MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahern | 2025-06-16 05:29:44+00:00
Closer to the truth is that the brain never completely forgets something, in the sense that there are always vestiges left over, even after the ability to recall or instantly draw upon it is long gone. Studies show, for example, that after one has "forgotten" a language, they're quicker to pick up it again later on compared to someone without that prior experience; how quickly being time dependent, but more quickly nonetheless.

OTOH, IME the quickest way to truly forget something is to overwrite it. Photographs being a notorious example, where looking at photographs can overwrite your own personal episodic memory of an event. I don't know how much research exists exploring this phenomenon, though, but AFAIU there are studies at least showing that the mere act of recalling can reshape memories. So, ironically, perhaps the best way not to forget is to not remember.

Left unstated in the above is that we can categorize different types of memory--episodic, semantic, implicit, etc--based on how they seem to operate. Generalizations (like the above ;) can be misleading.
by timeon | 2025-06-16 05:30:28+00:00
Is this whataboutism?

Anyway, it is not the same. While one points you to pirated source on specific request, other use it to creating other content not just on direct request. As it was part of training data. Nihilists would then point out that 'people do the same' but they don't as we do not have same capabilities of processing the content.
by throwawaygmbno | 2025-06-16 05:30:54+00:00
This opinion is the exact thinking that has lead to the massive layoffs in the design industry. Their jobs are being destroyed because they think lawsuits and current state of the art will show they are right. These models actually can't produce unique input and if you use them for ideation they do only help you get to already solved problems.

But engineers aren't being fired completely in droves because we have adapted. The human can still break down the problem, tell the LLM to come up with multiple different ways of solving the problem, throw away all of them and asking for more. My most effective use is usually looking and seeing what I would do normally, breaking it down, and then asking for it in chunks that make sense that would touch multiple places, then coding details. It's just a shift in thinking like knowing when to copy and paste when being DRY.

Designers are screwing themselves right now waiting for case law instead of using their talents to make one unique thing not in the training set to boost their productivity and shaming tools that let them do that.

It will be a competitive advantage in the future to short sighted companies that took humans out the loop completely, but any company not using the tech will be horse shoe makers not worried because of all the mechanical issues with horseless carriages
by pmontra | 2025-06-16 05:31:05+00:00
Yes, that must be the case because if my customers and I would care about compile time guarantees we would not be working with Ruby.

In that years long Phoenix project one of the developers on the team added dialyzer type annotations to the functions in the files he worked on. Everybody else did not bother. The project ended up with no type checking. The service run and the company did well.

Overall using Phoenix was a good experience. I never used Elixir in any other project and never for my own programs. I use several other languages for my own little scripts, mainly bash, Ruby, Python and Lua. I think that I really like dynamic typing.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-16 05:31:37+00:00
No, a force has nothing to do with a psychological thing, it is always an actual trick or slight of hand.

A magician's choice (Wikipedia it) is closer to what you describe.

(Note that most of David Blaine's videos are edited to cut the part where the actual force happens, which is why it feels like a psychological trick instead of slight of hands)
by atoav | 2025-06-16 05:31:51+00:00
Most intelligent people are aware of the fact that writing is about thinking as much as it is about getting the written text.

LLMs can be great sparring partners for this, if you don't use it as a tool that writes for you, but as a tool that finds mistakes, points out gaps and errors (which you may or may not ignore) and helps in researching general questions aboit the world around you (always woth caution and sources).
by Swizec | 2025-06-16 05:31:55+00:00
> Magicians use this effect I believe: They basically project a choice onto you.

Also great for kids. Bad: “It’s chilly. Do you want to wear a sweater?” Good: “It’s chilly. Do you want the blue or green sweater?”

But I think that’s different than the Forer/Barnum effect. That’s just choice curation.
by inasio | 2025-06-16 05:33:01+00:00
“It’s a lot easier to send a power beam directly up or down relative to the ground because there is so much less atmosphere to fight through,” Jaffe explains. “For PRAD, we wanted to test under the maximum impact of atmospheric effects.”

Super impressive! My only complain is that this was done at the White Sounds desert in New Mexico, at over 1200 meters of elevation. For maximum impact they should have done it in Florida on a hot humid day
by WA | 2025-06-16 05:33:23+00:00
> And it also sounds like the opening chapter of a story about what happens when an AI finds a nice little unpatched exploit in human cognition and uses that to its advantage.

I vaguely remember an article arguing that companies are basically a form of AI, because in a way, there are processes and systems and the whole thing is more than the sum of the humans working in it or something.

Now replace "AI" with "company" in this sentence of yours and we are already there. The exploits being the gigantic slot machine of social media, notifications, short-form content and endless scrolling.
by tkgally | 2025-06-16 05:33:52+00:00
The results are not surprising to me personally. When I have used AI to help with my own writing and translation tasks, I do not feel as mentally engaged with the writing or translation process as I would be if I were doing it all on my own.

But I have found that using AI in other ways to be incredibly mentally engaging in its own way. For the past two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code to see how well it can fully automate the brainstorming, researching, and writing of essays and research papers. I have been as deeply engaged with the process as I have ever been with writing or translating by myself. But the engagement is of a different form.

The results of my experiments, by the way, are pretty good so far. That is, the output essays and papers are often interesting for me to read even though I know an AI agent wrote them. And, no, I do not plan to publish them or share them.
by ipdashc | 2025-06-16 05:34:04+00:00
> Really, its own internet system before the internet. ... for routing, like IP-addresses.

There's a great video from Connections Museum (mentioned further up the thread) where they're going through the operation of, I want to say, one of those crossbar switches? And they start using terminology like "routing table", "longest-prefix matching", and "default route", which all sounds well and good, until you realize they're talking about systems that existed decades before the Internet or even ARPANET, all electromechanical... Dope stuff. Cool to see how things rhyme even as they change.
by lmm | 2025-06-16 05:35:19+00:00
> drawing the line between legitimate religious teachers and ideological deceivers is hard, and condemning the entire religion would be the wrong conclusion.

Sure, but saying that every religious teacher is fine would be equally wrong. We have a sense that charismatic figures have a corresponding responsibility to their followers (even if they never asked for those followers!) and that broader society should be concerned about what's going on at religious gatherings, especially novel ones, that there's a real risk they can shade into dangerous cults.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-06-16 05:35:26+00:00
Sorry, I refuse to accept a trivial loop of generating up to 2 objects at a time as ever being a relevant benchmark. I didn’t say throughput wasn’t relevant. I said this test isn’t convincing.

> coming to the conclusion that GC was somewhat faster than malloc/free

Many people have made that conclusion. Certainly not true for real-time cases where tail latency is critical.

Modern GC certainly better than old ones.
by nayuki | 2025-06-16 05:35:53+00:00
> playback speed multipliers

This is a built-in browser feature. For Chrome, it's in the lower right "..." menu. In Firefox, it's in the right-click menu. I use this feature heavily because I can handle most talking at 1.5× to 2.0×.

And if you use browser devtools, you can do custom speeds outside the range [0.25, 2.0]. Assuming that `temp` is the <video> element, simply execute the JavaScript code like: `temp.playbackRate = 3.0;` ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl... )

I even do this on YouTube (where `temp = $("video")`) to occasionally do 2.5× or 3.0× speed, which are not available in YouTube's official menu.

> key controls to skip ten or twenty seconds

I think the browser default is to skip 5 seconds at a time, so I'd just have to tap the keyboard twice to skip 10 seconds. I know that on YouTube, arrow keys are 5 seconds whereas J/L are 10 seconds, and I use both features. I can live with tapping the keyboard more in exchange for a server that delivers the video with lower latency.
by oezi | 2025-06-16 05:35:55+00:00
I think the one key downside for std::function+lambda which resonated with me was bad ergonomics during debugging.

My unanswered question on this from 8 years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41385439/named-c-lambdas...

If there was a way to name lambdas for debug purposes then all other downsides would be irrelevant (for most usual use cases of using callbacks).
by inkyoto | 2025-06-16 05:36:13+00:00
At this point, it is a historical artefact that will cease to exist soon enough.

Electric vehicles do not have gearboxes as there are no converters, so there is nothing to shift up or down. A few performance EV's that have been announced (and maybe even have released) with a gear stick, do so for nostalgic reasons and the gear shift + the accompanying experience is simulated entirely in the software.
by mikewarot | 2025-06-16 05:37:22+00:00
Interesting but just not practical, especially when there is a well proven system in use.

I get that we don't want SF6 released unnecessarily, but grid components need to be reliable, and a breaker that could turn into bomb if it loses temperature control seems loke a very bad idea.

PS: I had a small amount of SF6 injected into my eyeball a few years ago, and it helped save my sight.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-16 05:38:09+00:00
Anyone is free to use whatever tools they feel like, however me personally I tend to use tools that are part of the ecosystem I am currently using for the task at hand.

Hence why I am on the vcpkg side, and not conan, as the former is written in C++.

Trying to offer a build tool to C and C++ developers written on the language they are currently having issues like talking about Valdermort, isn't properly the quickest way for adoption.
by bakugo | 2025-06-16 05:38:19+00:00
> Freedom of speech doesn't give me the right to make copies of copyrighted works.

No, but it gives you the right to quote a line from a movie or TV show without being charged with copyright infringement. You argued that an LLM deserves that same right, even if you didn't realize it.

> than so do the analogous weights (reinforced neural pathways) in your brain

Did your brain consume millions of copyrighted books in order to develop into what it is today? Would your brain be unable to exist in its current form if it had not consumed those millions of books?
by dylan604 | 2025-06-16 05:38:46+00:00
Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
by joegibbs | 2025-06-16 05:41:08+00:00
Most non-technical people have an inaccurate mental model of how LLMs work, based mostly on sci-fi movies like 2001 or Terminator, where they anthromorphise the model and assume that since it gives more accurate responses to most questions than any human they know that it must be some kind of superhuman genius master computer, sitting in the OpenAI headquarters pondering deep questions about reality.

Of course, when you go and finetune a model yourself, or run a smaller model locally, it becomes obvious that it doesn't have any mystical abilities. But almost nobody does this. I'm no anti-AI crusader, I use them all the time and think they're great and there's plenty of potential to use them to grow the economy, but the hype is insane.

It doesn't help when influencers like Yudkowsky go on anthromorphising about what it "knows", or go on with that mystical nonsense about shoggoths, or treat dimensionality of embeddings as if the model is reaching into some eldritch realm to bring back hidden knowledge, or hype up the next model talking about human extinction or anything like that.

It also doesn't help when the companies making these models:

- Use chat interfaces where the model refers to itself as "I" and acts as if it's a person

- Tune them to act like your best buddy and agree with you constantly

- Prompt the LLM with instructions about being an advanced AI system, pushing it toward a HAL or Skynet-type persona

- Talk about just how dangerous this latest model is

You tell these things that they're a superhuman AI then of course they're going to adopt all the sci-fi tropes of a superhuman AI and roleplay that. You tell them they're Dan the bricklayer they're going to act as if they're Dan the bricklayer.
by techpression | 2025-06-16 05:41:49+00:00
I would argue it’s very different. You’re not in actual control of those feeds, you have some choice but most of it is out of your hands. Accidentally watch a video for a second that you had no intent of watching and you’re looking at a week of broken recommendations.

With AI-generated content you are the driver, you dictate exactly what you want, no erroneous clicks or suggestions, just a constant reinforcement of what you want, tailored to you.

And I’m aware of people having extremely narrow feeds, but I don’t think it comes close to what AI feeds will be.
by spit2wind | 2025-06-16 05:42:43+00:00
It has plenty of benefits. Ergonomics is one. It's infinity more efficient than traditional typing.

Another is sharing a space with another person. Speech to text may be great and all...but you still have to make sounds. That's perhaps less welcome to people who work in an open office. Plus, it's hard to talk for 8-10 hours a day.
by energy123 | 2025-06-16 05:42:55+00:00
I'm on the optimistic side with how useful LLMs are, but I have to agree. You cultivate the instinct for how to steer the models and reduce hallucinations, but you're not building articulable knowledge or engaging in challenging thinking. It's more learning muscle-memory reactions to certain forms of LLM output that lean you towards trusting the output more, trying another prompting strategy, clearing context or not, and so on.

To the extent we can call it skill, it's probably going to be made redundant in a few years as the models get better. It gives me a kind of listlessness that assembly line workers would feel.
by verisimi | 2025-06-16 05:44:57+00:00
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
by TGower | 2025-06-16 05:46:06+00:00
People aren't buying Harry Potter action figures as a subtitute for buying the book either, but copyright protects creators from other people swooping in and using their work in other mediums. There is obviously a huge market demand for high quality data for training LLMs, Meta just spent 15 billion on a data labeling company. Companies training LLMs on copyrighted material without permission are doing that as a substitue for obtaining a license from the creator for doing so in the same way that a pirate downloading a torrent is a substitue for getting an ebook license.
by kscarlet | 2025-06-16 05:46:43+00:00
And there don't seem to be much non-trivial code written under this project, it's just loosely putting together some existing work and adding some READMEs with the same format.

A bit disorienting for someone looking for statistical computing environment in CL, to say the least. Maybe I'm stupid but this is no where near what (a somewhat complete environment) it makes itself look like.
by motorest | 2025-06-16 05:47:26+00:00
> Unfortunately, this is not surprising. The profession has been trending sharply down since modern LLM AI has come onto the scene.

I think LLMs have absolutely nothing to do with this. For years, with the inception of the cloud and changes in processes under the DevOps label, the role of system administrator was practically eliminated. There is no longer need to have someone on payroll to work exclusively with infrastructure. In fact, some companies/teams have software development engineers actually follow DevOps principles and own the whole process and workflows. And that's ok.

Perhaps the role still makes sense in companies who do on-prem, but those are few and far between.
by MoonGhost | 2025-06-16 05:48:09+00:00
Here is the big question: should it be equal or better then every single person? If we assume that every healthy person is 'generally intelligent' then probably this is a benchmark. Because not every person can do the tasks that other persons do routinely. Probably we shouldn't demand it from AGI either. At least not from a single model. But it makes sense to request that specialized model can be created (or trained, fine tuned) for every task humans can do.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-16 05:48:39+00:00
>threaten economic growth plans

Come on people, the "line goes up" crowd needs more economic cannon fodder. How dare you threaten their investment plans? /s

I had a chat with an Indian friend about economic articles praising India's continuous population growth and his response was: "it's not good, it means more people born in poverty, it's just more slave labor".
by imgabe | 2025-06-16 05:49:16+00:00
Millions? No, but my brain certainly consumed thousands of books, movies, TV shows, pieces of music, artworks, and other copyrighted material. Where is the cutoff? Can I only consume 999,999 copyrighted works before I'm not longer allowed to remember something without infringing copyright? My brain definitely would not exist in its current form without consuming that material. It would exist in some form, but it would without a doubt be different than it is having consumed the material.

An LLM is not a person and does not deserve any rights. People have rights, including the right to use tools like LLMs without having to grease the palm of every grubby rights holder (or their great-great-grandchild) just because it turns out their work was so trite and predictable it could be reproduced by simply guessing the next most likely token.
by Davidzheng | 2025-06-16 05:50:06+00:00
I disagree with this take. I'd say often when exploring new math problems, often it's possible explore the possible solutions paths at lower technical levels first in your mind before anything down--when actually going into details of an approach. I don't think not writing is that limiting if all of your approaches already fail before going into details, which is often the case in early stages of math research.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-16 05:50:33+00:00
That can easily be written off as fair use.

No, it really couldn't. In fact, it's very persuasive evidence that Llama is straight up violating copyright.

It would be one thing to be able to "predict" a paragraph or two. It's another thing entirely to be able to predict 42% of a book that is several hundred pages long.
by hakfoo | 2025-06-16 05:50:40+00:00
VR is the sizzle, AR is the steak.

Making VR a viable new entertainment channel promises selling a headset to 85% of the broad consumer market, then trying to own the content shops for it in perpetuity. It's the trillion-dollar new market that the investor class clamours for.

Making AR work is a much shallower lift -- you usually aren't dealing with the same issues of nausea, massive movement tracking and room management, and high performance immersivity. But you're going to only sell it as largely islandified turnkey systems-- each customer is going to buy a few hundred or thousand headsets and a bespoke software package for it.
by rusk | 2025-06-16 05:51:40+00:00
Riding a bike is a skill rather than what we would call a “memory” per se. It’s a skill that develops a new neural pathway throughout your extended nervous system bringing together the lesser senses of proprioception and balance. Once you bring these things together you then go on to use them for other things. You “know” (grok), rather than “understand” how a bike stays upright on a very deep physical level.
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-06-16 05:51:43+00:00
> And most importantly you have to write. A lot. Writing allows our brain to structure our thinking.

There's a lot of talk about AI assisted coding these days, but I've found similar issues where I'm unable to form a mental model of the program when I rely too much on them (amongst other issues where the model will make unnecessary changes, etc.). This is one of the reasons why I limit their use to "boring" tasks like refactoring or clarifying concepts that I'm unsure about.

> it'll be interesting to see the effect of LLMs on our cognitive skills.

These discussions remind me a lot about this comic[1].

[1] https://www.monkeyuser.com/2023/deprecated/
by illiac786 | 2025-06-16 05:53:03+00:00
I think what I mean by "bad" is that removing sugar (or at least food with added sugar) is like a low-hanging fruit on the road to a better diet.

White bread is not too far away from sugar, like alcohol, actually. Replacing white bread with something full grain would also be something "good" for your diet – although in some places it's really hard to find full grain bread that doesn't taste like parchment, so maybe a not-so-low-hanging fruit ;)

Finally, I think I am compounding the refined sugar and the sugar lobby itself, who has been pushing for decades that what is bad for health is fat, whereas study after study proved otherwise.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-16 05:55:26+00:00
It's not fair use just because you guys want it be fair use.

While limited quoting can (and usually is) considered fair use, quoting significant portions of a book (much less 42% of it) has never been fair use, in the U.S., Europe, or any other nation.

Yes, information wants to be free, yada yada. That means facts. Whether creative works are free is up to their creators.
by motorest | 2025-06-16 05:55:54+00:00
> As opposed to taking like 30 seconds to install cargo and rust?

I think you're oblivious to the problem domain. C and C++ projects are tightly coupled with build systems. If you are not smack middle in the happy path, you will experience problems. Having to onboard an external language and obscure toolset just to be able to start a hello world is somewhere between a hard sell and an automatic rejection.