MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eviks | 2025-06-16 03:51:38+00:00
So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is *not* survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.

> Many species have thousands of offspring because the odds any one of them reproduces is very low, a valid strategy not some sign of incompetence.

But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.

Anyway, this is a different, simpler, argument, it explains "many with low chances", but doesn't explain 50 millions wether thousands would work just fine.

> There’s zero contradiction between those statements

My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.

> The actual cause is the full evolutionary history

That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit
by Full_Clark | 2025-06-16 03:52:03+00:00
> Expensive high-efficiency chemistries for carbon capture will cede to simpler, energy-hungrier chemistries, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum being something like soda lime

I haven't looked into the topic much at all but that does resonate. It reminds of the way solar farms are becoming less fine-tuned (e.g., no sun-tracking tilt motors anymore) as panel costs drops through the floor.
by ameliaquining | 2025-06-16 03:52:38+00:00
Deno has "sandboxing" in the sense that it will refuse to open files and such if you don't pass the relevant permission flags, but AFAICT it doesn't do the thing that this article is talking about, of telling the kernel not to let it do those things. (I'm inferring this from the note in the documentation that native code called via FFI isn't sandboxed.) So an attacker could still do those things if they found an exploitable bug in the Deno runtime.

I'm having a hard time figuring out the details of how Wasmtime works but I don't think it does this kind of sandboxing either.
by chabska | 2025-06-16 03:53:28+00:00
"Deforestation" is also known as economic development, when someone is not trying to disparage a third world country. Malaysia and Indonedia, with their relatively stable politics and governance, gained a lot of FDI in the 1970's and started developing rapidly. Rainforests were cleared, true, and initially the land was planted with rubber, because that's was the most profitable crop that grows well in this climate. Then rubber price crashed, so the farmers switched to oil palm, the next most profitable crop.

There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.

The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-06-16 03:54:44+00:00
Did you read the article? This exact point is made and then analyzed.

> Or maybe Meta added third-party sources—such as online Harry Potter fan forums, consumer book reviews, or student book reports—that included quotes from Harry Potter and other popular books.

> “If it were citations and quotations, you'd expect it to concentrate around a few popular things that everyone quotes or talks about,” Lemley said. The fact that Llama 3 memorized almost half the book suggests that the entire text was well represented in the training data.
by nxvo76 | 2025-06-16 03:56:59+00:00
More importantly "sane" people are fully capable of unconciously making "insane" people jump of the roof. Its not even possible to count how many times that happens.

One proxy signal is counting the number of people who start crying about their "good intentions" or searching for thing to blame post facto.

Jurassic Park wasnt about Dinosaurs, it was about the limitations of the 3 inch chimp brain in controlling things that cannot be controlled.
by Daub | 2025-06-16 04:00:06+00:00
Here you go:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wseunftjggoiqekn43hr1/paintin...

The relevant slides are on pages 16 to 19. Though I don't explicitly state it, most of the key changes Michelangelo made to his fresco were to its neighboring regional contrast. This is defined here:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/structural-...

As you might guess, neighboring regional contrast acts upon neighboring regions. Artists manipulate this property to produce tone wrap, which heightens the impression of form. Tone wrap is also defined in the preceding link.

Additionally, all Michelangelo's glazes were also removed. These would have had a significant impact on the global unity of his composition. I can barely look at photos of the Cistine Chapel taken after the restoration.
by choppaface | 2025-06-16 04:00:31+00:00
A key idea premise is that LLMs will probably replace search engines and re-imagine the online ad economy. So today is a key moment for content creators to re-shape their business model, and that can include copyright law (as much or more as the DMCA change).

Another key point is that you might download a Llama model and implicitly get a ton of copyright-protected content. Versus with a search engine you’re just connected to the source making it available.

And would the LLM deter a full purchase? If the LLM gives you your fill for free, then maybe yes. Or, maybe it’s more like a 30-second preview of a hit single, which converts into a $20 purchase of the full album. Best to sue the LLM provider today and then you can get some color on the actual consumer impact through legal discovery or similar means.
by spacechild1 | 2025-06-16 04:00:32+00:00
> If an extremely charismatic human was going around telling people to jump off roofs, and they did, would we shrug it off and say "well, they were obviously insane already"?

Your example might sound ridiculuous, but this is actually happening all the time. People might not literally jump off a roof, but they do blow themselves up with bombs, go on killing sprees or commit suicide because someone told them so.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-06-16 04:00:38+00:00
Indeed but since when is a blatantly derived work only using 50% of a copyrighted work without permission a paragon of copyright compliance?

Music artists get in trouble for using more than a sample without permission — imagine if they just used 45% of a whole song instead…

I’m amazed AI companies haven’t been sued to oblivion yet.

This utter stupidity only continues because we named a collection of matrices “Artificial Intelligence” and somehow treat it as if it were a sentient pet.

Amassing troves of copyrighted works illegally into a ZIP file wouldn’t be allowed. The fact that the meaning was compressed using “Math” makes everyone stop thinking because they don’t understand “Math”.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-06-16 04:02:36+00:00
Well, my only real point is that it’s not the version negotiation in TLS that’s broken. It’s the workaround for intolerance of newer versions that had downgrade attacks.

Fortunately that’s all behind us now, and transitioning from 1.2 to 1.3 is going much smoother than 1.0 to 1.2 went.
by Retric | 2025-06-16 04:04:12+00:00
> So the fittest tree dying due to a meteor is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the luckiest. This has nothing about being "fit"/better adapted to the environment.

Again fittest is a classification. In Darwinian terms, the phrase is best understood as "survival of the form that in successive generations will leave most copies of itself."

After several generations it could be shown that a tree did have the form of the fittest without itself surviving.

> But having millions instead of thousands that would decrease the chances of survival (for example, by the offspring exhausting food resources and starving) would be a sign of incompetence.

Offspring of many species consume their siblings, millions is generally inefficient for other reasons. Some trees could have millions of viable offspring in their lifetime but random dispersal is really inefficient.

> My issue is there is zero connection. You can't justify millions this way.

I already did.

Odds multiply here, you want competition and also have to contend with random dispersal. 1 in 10,000 * 1 in 100 is 1 in 1 million. It’s very easy to look at the combination of multiple factors and see why millions is an efficient use of resources for animals as large as humans. Trying to argue for a single justification doesn’t work because multiple factors such as our size is involved.

> That's not a cause, but a description of what happened. There's a lot of irrelevant info in that history. Also a lots of random things with no benefit

Randomness is part of evolution. There’s ultimately no particular reason we got the particular version of various mirrored molecules that we did, but once that selection happened it was unlikely to change.

The actual process isn’t just the high level overview we talk about but the actual interplay down to individual subatomic particles. Multiple paths could have resulted in an organism with your specific DNA sequence but only one path actually did result in you existing and having your specific layout of carbon 14 nuclei etc. So argue all you want that an equivalent organism could exist, just realize you’re arbitrarily lowering the threshold between the actual process and a simplified abstraction.
by zz99mz | 2025-06-16 04:04:47+00:00
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It runs locally on consumer hardware (~6.3GB VRAM), keeping data private, and uses Elastic Weight Consolidation to learn tasks like coding or Q&A without forgetting. Trained on CodeSearchNet, MMLU, and SciQ (100% accuracy on STEM/SciQ, DM me to replicate), it’s versatile for summarization, code generation, and more.

We’re training until September 2025, with checkpoints out in July. The code’s Apache 2.0, weights free for non-commercial use. We’re raising $15M to scale and hit the $43B NLP market, with plans for user-controlled reasoning and a plugin marketplace.

Star the repo, contribute code, or sponsor us (tiers from $5/month): https://github.com/versoindustries/HighNoonLLM. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/pBrSPbaMnM. What do you think about hierarchical AI? Any ideas for HighNoon? I’ll be here answering questions!

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by timschmidt | 2025-06-16 04:05:24+00:00
> Do you know every common programing language? The LLM does, plus it can code in FRACTRAN, Brainfuck, Binary lambda calculus, and a dozen other obscure languages.

Not only this, but they're surprisingly talented at reading compiled binaries in a dozen different machine and bytecodes. I have seen one one-shot an applet rewrite from compiled java bytecode to modern javascript.
by antgiant | 2025-06-16 04:06:51+00:00
They make it super simple for someone on the move to do a zoom out teams call with one screen and still have access to PowerPoint’s presenter view.

Basically use the dummy plug screen for PowerPoint’s output and the laptop screen for the presenter notes. Then share the dummy plug’s screen.

Might not be the best answer for the citizens of Hacker News but so, so easy for teachers and salespeople.
by Daub | 2025-06-16 04:07:32+00:00
A very funny video. Thanks. I will keep it as it beautifully demonstrates the waterfall of mistakes that often follow a minor change to a painting's composition.

Another anecdote: I was once photographing a painting in a museum gallery that did not encourage Phtography. Unfortunately, the light was causing excessive glare. Whilst the guards were not looking, we placed a cigarette package out of view under the frame to lift it away from the glare. Again... upon return many months later the cigarette package was still there.

I should state that this was a very provisional museum. It had recently been painted, and there were drops of paint of the frames showing that the paintings had not been removed during the painting.
by vanderZwan | 2025-06-16 04:07:44+00:00
I'm surprised that many comments here seem to have missed this bit of context:

> One thing you need to know about me is that despite working on SumatraPDF C++ code base for 16 years, I don’t know 80% of C++.

I'm pretty sure that most "why don't you just use x…" questions are implicitly answered by it, with the answer being "because using x correctly requires learning about all of it's intricacies and edge-cases, which in turn requires understanding related features q, r, s… all the way to z, because C++ edge-case complexity doesn't exist in a vacuum".
by vintermann | 2025-06-16 04:09:53+00:00
All this study really says, is that models are really good at compressing the text of Harry Potter. You can't get Harry Potter out of it without prompting it with the missing bits - sure, impressively few bits, but is that surprising, considering how many references and fair use excerpts (like discussion of the story in public forums) it's seen?

There's also the question of how many bits of originality there actually are in Harry Potter. If trained strictly on text up to the publishing of the first book, how well would it compress it?
by whoisyc | 2025-06-16 04:11:01+00:00
Shinkai is an one trick pony whose one and only plot is teenage longing and whose one and only visual language is coating everything in a shiny glittery glow so he can hide the emptiness of his movies under it. His works are nothing but one aesthetic remade and remastered over and over, but sadly plenty of people do not engage with works of art beyond their aesthetics and here we are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by kragen | 2025-06-16 04:13:30+00:00
I'm skeptical of the Heimildin article, because it contains obvious factual errors:

> equivalent to almost four times Iceland's electricity production, which is about 20 terawatts per year.

You can't measure electricity production in terawatts per year; you can measure things like solar panel deployment speed in those units, as you correctly did. This makes me wonder how many other factual errors I failed to spot in the article.

But, yes, we should not expect atmospheric carbon capture to be economically feasible yet, and when it is, we should expect most companies that attempt it to fail, just as most solar panel companies have failed. But remember that solar energy is free when the sun is up; there's no economic benefit to curtailing your electric production because your batteries are full. So we should expect vastly more energy-intensive approaches than Climeworks' to be viable.

Atmospheric carbon capture isn't an alternative to renewable energy. It's what you do in response to the much lower energy costs resulting from renewable energy, and to reverse the damage already done.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-16 04:13:33+00:00
>Amassing troves of copyrighted works illegally into a ZIP file wouldn’t be allowed. The fact that the meaning was compressed using “Math” makes everyone stop thinking because they don’t understand “Math”.

LLMs are in reality the artifacts of lossy compression of significant chunks of all of the text ever produced by humanity. The "lossy" quality makes them able to predict new text "accurately" as a result.

>compressed using “Math”

This is every compression algorithm.
by diagraphic | 2025-06-16 04:14:35+00:00
Hey everyone! I've been tinkering with storage systems for the past few years as a nights-and-weekends obsession. Wildcat is my latest experiment -- an open-source Go-based storage engine with C-interop that combines MVCC with lock-free data structures, atomic block-storage and an LSM-tree approach (think RocksDB).

It's definitely over-engineered for most use cases. The code base has grown to handle everything from cross-platform file I/O to transaction recovery, with way more documentation than probably necessary.

Not claiming it's production-ready or faster than the battle-tested options out there, but as an experimental solution to concurrency bottlenecks it's rather cool. :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Always happy to discuss the design or answer questions.
by Brybry | 2025-06-16 04:16:40+00:00
I think a lot of people who were or had kids pre-internet streaming probably watched PBS, at least sometimes.

Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Reading Rainbow, Joy of Painting, Arthur, Bill Nye, Barney, Teletubbies, etc.

It's not like there were a lot of TV choices for kids if their parents couldn't afford cable (and some stations like Cartoon Network didn't even exist until 1992+, I think even Disney Channel was a premium channel like HBO).
by 1123581321 | 2025-06-16 04:17:25+00:00
Agreed. It’s an obtuse quote by Lemley who can’t picture the enormous quantity of associations and crawled data, or at least wants to minimize the quantity. It’s hardly discussion-ending.

Accusations of not reading the article are fair when someone brings up a “related” anecdote that was in the article. It’s not fair when someone is just disagreeing.
by int_19h | 2025-06-16 04:17:35+00:00
I don't think it was Microsoft that killed Java applets. I mean, for one thing, they always worked in IE, which was really the only avenue through which MS could have affected them.

No, Java applets failed because they became the poster child for "Java is slow" take. Even though it wasn't exactly true in general, it was certainly true of applets, what with waiting for them to download and then waiting for the JVM to spin up.

What killed them was 1) HTML/JS itself getting better at dynamic stuff that previously required something like applets, and 2) Flash taking over the remaining niche for which HTML wasn't good enough.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-16 04:17:56+00:00
> a blatantly derived work only using 50% of a copyrighted work without permission

What's the work here? If it's the output of the LLM, you have to feed in the entire book to make it output half a book so on an ethical level I'd say it's not an issue. If you start with a few sentences, you'll get back less than you put in.

If the work is the LLM itself, something you don't distribute is much less affected by copyright. Go ahead and play entire songs by other artists during your jam sessions.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-16 04:18:11+00:00
copyright is actually not as much about right to copy as it is about redistribution permissions.

if you trained an LLM on real copyrighted data, benchmarked it, wrote up a report, and then destroyed the weight, that's transformative use and legal in most places.

if you then put up that gguf on HuggingFace for anyone to download and enjoy, well... IANAL. But maybe that's a bit questionable, especially long term.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-16 04:18:19+00:00
Everyone knows we live in the Information age, not everyone realizes we're also living in an age Psychology - and of the two, we have a much clearer understanding of information and technology.

You can argue we're seeing a continuation of a pattern of our relationship with media and it's evolution, but in doing so you affirm that the psyche is vulnerable under certain circumstances - for some more than others.

I think it's a mistake to err on the side of casual dismissal, that anyone who winds up insane must have always been insane. There are well known examples of unhealthy states being induced into otherwise healthy minds. Soldiers who experience a war-zone might develop PTSD. Similar effects have been reported for social media moderators after repeated exposure to abusive online content. (Trauma is one example, I think delusion is another less obvious one w.r.t things like cults, scientology, etc.)

Yes, there are definite mental disorders like schizophrenia and bi-polar, there's evidence these conditions have existed throughout history. And yes, some of us are more psychologically vulnerable while others are more robust. But in the objective sense, all minds have a limit and are vulnerable under the correct circumstances. The question is a matter of "threshold."

I'm reminded of the deluge of fake news which, only a few years ago, caused chaos for democracies everywhere. Everything from Q anon to alien space ships, people fell for it. A LOT of people fell for it. The question then is the same question now, how do you deal with sophisticated bullshit? With AI it's especially difficult because its convincing and tailor made just for you.

I'm not sure what you would call this metric for fake news and AI, but afaict it only goes up, and it's only getting faster. How much longer until it's too much to handle?
by bobthepanda | 2025-06-16 04:19:34+00:00
One interesting fact is that these days graffiti is cracked down on hard in NYC and the majority of people who try and tag subway trains now are actually tourists who want to essentially re-enact the gritty era of 1980s NYC https://hyperallergic.com/731649/subway-graffiti-is-on-the-r...
by quantadev | 2025-06-16 04:19:49+00:00
I wouldn't exactly call APL simpler than LISP. Just because there are some things in APL that _can_ be coded with less characters doesn't make it overall simpler or even more compact in the general case. It's just axiomatic that for a language you need the ability to define and call functions, and it's just a debate about whether there's a simpler syntax than LISP or not, and I say there isn't.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-16 04:19:50+00:00
> These doomsday scenarios seem to all assume that there is only a single superintelligence, or one whose capabilities are vastly ahead of all its peers

A lot of scenarios posit that this is basically guaranteed to happen the very first time we have an ASI smart enough to bootstrap itself into greater intelligence, unless we're basically perfect in how we align its goals, so yes.

LLMs seem like the best case world for avoiding this scenario (improvement requires exponentially scaling resources compared to inference). That said, it is by no means guaranteed that LLMs will remain the SotA for AI.

> “the best way to achieve my goals would be to remove humans”, it seems unlikely the other superintelligences would let it.

Why not? Seriously, why wouldn't the other superintelligences let it? There's no reason to assume that, by default, ASI would be invested in the survival of the human race in a way we would prefer. More than likely they will just be as laser focussed on their own goals.

The whole point is that it's very difficult to design an AI that has "defending what humans think is right" as a terminal value. They basically all try and find loopholes. The only way to make safety its number one priority is to dial it up so high that everyone complains it's a puritan - and then you get scenarios where it's telling schizophrenics to go off their meds because it's so agreeable.

Unless you're saying that they would fight off the other ASIs gaining power because they themselves want it, but I fail to see how being stuck in a turf war between two ASIs is at all an improvement.