MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-06-12 06:09:25+00:00
I'll have to read the JEPA article in more detail before commenting specifically on whether "world model" is appropriate. However procedural-action models have, in my view, a special place in the area of modelling the world.

While they may not be world models under my definition above, they are something like world-model-generating-models. They work like our sensory-motor system which itself builds "procedural proxy models" of the world -- and these become world models when they are cognised (, conceptualised, made abstract, made available for the imagination, etc.).

Contrast a very simple animal which can move a leaf around vs., a more complex one (eg., a mouse, etc.) which can imagine the leaf in various orientations. It's that capacity, esp. of mammals (, birds, etc.) to reify their sensory-motor "world-model-generating" capacity, eg., in imagination, which allows them to form world models in their heads. We require something like imagination in order to be able to hypotheticate a general model, form a hypothetical action, and try that action out.

I'm less concerned about making this distinct clear for casual observes in the case of robotics, because imv, competent acting in the world can lead to building world models. Whereas most other forms cannot.

What these robots require, to have world models in my view, would be firstly these sensory-motor models and then a reliable way of 1) acquiring new SM mdoels live (ie., learning motor techniques); and 2) reporting on what they have learned in a reasoning/cognitive context.

Robotics is just at stage0 here, the very basics of making a sensory-motor connection.
by sph | 2025-06-12 06:10:18+00:00
Where I live now there are pretty much no ADHD meds either, but I wouldn’t have moved here (for a better quality of life in general) if I didn’t have nicotine patches to keep me going. I order them on eBay because they are 4x as expensive in pharmacies here compared to other european countries. Start with a low dose (you can cut them). 7.5mg worked well for over a year, now I’m increasing it to 12mg. If never abused, neither amfetamine nor nicotine patches have great addiction potential ( I used to smoke a pack a day for 10+ years). It’s good to take a day off once in a while.

What I also require to function is a low carb diet, and pretty much no added sugars. Carbs destroy my mood, sugar is powdered ADHD, whereas protein and fats keep my brain silent. Lately I’ve been experimenting with tyrosine (a supplement of natural aminoacid found in many foods such as cheese) which gives me a bit the laser like focus of AMPH, and a minor crash in the evening. I use it sparingly but it’s good to have and very cheap.

Hope some of this helps. Email in the profile if you have more questions.
by paulnovacovici | 2025-06-12 06:12:00+00:00
I’ve always like to explore the idea of our universe being in a static 5th dimension where the 5th dimension represents randomness/entropy. The same way to think about exploring a 2d plane in a 3 dimensional space where the 3rd dimension is constant. We just happen to be in a random big bang in this 5th dimensional space
by aidenn0 | 2025-06-12 06:12:29+00:00
I was hoping that, since it takes terrain into account, it might be more accurate than other sites I've used. I'm in a bit of a valley and get zero channels. Everyone near me that watches OTA has a antenna elevated to at least 20 feet. This lists 5 channels as "green."

It also seems to use licensed ERP rather than actual ERP. There is a VHF station near me licensed for 300W that only broadcasts at 100W ERP; this site lists it as 300W.
by PaulShin | 2025-06-12 06:12:52+00:00
As a founder who also acts as the head of product for our B2B SaaS, Markhub, this is a topic I'm passionate about. Your use cases especially using an LLM to understand an undocumented codebase are very familiar.

My biggest pain point wasn't just executing individual tasks with an LLM, but the "context loss" that happens between those tasks. The summary from my research, the user feedback from a Slack thread, and the technical spec for the feature all lived in separate places.

So, we took a different approach. We built our own AI teammate, MAKi, directly into our collaboration platform. We don't just "use" an LLM; we've made it the central OS for our entire product development cycle.

Here's our day-to-day workflow:

1. User Feedback Synthesis: Instead of manually reading user interviews or community posts, I ask MAKi: "Summarize all feedback from the last 7 days related to our mobile app, and categorize them into 'Bugs' and 'Feature Requests'." MAKi reads all the scattered conversations and generates a structured report.

2. From Feedback to Spec: We then discuss that report in a chat thread. Once we decide on a feature, I ask MAKi: "Take this conversation and our decision, and write a technical spec document for the dev team, including the user problem, proposed solution, and key action items."

3. Living Documentation: This is the most powerful part. As developers work on the feature, their discussions and code commits (via integration) are all linked to that initial conversation. Later, anyone can ask MAKi: "What was the original reason we built the PWA notification feature?" and it will instantly pull up the entire history from the first user feedback to the final decision document.

We've found that the true power of LLMs isn't just in answering questions, but in creating a persistent, searchable, and intelligent memory for the entire team.
by pixelsynth | 2025-06-12 06:13:46+00:00
We are purposefully trading off some sorting precision for speed with float16, and for scenes with large Z extents you'd probably get more Z-fighting, so I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for you if your goal is max reconstruction accuracy! But we'll likely add a 2-pass sort (i.e. radix sort with a large base / #buckets) in the future for higher precision (user selectable so you can decide what's more important for you). But I will say that implementing a sort on the CPU is much simpler than on the GPU, so it opens up possibilities if you're willing to do a readback from GPU to CPU and tolerate at least 1 frame of latency (usually not perceivable).
by toomanyrichies | 2025-06-12 06:14:23+00:00
The delta in terms of salary? The median is roughly similar, maybe a slight edge for Rails + React depending on region or company. But the big difference is volume. There are way more Rails + React roles out there, and the Rails-only ones tend to be more variable in scope, stack, and compensation.

On the developer experience side, I haven’t worked extensively with the latest versions of Rails, so I don’t have a strong opinion yet on whether Hotwire provides a better frontend experience than React. That said, people I respect in the Rails community speak highly of the Hotwire approach to building modern, interactive UIs without the overhead of a full SPA. I’m sure I could pick it up with a little effort, but it’s not a top priority for me right now.

From a technical perspective, my sense is that teams adopting or reverting to a pure Rails stack, especially with Hotwire, tend to be more conscientious about keeping versions up-to-date, and generally more opinionated and deliberate about tech choices. A few years ago, replacing Rails views with React SPAs was not uncommon. But now that Rails has caught up with tools like Turbo and Stimulus, some teams are intentionally moving back toward server-driven UIs.

In terms of employability, most of the job listings I came across during my recent search were still Rails + React. And given that being fluent in multiple tech stacks broadens my opportunities, I plan to stay in the Rails + React camp for now.
by flakiness | 2025-06-12 06:21:29+00:00
FYI: https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/faqs#android-lat...

> Google pushes the code for the next release to the latest public release branch and updates the android-latest-release manifest to point to that branch.

Along with https://source.android.com/docs/whatsnew/site-updates#aosp-c...

> The android-latest-release manifest is set to the latest AOSP release branch, android16-release
by pixelsynth | 2025-06-12 06:22:26+00:00
It's an interesting idea, and with spark you could test this by adjusting the parameter maxStdDev to control how far out it draws the splat.

I agree with you though that in general 3DGS is a worse representation for hard, flat, synthetic things with hard edges. But in the flip side, I would argue it's a better representation for many organic, real-world things, like imagine fur or hair or leaves on a tree... These are things that can render beautifully photo realistically in a way that would require much, much more complex polygon geometry and texturing and careful sorting and blending of semi-transparent texels. This is one reason why 3DGS has become so popular in scanning and 3D reconstruction.. you just get much better results with smaller file sizes. When 3DGS first appeared, everyone was shocked by how photorealistic you could render things in real time on a mobile device!

But one final thought I want to add: with Spark it's not an either/or. You can have BOTH in the same Three.js scene and they will blend together perfectly via the Z-buffer. So you can scan the world around you and render it with 3DGS, and then insert your hard-edged robot character polygon meshes right into that world, and get the best of both!
by yin773113672 | 2025-06-12 06:22:37+00:00
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by ninjin | 2025-06-12 06:23:26+00:00
Here is the policy for their public-facing DNS:

https://142290803.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/14229...

Read it rather quickly, but looks fine at least on the surface. Sadly, there is no way I would trust anything as sensitive as DNS with the EU given their dreadful record of creeping surveillance.
by varsketiz | 2025-06-12 06:23:40+00:00
I like companies that do tryouts. In the last 15 years I worked for 3 employers. Two of them did tryouts - a day or two literally working in their environment. One did not.

The two that did it both were great, the one that did not turned out to not be for me.

I'm with the last employer for the last 9 years, and not looking to quit :))
by mjburgess | 2025-06-12 06:24:07+00:00
It's important to be aware that ML textbooks are conditionalising every term on ML being the domain of study, and along with all computer science, extremely unconcerned with words they borrow retaining their meaning.

Generalisation in the popular sense (science, stats, philosophy of science, popsci) is about reliability and validity, def. validity = does a model track the target properties of a system we expect; reliability = does it continue to do so in environments in which those features are present, but irrelevant permutations are made.

Interpolation is "curve fitting", which is almost all of ML/AI. The goal of curve fitting is to replace a general model with a summary of the measurement data. This is useful when you have no way of obtaining a model of the data generating process.

What people in ML assume is that there is some true distribution of measurements, and "generalisation" means interpolating the data so that you capture the measurement distribution.

I think it's highly likely there's a profound conceptual mistake in assuming measurements themsleves have a true distribution, so even the sense of generalisation to mean "have we interpolated correctly" is, in most cases, meaningless.

Part of the problem is that ML textbooks frame all ML problems with the same set of assumptions (eg., that there exists an f: X->Y, that X has a "true distribution" Dx, so that finding f* implies learning Dx). For many datasets, these assumptions are false. Compare running a linear regression on photos of the sky, through stars to get star signs, vs. running it on V=IR electric circuit data to get `R`

In the former cases, there is no f_star_sign to find; there is no "true distribution" of star sign measurements; etc. So any model of star signs cannot be a model even of measurements of star signs. ML textbooks do not treat "data" as having these kinds of constraints, or relationships to reality, which breads pseudoscientific and credulous misunderstandings of issues (such as, indeed, the othello paper).
by pjerem | 2025-06-12 06:25:25+00:00
In the meantime we’ve lost pretty much any innovation in the physical space.

I have a great illustration with a simple product I cannot find : a _modern_ … alarm clock.

I’ve been searching for the ultimate alarm clock in a while with the following list of must have :

- FM/AM and DAB+

- Decent sound/speaker

- Nice ringtones (with decent sound) and not just beep beep beep or a radio station …

- A brightness suitable for an alarm clock (that’s something we aren’t able to make anymore it seems or nobody cares anymore)

- Physical buttons that you can use in the dark

- Good build quality

And that’s all.

It’s not an unreasonable list of features. In fact, most alarm clocks on the market have most of those features, nothing in this list is exceptional. Yet, I totally fail to find one that have it all.

It just feels like objects are all the same now and that nobody cares.

Sure, you can use your smartphone as an alarm clock. But even if you wanted (I don’t) it doesn’t check all those requirements.
by Huxley1 | 2025-06-12 06:26:17+00:00
I never really thought of plants as responding to sound like this. I always imagined them reacting to light, chemicals, or maybe touch, but the idea of them picking up vibrations from specific insects is kind of mind blowing.

It makes me wonder how many other forms of input plants might be sensing that we simply don’t recognize yet. Nature keeps surprising me the more I read about this kind of stuff.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-12 06:27:35+00:00
Guardrails were always crucial; now? Yep, still crucial. Code review, linting, a good test suite, and did I mention code review?

With guardrails you can let agents run wild in a PR and only merge when things are up to scratch.

To enforce good guardrails, configure your repos so merging triggers a deploy. “Merging is deploying” discourages rushed merges while decreasing the time from writing code to seeing it deployed. Win win!
by noduerme | 2025-06-12 06:28:07+00:00
Just to play devil's advocate here... I'm about as extreme a privacy absolutist as you can find. But given that we're all on camera all the time in public spaces, like it or not, I don't consider tracking on digital billboards to be inherently evil. It could be used for evil (like - an authoritarian government tracking who looks at a billboard for an opposition political leader, for instance). But it could just be innocent data gathering. If you ran a plumbing business and paid $10k for a billboard, wouldn't you want to know if it was worth it or not? It's not as if decades of focus groups and hand-wavey feelings about what is or isn't effective advertising didn't already steer us into a society entirely dominated by big loud ads everywhere.

People who make products and sell services need to advertise. They in turn pay taxes. The many layers of parasitism in the advertising world historically relied on conning these people and taking their money in exchange for an unprovable proposition, namely that if you run this ad we tell you to run, right here, your sales will go up - but we'll never be able to actually tell you for sure by how much, or whether it was a good deal for you. From that perspective, more and better viewership data helps undermine the advertising bullshit machine and close the gap between people who run businesses and the people they're trying to sell their services to.
by psalaun | 2025-06-12 06:29:50+00:00
You completely ignore the point of my metaphor. Do you have enough trees to build the brig to reach these resources?

If we deplete our oil stocks (even non-conventional) before discovering the multiple replacements we'd need at large scale for logistics, electronics, hardware, healthcare, heavy vehicles and tools, etc. we won't get anywhere close your solar system matter. Maybe we should have rationed it 70 years ago, to give us more time to research the next breakthrough, instead of investing in all the modern life shenanigans like buying dozens of $5 pieces of clothes from Shein or Temu because it make us feel good in the schoolyard or on Instagram. The "trust the science bro, if it's possible we'll make it, let the human genius do its thing" is dangerous.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-12 06:30:25+00:00
> Both TSMC and Jim Beam already have to amortize their production equipment over several years. I'm not arguing that this should be changed. This is because the primary risk taken in a distillery build-out or a fab build-out is if there is market demand for a known product. It's primarily a *business* risk, not a *research* risk.

It is interesting that you think building a new state-of-the-art fab isn't a combination of both business and research risk. As I understand, the first X months (up to 2 years) of a fab's life is spent increasing yields. On day one, your semiconductor yields from manuf'd silicon wafers might be completely loss making. I have no idea how TSMC handles this tension between business and research risk when building a new fab. I am sure there is an army of tax lawyers who argue about how to categorize these expenses.
by bdbenton | 2025-06-12 06:31:19+00:00
It's a controversial observation, but it is very true. I work with AI models and have to read recently published research to work with the latest developments in the field.

Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject. So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility. Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just to have a paper to publish.

Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of published research does not push any boundaries or discover anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.

I would argue that a lot of the research published in the social sciences also falls under this category. It is there so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this point even further.
by protocolture | 2025-06-12 06:31:42+00:00
I dont know about a great firewall, but it certainly needs parallel services.

The problem I have is 2 fold.

1. We need more distributed services and less reliance on that silly country full of absolute dunderheads I am not allowed to be mean to on this service.

2. We ALSO need to safeguard freedom of communication BETWEEN countries, lest a series of bad events leads to a bunch of countries going permanently dark.

The BGP bomb isnt frightening because you might be left without root service nodes, its frightening because there are people in other countries we get great value out of communicating with.
by zeech | 2025-06-12 06:32:13+00:00
GrapheneOS only supports Pixels due to their having superior security features [0]. Calyx supports Pixels as well as some newer Motos and the Fairphone 4 and 5 [1]. Lineage supports tons of devices [2].

LineageOS is the only one of the three that supports older hardware, but I'd recommend getting a previous-gen Pixel for the seven-year (at least) support cycle.

[0] https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

[1] https://calyxos.org/docs/guide/device-support/

[2] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
by drabbiticus | 2025-06-12 06:33:22+00:00
From https://www.neh.gov/article/honest-fault

> In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault.

> The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”

> Another obvious victim of Pepys’s sexual involvements beyond his household was his wife. In 1665, he had married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel, the daughter of a French immigrant. Loveman describes the marriage as a “love match, albeit a tempestuous one.” The diary records the couple’s arguments over Pepys’s infidelities, and there were other tensions in the marriage. In an especially heated quarrel over Elizabeth’s management of the household, Pepys gave her a black eye.

> The full record of Pepys’s mistreatment of women is too extensive to detail here. That grim record could fill a book—and, in fact, it has. In The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys, author Geoffrey Pimm explores Pepys’s predations at length, drawing on the diarist’s own accounts of his misdeeds to build the case against him. Pepys, writes Pimm, “faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts.”
by geysersam | 2025-06-12 06:34:08+00:00
What is even an "accurate model of the world" in this context? Isn't it all just perception and impression and interpretation?

For example, a depressed person might think: "this company is shit and will go under in 6 months because my coworkers and management are so incompetent and malicious"

Let's say their prediction was true. Good job!

What if the depressed person missed that there were a couple of people at the office who actually were not incompetent and malicious, maybe people they would enjoy to get to know. What if there were opportunities to learn interesting things while the company crashed and burned.

To determine what worldview is most realistic you have to weigh what aspects of reality are most significant.
by noduerme | 2025-06-12 06:34:39+00:00
I pretty much only use computers to create. If I want to consume, I use a phone or something. I don't consume much.

So, like, if I boot up my Air from 2009, it's to write AS3 code and make a demo or something. If I boot up the one from 2015, it's probably because I want to use the Eclipse dev environment I was using then for a specific task. Both those things will simply not run if I upgrade the OS.

And not everything you didn't create is untrusted. I trust certain devs and ensure that if I install something, it is safe.

But it's much more valuable to me to have a snapshot in time of my own dev environments than it would be to have a piece of old hardware running a newer system. The hardware is barely worth anything. The state of the machine as it was, with all the software that was running perfectly on it at the time, is priceless.