MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ddingus | 2025-05-04 20:24:08+00:00
It does and I managed it recently. It was painful.

I had to pair, or at least I think I did. Was fetching a file. off a flip phone. Doing these things without "file" gets weird quick.

I also seem to recall an awesome Bluetooth control panel applet I used a few times in Windows XP.

At the time I had a pretty spiffy Moto flip phone. It could be the computer keyboard, handle audio play and record and more.

Pretty sure that all came from the phone driver. I do recall also using the computer in reverse the same way when the display was badly damaged. I could make phone calls, dialing with the computer and in general use the phone taped to the back of my laptop screen.

Today, it is simpler, and far less robust.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-04 20:24:47+00:00
Check the Thinkpad firmware settings to make sure the external monitor and/or dock GPU is the primary display which is effective during boot. On some PC's though you will then see nothing during boot on the laptop's own screen, sometimes even when the laptop is standalone. If Initial Graphics Device is set for "Auto" instead of a specific device, that may be OK but also may not be any different than you have now.

The external monitor may also have multiple inputs to choose from, like VGA, DVI, HDMI, which also might be set to "Auto" scan for which one is active, and that can sometimes take more time to succeed than it takes to boot. If so, using the Input Option settings on the external monitor you may be able to specify your preferred input connection exclusively, or as default, and then be able to see something during the time that it's blank now.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-04 20:24:52+00:00
Aunt Sally writing a book in her kitchen is not the same as automated publishing using scripts and bots. The ability of machines to generate content is not at all similar to real human authors. Those familiar with online commerce just want to fill pipes with content, and machines can make that content. It is a question of scale, speed and the nature of the material. This is not at all a stable situation IMHO as the larger trends are clear.
by tomjen3 | 2025-05-04 20:25:34+00:00
I wish the author had state out right that they were not using LLMs much, since their opinion on them and their output has no value (its a new technology, and different enough that you do have to spend some time with them in order to be able to find out what value they have for your particluar work[0].

The is especially the case when you are about to complain about style, since that can easily be adjusted, by simply telling the model what you want.

But I think there is a final point that the author is also wrong about, but that is far more interesting: why we write. Personally I write for 3 reasons: to remember, to share and to structure my thoughts.

If an LLM is better then me at writing (and it is) then there is no reason for me to write to communicate - it is not only slower, it is counterproductive.

If the AI is better at wrangling my ideas into some coherent thread, then there is no reason for me to do it. This one I am least convinced about.

AI is already much better than me at strictly remembering, but computers have been that since forever, the issue is mostly convinient input/output. AIs makes this easier thanks to speech to text input.

[0]: See eg. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the....
by switch007 | 2025-05-04 20:26:05+00:00
I seem to recall way more thunderstorms when I was younger. Turns out there was a peak during my childhood and we're now on the decline:

> "Overall, there was a reduction in the number of days of thunder in the UK per year between 1989 and 2019, according to the study. Thunderstorms increased in the north of the UK and decreased in the south" [0]

Of course there's an element of being more scared of thunderstorms when you're young and noticing them more. I also wear earplugs at night now as the world seems noisier, but I digress.

Also:

> "A 2014 study predicted the frequency of lightning strikes around the world would increase by about 12% for every 1C rise in global temperature." [1]

[0] https://www.wired-gov.net/wg/news.nsf/articles/How+many+days...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/18/more-than-ha...
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-04 20:27:32+00:00
Going somewhere else where you don't have control is not control. Being able to choose who you surrender control to is better than nothing, but it is not control. At the end of the day you are still reliant on other people who have no incentive to care, where you have limited recourse. I have a friend whose landlord screwed her over so she moved. Landlord of the new place sells, and the buyer landlord sucks. No control. You get your accounts closed by Google and you move to Microsoft. Microsoft closes your accounts too. No control. Imagine the OP of this piece cancelled the movers and hired new ones. They would probably have similar results! That's not control!
by rscho | 2025-05-04 20:28:00+00:00
"MAC being the primary indication of anesthetic depth being the textbook definition"

I am an attending anesthesiologist and this is true. MAC cannot be interpreted at face value, though. You've got other drugs on board (not accounted for in MAC), the patient might be frail or very old, etc. etc. All things changing MAC interpretation, which is why there are still anesthesia providers instead of robots ;-) We currently have no way of faithfully measuring the depth of anesthesia, and our understanding of consciousness/awareness is incomplete. Anesthesiologists have to rely mostly on know-how, even in 2025.
by echelon | 2025-05-04 20:28:03+00:00
> I fully support the author’s point

I don't. I think the world is falling into two camps with these tools and models.

> I now circle back to my main point: I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt. The resulting output has less substance than the prompt and lacks any human vision in its creation. The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience

Strong disagree with Clayton's conclusion.

We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY

I think the world will be segregated into two types of AI user:

- Those that use the AI as a complete end-to-end tool

- Those that leverage the AI as tool for their own creativity and workflows, that use it to enhance the work they already do

The latter is absolutely a great use case for AI.
by woleium | 2025-05-04 20:28:59+00:00
There is the story in Dr. James Ketchum‘s memoir of a barrel containing 40lbs of LSD turning up in his offices. He worked on the Edgewood arsenal as part of the US military. This was enough LSD to make several hundred million people trip and worth nearly $1 billion at street value. Are you suggesting that Pickard manufactured more than that?
by Gud | 2025-05-04 20:29:26+00:00
I am a responsible drug user. I think we’re not noticed much because if you are a reasonably well adjusted individual, you will be low key about it.

It’s called self reflection and not buying into the lifestyle.

Many drugs kind of suck and you have to be tactical in their use.

I do coke once perhaps every quarter. MDMA maybe once a year? I avoid overdoing it because they both come with a terrible, unpleasant downer, especially if you do too much. I have access to great coke and great MDMA.

I smoke weed perhaps 10-15 times a year. I used to smoke it daily when I was suffering from severe depression. I credit cannabis with being alive.

I don’t want to end up with some weird ass world view, so I’ve avoided LSD and mushrooms. I did mescaline twice - highly recommend.

Alcohol and tobacco I’ve stopped. Terrible drugs overall.

So we do exist, us responsible drug users. I suspect the drug using population in general, due to the legality and taboo of their usage, will be of a less stable character compared to the general population. I suspect this plays a big part in your observation.
by oncallthrow | 2025-05-04 20:30:00+00:00
LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee fallacy.

The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this article, is pretty easy to detect.

However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect.

I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably be ruined by this: there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not, at which point why bother?
by serjester | 2025-05-04 20:30:49+00:00
I appreciate you dropping those.

In https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9855498/ the average dose was a staggering 440mg a month (multiple rolls a month) with a sample size of 24 people. This is definitely falls under "heavy" usage and even then it's hard to disambiguate correlation vs causation in such a small, underpowered study.

The average participant in your second study, https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0269881106059486, had again taken an average of 800 lifetime doses. These are insane amounts and do not remotely reflect the average user.

Here's a meta study for example that found no long term impact among more realistic users - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3053129. I haven't looked into this in a long time, so I ran a deep research query, and for typical usage (<50 lifetime doses, months between sessions) there seems to be very little evidence of structural or functional harm.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/s/dr_6817cd9ce85081918c7d55fa9a28c654
by Telemakhos | 2025-05-04 20:31:27+00:00
I read through the previous discussions of this, and this article and the previous discussions seem to overlook two things that could have some power to explain the weirdness.

First, the development of the process: the system described came into effect in 1268, because previous systems had failed to satisfy fears of factionalism. IA bit earlier in 1229, a simple, one-round electoral council of 40 had stalemated, so lots were drawn, leading to a feud between the Dandolo family and the winner, Giacomo Tiepolo. Giacomo's son Lorenzo Tiepolo was the first elected under the 1268 system, which Nicolao Michele seems to have devised. Not mentioned in the article or discussions is the rule that the men selected were 30 years or older. [0] The violent factionalism and feuding preceding the new system, however, seems to indicate that oligarchs were fiercely competitive. The aristocrats were always going to choose some one aristocrat from their own ranks, but they were strongly divided against each other as well. I'm not sure there would be a solid faction of fifty or so to monopolize the process, especially given the random selections.

Secondly, those random selections by lottery, combined with the opening of the article ("an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza") points to another participant in this process, God. While today we tend to think of election protocols in terms of human actors, sortition can imply belief in divine providence taking a hand. The nomination and approval of candidates (election) at least nominally uses human estimation of merit as its input, while sortition gives divine knowledge of merit a role. The intertwined repetition of the two may have been thought to negotiate a best possible outcome from each set of inputs; in practice, against the backdrop of feuding and factionalism, it likely also made the ultimate 41 electors unpredictable and thus less prone to bribery or prior arrangements.

[0] https://origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/halsall/source/dogesvenice...
by maccard | 2025-05-04 20:32:54+00:00
I don’t think I am spreading FUD. Hardware issues with Linux on non well trodden paths is a well known issue. X11 (still widely used on many distros) has a myriad of problems with multi monitor setups - particularly when resolutions and refresh rates don’t match.

You’re right that the manufacturers could provide better support, but they don’t.
by bonoboTP | 2025-05-04 20:33:49+00:00
[Edit: I agree] I've also grown to dislike even this use case. I did this back in 2023 but as AI text is spreading, the style - yes, even with prompt adjustments it leaks through - is recognized by more and more people and it's a very very bad look. If I see AI-like text from someone, I take it as an insult. It means they don't feel that it's worth their time to brush up the text themselves. And sure, it may well be that they don't value our interaction enough to spend the time on it. But that fact is indeed by itself insulting. So I only send AI touched up text to orgs that are so faceless or bureaucratic that I don't mind "offending" them.

I've grown to respect typos and slightly misconstructed sentences. It's an interesting dynamic that now what appeared lazy to 2021 eyes actually indicates effort and what appeared polished and effortful in 2021 now indicates laziness.

An example is how the admins of my local compute cluster communicate about downtimes and upgrades etc and they are clearly using AI and it's so damn annoying, it feels like biting into cotton candy fluff. Just send the bullet points! I don't need emojis, I don't need the fake politeness. It's no longer polite to be polite. It doesn't signal any effort.
by martinald | 2025-05-04 20:33:52+00:00
At the end of the day the 'traditional' Linux packaging system in where distributions do it all for you is totally outdated. Tbh I can remember in the early/mid 2000s being extremely annoyed with this so I don't know if it was ever a good model.

On SaaS/mobile apps you have often daily new versions of software coming out. That's what users/developers want. They do not want 3 year+ stale versions of their software being 'supported' by a third party distro. I put supported in comments as it only really applies to security and what not; not terrible bugs in the software that are fixed in later versions.

Even on servers where it arguably makes more sense it has been entirely supplanted by Docker which ships the _entire OS_ more or less as the 'app'. And even more damingly, most/nearly all people will use a 3rd party Docker repo to manage the docker 'core' software updates itself.

And the reason noone uses the six monthly releases is because the upgrade process is too painful and regresses too much. But - even if it was 100% bulletproof, noone wants to be running 6-12 month out of date software on that either. Chrom(ium) is updated monthly and has a lot of important new features in it. You don't really want to be running 6-9 months out of date on that.
by TheTaytay | 2025-05-04 20:34:51+00:00
This is one of the first paragraphs:

> Where a trade deficit does become a problem is when 1) it’s persistent and 2) it’s mainly going toward overconsumption or malinvestment. When both of these conditions are met, the trade deficit is likely to result in significant imbalances, and risks an eventual currency crisis or other economic problem that forces the trade imbalance closed.

It is stated in the tone of “as every 3rd grader knows…” but I don’t believe this is a “mainstream” economic position these days, is it?
Show HN: NBAGrid, a daily NBA guessing game
by monsdar | 2025-05-04 20:35:32+00:00
For a while now I'm playing a bunch of daily games like Wordle, Geogrid or Connections with my friends. I love the format and wanted to try my own.

As I'm into basketball, and especially the NBA, I created a NBA guessing game called NBAGrid. Every day a new game is generated where the user needs to guess a bunch of players that fit into a 3x3 grid.

The sources are on GitHub: https://github.com/monsdar/nbagrid

I chose PythonAnywhere.com to host the app as they're pretty easy to get set up and get something out there. Later on I plan on deploying to some of the hyperscalers so I can get some experience with a real-world application as well.

I know my way around Python pretty well, but it's the first real Django app I'm writing. So if there's anything in there to improve on please let me know.
by tptacek | 2025-05-04 20:36:03+00:00
I have a lot of sympathy for the author's position but I may have missed the point in the article where he explained why clarity of writing and genuineness of human expression was so vital to a robotics class. It's one thing for an instructor to appreciate those things; another for them to confound their own didactic purpose with them. This point seems obvious enough that I feel like I must have missed something.

As always, I reject wholeheartedly what this skeptical article has to say about LLMs and programming. It takes the (common) perspective of "vibe coders", people who literally don't care what code says as long as something that runs comes out the other side. But smart, professional programmers use LLMs in different ways; in particular, they review and demand alterations to the output, the same way you would doing code review on a team.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 20:36:48+00:00
You don't have to specify role when you call through Python (https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/start/...)

(which I think is what you are using but maybe i'm wrong).

Feel free to DM me on @chrischo_pm on X. Stuff that you are describing shouldn't happen
by bonoboTP | 2025-05-04 20:37:01+00:00
That's how it works in Germany. Usually assignments are either optional or you just have to get 50% of the total assignment marks over the semester to be admitted to the exam (written or often oral, in person). Then your grade is entirely based on the exam. Hand-holding throughout the semester assignment-to-assignment, checking attendance etc. is more an Anglo-specific thing where students are treated as kids instead of adults.
by ipdashc | 2025-05-04 20:38:36+00:00
> There is no excuse to not add text to a printed part.

Super off-topic, but I've always kind of been let down by the appearance of 3d printed text. As noted, engraved seems to be better than embossed, but it still just looks kind of weird. I envy the clean, crisp labels that seem to be commonplace on commercial injection-molded plastic parts.

The toner transfer technique seems kind of promising. I think I've also seen people spray painting 3d-printed parts, and then lasering away the paint to draw text, which is interesting (if somewhat more materials- and equipment-intensive).

Really cool article though.
by ineedasername | 2025-05-04 20:38:57+00:00
Yes, depending on the model being used, endless text of this flavor isn't all that compelling to read:

"Tall man, armor that is robotic and mechanical in appearance, NFL logo on chest, blue legs".,

And so on, embedded in node wiring diagrams to fiddly configs and specialized models for bespoke purposes, "camera" movements, etc.
by larodi | 2025-05-04 20:38:59+00:00
> a big part is that duckdbs spatial extension provides a SQL interface to a whole suite of standard foss gis packages by statically bundling everything (including inlining the default PROJ database of coordinate projection systems into the binary) and providing it for multiple platforms (including WASM). I.E there are no transitive dependencies except libc.

and for the last twenty, not ten years, this is what PostGIS was pioneering, and also teaching everyone get used to. DuckDB was not something that people even knew in GIS world. I'm not even sure whether QGIS connects to DuckDB, perhaps it does for a while, but it sure knows Spatialite for very long and last, but not least - ESRI sure as f*ck still have not heard of DuckDB. This is already half the geospatial world out there.

This whole article is superb biased and its very sad.
by maccard | 2025-05-04 20:39:21+00:00
>I guess things could be spotty if you don’t have drivers

Sure, and this unfortunately isn’t uncommon.

> What exactly is wrong with */Linux handling of multi-monitor?

X11’s support for multiple monitors that have mismatched resolutions/refresh rates is… wrong. Wayland improves upon this but doesn’t support g sync with nvidia cards (even in the proprietary drivers) You might say that’s not important to you and that’s fine, but it’s a deal breaker to me.
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 20:39:27+00:00
I used that example because, across the developed world, immigration policy is the issue that reflects the disconnect between what the public wants and what anti-democratic checks on democracy have allowed.

We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.

What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.
by topkai22 | 2025-05-04 20:40:16+00:00
Many of the things we teach in school aren’t just for the direct knowledge or skill. We largely don’t need to do arithmetic any more, but gaining the skill at doing it really improves our ability to deal with symbolic manipulation and abstraction.

I remember another parent ranting about their 3rd grade kids “stupid homework” since it had kids learning different ways of summing numbers. I took a look at the homework and replied “wow, the basics out set theory are in here!” We then had a productive discussion of how that arithmetic exercise led to higher math and ways of framing problems.

Similarly, writing produces a different form of thought than oral communication does.

History is a bit different, but a goal of history and literature is (or it least should be) to socialize students and give them a common frame of reference in society.

Finally there is the “you don’t know when you’ll need it defense.” I have a friend who spent most of the last 20 years as a roofer, but his body is starting to hurt. He’s pivoting to CAD drafting and he’s brushing off a some of those math skills he hated learning in school. And now arguing with his son about why it’s important.

Those are the fundamental defenses- that we are seeking not skills but ways of viewing the world + you don’t know what you’ll need. There are obviously limits and tradeoffs to be made, but to some degree yes, we should be forcing students (who are generally children or at least inexperienced in a domain) to things they don’t like now for benefits later.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-04 20:40:18+00:00
Like with email (or SMS, now) spam.

The model is basically “arbitrage.” Produce a huge amount of crud, making only fractions of a penny, but there’s so much of it, the pennies add up.

This is the kind of thing that can be addressed by well-enforced legislation, but, for some reason, that legislation (or enforcement) never seems to happen.

I’m sure that has nothing at all to do with politicians, using the same techniques, to push their own agenda.
by hfx7 | 2025-05-04 20:40:51+00:00
When you are dealing with 3 inch chimp brains, that can barely solve their day to day problems without all kinds of structures/institutions to hide and manage complexity their bounded rationality can not handle, you don't need Godel or Quantum Error Correction to convince anyone about anything.

After you do, then what happens? Nothing much. The chimps are too dumb for anything to happen. No big deception is required. There are many religions in the world that dont require a satan to sound coherent.

This is an attempt at pretending that talking to farm animals with their inherent limitations, about who designed the farm, has some value.