MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbgerring | 2025-06-23 20:27:20+00:00
As long as energy production and consumption has severe downstream impacts, yes, we do need to wade into this territory.

All serious, viable plans for decarbonization include a massive increase in electricity consumption, due to electrification of transportation, industrial processes, etc, along with an increase in renewable energy production. This isn't new, but AI datacenters are a very large net new single user of electricity.

If the amount of money already poured into AI had gone into the rollout of clean energy infrastructure, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, but here we are.

It makes perfect sense from a policy perspective, given that there are a small number of players in this space with more resources than most governments, to piggyback on this wave of infrastructure buildout.

It also makes plenty of financial sense. Initial capex for adding clean energy generation is high, but given both the high electricity usage of AI datacenters, and the long-term impact on the grid that someone will eventually have to pay for, companies deploying AI infrastructure would be smart to use the huge amount of capital at their disposal to generate their own electricity.

It's also, from a deployment standpoint, pretty straightforward — we're talking about massive, rectangular, warehouse-like buildings with flat roofs. We should have already mandated that all such buildings be covered in solar panels with on-site storage, at a minimum.
by manjalyc | 2025-06-23 20:27:24+00:00
The reason I brought up roomba wasn't to talk about Lidar or vision necessarily. It's more a story about how the first-mover in a technological space became entrenched in what works and became resistant to investing in newer technologies. The result was rival companies taking away marketshare from a market roomba once defined. Roomba has since incorporated lidar and other innovations after being stagnant for a decade, but its too late - their competitors now dominate the market.

To complete the analogy, Tesla is invested in vision-only technologies, while its competitors are making gains with Lidar and other tech that Tesla refuses to acknowledge. It's very reminscent of Roomba in the mid 2010s.

The Matic is a cool little robot though.
by phillipcarter | 2025-06-23 20:28:28+00:00
> If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look. Pointing fingers at the incredible energy consumption of internet-delivered HD video might not feel very comfortable to lots of folks.

I agree that in general, if the goal is to limit CO2 emissions and use renewable sources of energy, we ought not to focus on AI first, because it is dwarfed by many other things that we take for granted today. My canonical example I give folks is that the latte they order every day from Starbucks involves substantially more energy and water use than most uses of ChatGPT on a daily basis.

But as we move to digitize more and more of this world, and now create automated cognitive labor, we should start with the right foundations. I'd rather we not try to disentangle critical AI infrastructure from coal power plants, and I'd rather we try to limit the compute available to workloads in ways that encourage people to use the tech actually befitting of their use case rather than throw it all into the most expensive model every time.
by RankingMember | 2025-06-23 20:28:30+00:00
> I think a US private company pioneered electric cars.

Electric cars have been around since the late 1800s. If you mean modern ones, in the US the California Air Resources Board basically willed them back into existence in the 90s, and a California automaker (Tesla pre-Musk) made great strides in their public esteem by putting a battery pack and electric motor into a Lotus chassis and selling it as the "Roadster" (leaning on the prior art of companies like Ford and especially GM's EV1).
by leobuskin | 2025-06-23 20:29:01+00:00
They are hijacking the entire python's ecosystem in a very smart way, that's all. At some point we, probably, will find us vendor locked-in, just because the initial offer was so appealing. Take a closer look at it: package manager, formatter/linter, types, lsp. What's left before it will poke cpython one way or another? Maybe cloud-based IDE, some interesting WASM relationship (but RustPython is not there yet, they just don't have enough money). Otherwise, Astral is on a pretty straightforward way to `touchdown` in a few years. It's both, the blessing, and the curse.

Let's be honest, all tries to bring a cpython alternative failed (niche boosters like PyPy is a separate story, but it's not up-to-date, and not entirely exact). For some reason, people think that 1:1 compatibility is not critical and too costly to pursue (hello, all LLVM-based compilers). I think, it's doable and there's a solid way to solve it. What if Astral thinks so too?
by danudey | 2025-06-23 20:29:07+00:00
Easy, just avoid any processed food. Eat only fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables. Make your own bread, jams, pickles, etc. Never eat any fast food, anything from a cafe, or anything at a restaurant. Wrap all your work lunches in linen you made yourself from flax you grew yourself. Boom, problem solved, no more toxic chemicals in your food unless they were in the air or groundwater where your fruits and vegetables were grown, harvested, or processed, or your cattle grazed or were slaughtered or packaged.
by whycome | 2025-06-23 20:29:48+00:00
30K to 50K K? K. It’s not clear what the range represents. Were they polling and those are max and min values they got? Was that their range of uncertainty because it’s hard to accurately measure there?

Also, I hate the ambiguity of a title that references “Voyager Spacecraft” so it’s unclear if it was one or both.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-23 20:30:30+00:00
Word of warning, if you use Linux you can easily break your system like this. Many distros stop you being able to modify the system packages now but that's quite a recent development. You should look into doing user-level installs instead. Don't know about Mac. If you use Windows then you do you. It might break eventually but probably not irrecoverably.
by bbor | 2025-06-23 20:30:36+00:00
Do we as a society want to wade into the morass of telling people what kinds of activities they can use energy for?

I mean, yeah, that's just basic civil regulation. Energy generation has massive negative externalities, and preventing waste is a worthy cause. I don't agree that AI must be singled out in that sense, but even it were, I imagine a modest push for efficiency would only help us in the long run.

If we care about saving a watt-hour, there are lots of places to look.

Well put, but I think it's important to bring the analysis one level up, and look at emissions. In that paradigm, meat eating and non-essential travel (yes, including vacations to Rome, business meetings, scientific conferences, and other perceived-to-be-unalienable rights) are punching way above their weight class.

For anyone who's curious on specifics re:AI emissions, the recent MIT article is the gold standard in terms of specificity, neutrality, and nuance: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ... .

I also did some napkin math here in 2024.12: https://bsky.app/profile/robb.doering.ai/post/3lckwra33vk2t TL;DR: Eating one less burger affords you ~300 chatbot inferences, and avoiding a flight from ATL to SFO affords you ~16,000.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-06-23 20:32:03+00:00
> This premature move in releasing the robotaxi is certainly stock pumping.

It is. Inevitably, when the promised rollout ramp up doesn't happen, there will be another pump. This is not his first rodeo. The only thing that can stop another pump is competitors scaling first, not repeated Robotaxi failures (which I fully expect).
by alexanderameye | 2025-06-23 20:32:30+00:00
Not at the moment but maybe in the future. While I'm sure the code could be of interest, the code definitely isn't a template that would fit for other countries. It is tightly coupled to the format of the Belgian parliament since most of it is parsing their PDF reports. In detail my tech stack is like this:

- Rust + reqwest crate + scraper crate to download reports and parse data from it into parquet files

- 11ty + @duckdb/node-api to parse the parquet files at build time and generating pages automatically, I have for example a 'meeting' template and then for each meeting a html page gets built

- summarize certain data using mistral API

- deploy on cloudflare free plan
by kiitos | 2025-06-23 20:32:49+00:00
> you just aggregate what you need at query time, and the cost to query is not usually too expensive

The entire challenge of observability systems is rooted in the fact that the volume of input data (wide events) on the write path, is astronomically larger than what can ever be directly evaluated by any user-facing system on the read path. Data transformation and specialization and etc. is the whole ball-game. If you can build something directly on top of raw wide-events, and it works for you, that's cool, but it means that you're operating at trivial and non-representative scale.
by swed420 | 2025-06-23 20:32:53+00:00
Many professionals also use cannabis but choose to not advertise it since misinformation is still so rampant, originating from the "Reefer Madness" propaganda days. The tradeoff of potential career damage just isn't worth it.

Carl Sagan understood this, among many others:

https://bigthink.com/health/carl-sagan-on-smoking-marijuana/
by chriswarbo | 2025-06-23 20:33:12+00:00
> What about mounting a remote file system over sftp?

That can be OK for some tasks, but not others. For example, TRAMP will execute commands on the remote; so commands like M-x find-grep-dired will be faster when using TRAMP.

> Install EMACS or whatever editor you prefer on the remote?

There's actually a lot of flexibility there, since Emacs is perfectly usable in a text terminal, which could be run over SSH; it can also show X11 windows over the network (though I recommend the "lucid" build, rather than GTK); and it also has a client/server mode.
by ianmcnaney | 2025-06-23 20:33:52+00:00
PM: I am good at talking to people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you!?

Edit: Having been around for a while I’ve learned to appreciate PMs. You have to be very careful what you say in front of customers or focus groups. If you had two engineers and one customer chatting unsupervised it would turn into a brainstorming session, and after 45 minutes we’re building a flying police box that can travel through time.
by bunderbunder | 2025-06-23 20:34:28+00:00
uv is indeed fast and easy. But I'm also finding that the maintainers' efforts to make it work like Cargo mean it can be more difficult to use in more complex project structures. As sensible as Rust's project management ethos is, you're never going to escape Python's underlying design in a Python project, and friction between the two philosophies may not be avoidable.

One possible alternative is Pants. It's also written in Rust for performance, but has more flexibility baked into the design.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-23 20:34:39+00:00
Inspired by this I made a similar thing for direnv: https://github.com/georgek/dotfiles/blob/01fb53619adc7269824...

A problem I have now, though, is when I I jump to def in my editor it no longer knows which venv to load because it's outside of the project. This somehow used to work with virtualenwrapper but I'm not sure how.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-23 20:34:48+00:00
No, they happen for absolutely every externally-generated pixel of light (that is, not for shot noise, or firelflies that happen to fly between the mirrors). Where objects subtend more than one pixel, each pixel will generate it's own diffraction patterns, and the superposition of all are present in the final image. Of course, each diffraction pattern is offset from the next, so they mostly just broaden (smear out), not intensify.

However, the brightness of the diffraction effects is much lower than the light of the focused image itself. Where the image is itself dim, the diffraction effects might not add up to anything noticeable. Where the image supersaturates the detector (as can happen with a 1-pixel-wide star), the "much lower" fraction of that intensity can still be annoyingly visible.
by kevincox | 2025-06-23 20:35:27+00:00
Yes, and due to having been used for a long time we are aware of the effects (and at least for lead have implemented reasonable rules around its use).

My point is that the longer we have used and consumed something the better we understand it. We are more likely to know and understand the risks. So we should be extra cautious with new materials. Something that we have been eating for hundreds of years with no known negative effects is wildly different than something that a company discovered (naturally or artificially) last year and didn't find any negative effects with some short-term tests.
by xeonmc | 2025-06-23 20:36:18+00:00
Macs: locked down by default, hackable if you know what you’re doing.

Windows: hackable by anyone, usually inadvertently so.

Phones: locked down and hostile to all attempts of tinkering.

---

Microsoft’s attempt at the locked-down-by-default approach with S Mode was half-assed in its effort and held back by ecosystem inertia.

I think the only feasible way to achieve this with the win32 ecosystem is a pubesos + wine approach.
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by fineline | 2025-06-23 20:36:23+00:00
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by mrguyorama | 2025-06-23 20:36:31+00:00
The precautionary principle is not "Ban scary sounding things", it's "Prove that chemical is safe before you can expose people to it", which places like the EU often attempt to do.

But notably, nothing about this action takes any steps or effort towards enforcing "Prove it is safe BEFORE you sell it" and "natural" does not make any impact there. Ricin is plenty natural, so is methanol, and this change would not stop you from selling people literal poison as long as it wasn't already banned.

If Bayer makes a new derivative of carminic acid ("Natural" red #4) tomorrow that is easier for production lines to handle but also gives you cancer if you eat it for 20 years, there's no legal requirement that they demonstrate it doesn't give you cancer before they can sell it. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as a consumer to do that science for them! It being "Natural" is utterly meaningless marketing bullshit.

None of this bullshit safety theater makes any of us more safe.

As I note elsewhere, this isn't exactly damaging though. Most other countries already encouraged manufacturers to develop formulas without artificial dyes, primarily due to differences in consumer opinion (which is usually similarly not fact based), so companies are going to make a big hubub about how this will be so hard for them and then they just shut down the "this is American specific" production line and retool it for the international formula and then insist that they made such a huge change to help everyone.

But "natural colors only" has zero relation to "more healthy", and that goes double when you are talking about processed food. If you actually wanted people to eat healthier, you would be better off banning all food coloring additives, all food texture additives, and anything that lets you modify how food presents itself after processing. People would buy less processed food if it all looked like what it actually was.

Other countries have better food than the US because 1) They often force food additives to be PROVEN safe before any use and much more importantly 2) consumers are way more discerning about food. European bread doesn't have a spoonful of sugar or sugar syrup because Europeans don't want their bread to be addictively sweet, while Americans objectively buy more bread that's been sweetened than "normal" bread. I'm not a fan of treating "revealed preferences" as too meaningful, but it's hard to sell bread to people who wont buy it because they would rather eat the cake in bread form. So it's important to ask why Europeans want their cakes cakey, and their bread not.
by sylens | 2025-06-23 20:37:24+00:00
Maybe it's because I love Ocarina of Time but this is one randomizer I really enjoy playing/watching. I think it's because there is already a little bit of sequence breaking built into the game (you can swap the orders of the Spirit and Shadow Temples if you want - in fact, their medallions are already swapped in the Quest Status screen) but there's also a ton of items available to you to solve the same puzzle in different ways. As Adult Link, the hookshot/longshot or hover boots can often be used to solve the same puzzles; ditto for bombs and the hammer.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-23 20:37:37+00:00
This exactly what I said:

This is the most likely possibility and we have based all of our technology and culture and science around this.

And that’s the summary of my claim and what I meant by this:

the entire world claims this assumption by action then my claim is inline with the entire world.

I assumed it was obvious because when does the world make a claim? The world doesn’t make any singular claim. But they do take a singular action of acting on the assumption the theories are true.

> That's a really strong claim to make, especially with "you". You don't know how I live. It's like seeing somebody appear in Church and denigrating them for not believing in Jesus.

Yeah and you know what’s crazy? I’d bet a million dollars on it. It’s insane how confident I am about it right? And you know what’s even crazier? You know that I’d win that bet even though you didn’t volunteer any information about your stance. Did I know this information through my psychic powers or what? No. I didn’t. But you also have a good idea how I know.
by Y_Y | 2025-06-23 20:37:59+00:00
Small k for kilo-, big K for kelvin.

I skimmed the links that TFA provided and couldn't find the source of that figure. With rare space plasmas near shocks it's typical to have non-thermal distributions where the temperature isn't well defined. I don't think it's anything to get to excited about without having a proper article from NASA instead of IFL slop.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-23 20:38:00+00:00
This is a good point. Another point is that the better models get, the less wasted tokens there will be on unproductive token generation for answers that are wrong in some way. Better answers might lead to increased demand of course. But less waste is not a bad thing in itself. And improved quality of the answers has other economical advantages.

My view is that increased energy demand is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. First, it's by no means the dominant source of such demand, other things (transport, shipping, heating, etc.) outrank it; so a little bit of pressure from AI won't move the needle too much. Our main problem remains the same: too much CO2 being emitted. Second, meeting increased demand is typically done with renewables these days. Not because it's nice to do so but because it's cheap to do so. That's why renewables are popular in places like Texas. They don't care about the planet there. But they love cheap energy. And the more cheap, clean power we bring online, the worse expensive dirty power actually looks.

Increased demand leads to mostly new clean generation and increased pressure to deprecate dirty expensive generation. That's why coal is all but gone from most energy markets. That has nothing to do with how dirty it is and everything to do with how expensive it is. Gas based generation is heading the same direction. Any investment in such generation should be considered as very risky.

Short term of course you get some weird behavior like data centers being powered by gas turbines. Not because it's cheap but because it's easy and quick. Long term, a cost optimization would be getting rid of the gas generators. And with inference increasingly becoming the main thing in terms of energy and tokens, energy also becomes the main differentiator for profitability of AI services. Which again points at using cheap renewables to maximize profit. The winners in this market will be working on efficiency. And part of that is energy efficiency. Because that and the hardware is the main cost involved here.
by iLemming | 2025-06-23 20:38:20+00:00
You don't need to "buy" restclient, want you want is to understand Org-mode. Org-mode is a literate programming environment, you can run code snippets and "pipe" the results into one another. So, this is how I usually test my API endpoints - I would use ob-http, or verb.el, or restclient (although iirc this one no longer maintained) and then make a simple call to an endpoint, then I can pipe the results into a Clojure source block passing the data in, where I can easily parse the json and slice, dice, group and filter on the data. You can do the same thing in Python or Javascript or R (or whatever) source block. Then you can spit it out as is or pipe into another block for further tranformation. Very often I have to query a SQL DB to retrieve the payload I need to send to the API, that all I also do right there, in the same context.

What's great is that all my experimentation is "reproducible", and all of it is in my notes. Notes that are easily searchable, exportable (e.g. for a blog content), etc.

I can easily add links to some relevant PDFs, and youtube vids right there. I can start annotating those pdfs, where my notes will be interwoven with my API research. I can watch videos while controlling playback from Emacs, without having to switch to the app - it's very nice when taking notes. I can retrieve the transcript, send it to LLM, get the summary of the video and add it to my notes.

If I come up with something that I'd like to memorize better, I can easily export chunks as Anki cards. That information is also within my notes. I can easily find it, edit it, etc. I don't need to navigate multiple different apps to get this work done.
by allturtles | 2025-06-23 20:38:36+00:00
The person you're replying to said "For me the risk of timelines is that they're unknowable due to the unpredictable nature of ASI." So they are predicting >90% chance of doom, but not when that will happen. Given that there is already a 100% chance of death at some unknown point in the future, why would this cause GP to start living like a terminal cancer patient (presumably defined as someone with a >99% chance of death in the next year)?
by stevenwoo | 2025-06-23 20:39:04+00:00
Because the USA politicians for the most part do what corporate interests want. When it looked like consumer interests might gain a foothold in 1960-1970s, a member of the US chamber of commerce wrote the Powell memo as a guide to corporate responses to consumer activism, this is still followed by USA corporations and he was appointed to US Supreme Court to put his influence on legal standards for generations. He’s not the first nor the last as traditionally in the USA due to how weak the framers made the federal government originally, a private public partnership is always exalted as the best of both worlds for governance but this leads to regulatory capture we have now without sufficient safeguards. edit: an adjacent comment mentions GRAS,Generally Recognized as Safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe - laws in the USA last forever unless new laws supercede them so this law set in stone thousands of chemicals (including the aforementioned dyes) as safe because they didn't kill anyone quickly in 1958 and companies are free to use those in food - only a handful of items have been removed since then because the FDA is required to scientifically prove harm, unlike how those items got put on the list.