-05-25 23:10:59+00:00
What if trains brought their heat with them instead of leaving it in the tunnels? I'm thinking some kind of large seal like thing in front of and behind trains that keeps the train surrounded by the same air. Stations serve as a spot to dump hot air and blow in cooler air. I guess the problem is it would take a lot of energy to push all that air around. Also the trains would be hotter.
by ClayShentrup | 2025-05-25 23:11:57+00:00
> an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge

1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game. https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.
by YZF | 2025-05-25 23:12:30+00:00
Isn't this more about letting people who want to keep working do that? What's stopping people in Sweden and Denmark from retiring earlier? I would imagine there are some pensions plan withdrawal requirements or criteria for government assistance but can't you just save money to bridge that gap?

Maybe we need to start thinking about these things differently. I would love to have more time off but still have a job and not need to make this so binary.
by nchmy | 2025-05-25 23:12:32+00:00
There's probably not many people who write essays generally focused in tech who have a larger audience (or even following). Though it's beside the point how generally popular he is. It can only be helpful to get feedback on anything that we ever do - it doesn't mean we have to incorporate it.

And seeking feedback from specific people who you respect is a vastly different thing than opening up your digital home to the slovenly masses to come and shit in with their comments.

Though, I think he probably should have sought feedback from some actual good writers for a topic like this...
by Retric | 2025-05-25 23:13:21+00:00
For me nothing changes.

The benefits of a pension start before retirement. I can avoid setting aside a huge pile of money for the potential of an extremely long lifespan and then worry as minor changes to that pile become really critical near and in retirement.

Suppose you’re 50 with 2 million USD in savings. How soon do you retire and what kind of lifestyle do you live in retirement? That’s heavily dependent on what kind of pension is waiting.
by rl3 | 2025-05-25 23:14:04+00:00
>0:25: A brief glimpse of Altman’s shoes, which we’ve identified as the LEGO x Adidas UltraBoost DNA, is seen as he walks through the Financial District.

Reminds me of this:

https://x.com/sama/status/1791183356274921568

Funny his shoes in the Jony Ive video share a similar aesthetic to the very Google stage he was calling out. It gets better when you consider Google's only recently begun starting to kick OpenAI's ass, and all without fake-ass coffee shop extras.

The lengths people go to try to appear "real" never ceases to amuse. Surely there's a formal term for this? Perhaps the Zuckerberg effect.
by ghaff | 2025-05-25 23:14:43+00:00
>There's also an intangible effect from being surrounded by other highly motivated and mission driven students that you gain in these environments.

I think that is absolutely true. But other than one thing (which was part of a class and was really great even if we didn't do well), didn't really do competition teams in any formal way other than some class groups. Certainly nothing involving separate hiring events.
by d4mi3n | 2025-05-25 23:16:29+00:00
I’m working on a Content Security Policy parser. There are a handful of them around the web, but I couldn’t find one that implemented the entirety of the CSP spec and I wanted something I could use to verify structure and validity of CSP directives.

https://github.com/damien/content-security-policy/tree/main/...

Once I’m happy with my take on a reference implementation I’m hoping to create some tooling with it to do some interesting analysis of CSP abstract syntax trees to identify things like policy anti patterns, reporting on capabilities a policy grants to a domain/resource, and a better mechanism for allowing tools like OPA, SemGrep, etc. to define and enforce rules on a policy.
by carpo | 2025-05-25 23:16:35+00:00
Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.

In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.

I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)
by cryptonector | 2025-05-25 23:17:12+00:00
It's not to convince you of anything.

You can't retire if you don't have savings or children to support you.

Even if you have savings and/or children to support you, you can't retire if your society didn't make enough children so that your savings can have some value.

Social security was always a ponzi scheme that doesn't work in the long run as fertility rates _necessarily_ drop to or below (really, always below) replacement rate.

Even without social security, if you want to retire, and to have along retirement, then you need your society to have near replacement rate fertility. Or insanely high productivity. I guess you can look forward to AI rendering most jobs obsolete, and hope that humans can -as always before- create new jobs that can't be easily automated.
by toomanyreps | 2025-05-25 23:17:39+00:00
Its not as crazy as it looks in my opinion. This is about as far as it goes in terms of customization, maybe a few more layers if you have a specialized workload. Once you are used to changing part of a layout once or twice, you pick up new changes much faster. Every layout feels different to me mentally, its harder to confuse them than one might think.
by avianlyric | 2025-05-25 23:19:24+00:00
And where is the energy to power all of them coming from?

GP is saying that you can approximate the energy going into the system by looking at the electricity consumption of the trains, as all then energy is eventually going to end up as heat.

A heat pump can have a CoP topping out at 5. So 1 unit of energy needed to move 5 units heat out. That means a “net zero” cooling system would consume a minimum of 20% as much energy as the trains themselves. Realistically it’s probably closer to a CoP of 3.5, so 28% more energy. For something like the underground that gonna be a 5-10% increase in there operational costs at a minimum. Where does the funding for all that come from? And that before we even look at the capital costs of heat pumps and various ancillary equipment needed to run them.

As a point of reference TfL underground trains have an average power consumption of 140MW continuous. Now only about 45% of the underground is actually underground, but that’s still 63MW in just the underground parts. At an optimistic CoP of 5, that means 12.6MW of additional energy needed to cool the tunnels using your approach.

Wholesale electricity prices in the UK are something like 7p per kWh. So over a year that’s an additional £17m of electricity, just for cooling.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-05-25 23:19:38+00:00
I have read (tbh, more skimmed, but this is because it's late here) the article by now.

It's a general discussion and very Yin/Yang like (or dialectical, I'm not 100% sure if these are appropriate terms).

Second the comment by mrkeen.

With concrete examples, this could be more interesting.

And I poorly introduced the thought I wanted to communicate.

The "appeal to feelings of superiority" that I mentioned were mangled, I started to also think about said "merchants of complexity" and software design "evangelism" in general.

And I didn't read the post initially because the writing, structure etc combined with the vague familiarity of the title threw me off.

Especially starting with a bulleted list, ending with a summary, and still: me not seeing any interesting example at first glance.

Though only the top comment in this chain reminded me of the importance of examples / real-world anecdotes.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-05-25 23:19:40+00:00
There is a difference between supporting one research paradigm over another and rejecting science altogether to focus on engineering. The first quote and the context around it implies the latter.

The success of naval vessels shows it’s possible to navigate without innate star and wind comprehension, so maybe we should think of that inner stuff as phlogiston. (Yeah, this analogy isn’t as nice but it’s quite hard to translate the nuance of linguistic debate into nautical terms.)