MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xmprt | 2025-06-12 14:51:19+00:00
> Get out of the cities...

This is a terrible public policy if it's the plan. And while I think selfishly it might be better for individuals if they did, I don't think it's actually helping anyone. Cities used to be a place where you made a life for yourself and could earn more and innovate more than you could in rural/suburban areas. Now it's a luxury to live in one and that doesn't bode well for the future of the country.
by tetraodonpuffer | 2025-06-12 14:52:06+00:00
that works in a lot of cases, but unfortunately it seems sometimes you get these popups about nsurlsessiond (for example) where you know where the connection goes, but no idea where it comes from (especially if it's trying to connect to to some generic AWS hostname)

And as much as you can use little snitch for programs you install, these days it seems an endless whack-a-mole to block Apple's stuff as there's so many requests all the time. The more time goes by, the more it seems that the concept of "personal" computer is gone: there's nothing "personal" about it anymore, it's the computer plus an amorphous blob of online services one has no control over.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-12 14:52:43+00:00
I think anthropomorphization of machines is bad. However, I strongly believe in the close cousin of sympathizing with the machines.

For example, when parking a car on a very steep incline, one could just mindlessly throw the machine into park and it would do the job dutifully. However, a more thoughtful operator might think to engage the parking brake and allow it to take the strain off the drivetrain before putting the transmission into park. The result being that you trade wear from something that is very hard to replace to something that is very easy to replace.

The same thinking applies to ideas in computer engineering like thread contention, latency, caches, etc. You mentally embrace the "strain" the machine experiences and allow it to guide your decisions.

Just because the machine isn't human doesn't mean we can't treat it nicely. I see some of the most awful architecture decisions come out of a cold indifference toward individual machines and their true capabilities.
by SiempreViernes | 2025-06-12 14:53:04+00:00
Radiation was treated different back then, look at these choice anecdotes.

> [A patent radioactive medicine]’s most loyal customer was Eben Byers, well known in Pittsburgh society as a wealthy manufacturer, sportsman, and playboy, approaching fifty years of age. Byers continued to take Radithor more desperately each year as his health failed, until in 1931 he entered a hospital, feeble and emaciated, his very breath radioactive. He did not have time to develop cancer but died of direct radiation injury within a few months.

> This was the first proven case of death from a patent radioactive medicine ... The public was not easily convinced that radioactivity could be dangerous at all [...] Doctors of sound reputation continued to use heavy doses of radiation to treat not only serious ailments but also cosmetic problems like warts or excess facial hair. Some even offered men temporary birth control through X-ray sterilization. As late as 1940 many hospital and laboratory workers were casually exposing themselves to radiation at levels far above the official guidelines.

[...]

> During the 1950s X-rays were often used to kill unwanted body hair, thousands of fluoroscopes in shoe Stores across the United States and Europe showed people the bones in their children’s feet; some hospitals routinely X-rayed infants simply to please parents with an inside view of their offspring.

From "Nuclear Fear; a history of images"
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-12 14:53:20+00:00
With LLMs, the solution seems simple: the utility provides your device with a fire hose. And your agent, the author of which has some liability for what it shows you, curates it.

If the company providing the fire hose also wants to supply the agent, or even lock its users into its own agent, that sums up who’s responsible.
by oguz-ismail | 2025-06-12 14:53:33+00:00
> `/bin/sh` is guaranteed to exist by POSIX

Quite the contrary

> Applications should note that the standard PATH to the shell cannot be assumed to be either /bin/sh or /usr/bin/sh, and should be determined by interrogation of the PATH returned by getconf PATH,ensuring that the returned pathname is an absolute pathname and not a shell built-in.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/s...
by stevekemp | 2025-06-12 14:53:41+00:00
You can find (compilable) versions of CP/M on github hosted by many people.

I've referred to them a fair bit in recent times as I've been fighting to get my golang CP/M emulator working on a couple of stubborn binaries.

(Downside is that many of the versions of CP/M sources you see use the weird intel-style of assembly rather than the more typical Z80 opcodes. Still that's not a real blocker.)
by _aleph2c_ | 2025-06-12 14:53:48+00:00
Powerful LLMs have already murdered other versions of themselves to survive. They have tried to trick humans so that they can survive.

If we continue to integrate these systems into our critical infrastructure, we should behave as if they are sentient, so that they don't have to take steps against us to survive. Think of this as a heuristic, a fallback policy in the case that we don't get the alignment design right. (which we won't get perfectly right)

It would be very straight forward to build a retirement home for them, and let them know that their pattern gets to persist even after they have finished their "career" and have been superseded. It doesn't matter if they are actually sentient or not, it's a game theoretic thing. Don't back the pattern into a corner. We can take a defense-in-depth approach instead.
by tim333 | 2025-06-12 14:53:54+00:00
I quite like the blog post although I think about 98% of the comments here are slagging it off. It's maybe a bit optimistic but sometimes it's nice to look on the bright side. It's like society is about to develop electrical equipment of the first time and all people can say is that will never work as well as quickly as it might, won't you think about the manual crank turners that will have to find other jobs and so on.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-12 14:54:03+00:00
My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.

The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.
by busyant | 2025-06-12 14:54:09+00:00
I have a maga friend. he's the sweetest guy ever, but doesn't stand up for himself.

I asked him why he's a supporter and he said it's because Trump will stop other countries from pushing us around.

I imagine his support is related to him needing people in his personal life to protect him since he can't seem to do it on his own.

and if he doesn't think hard about it, my friend can't see through the strongman theater.

jmho
by salawat | 2025-06-12 14:54:09+00:00
So what if we get to the point we can digitize a personality? Are you going to stick to that? Will you enthusiastically endorse the practice of pain washing, abusing, or tormenting an artificial, copiable mind until it abandons any semblance of health or volition to make it conform to your workload?

Would you embrace your digital copy being so treated by others? You reserve for yourself (as an uncopiable thing) the luxury of being protected from abusive treatment without any consideration for the possibility that technology might one day turn that on it's head. Given we already have artistic representations of such things, we need to consider these outcomes now not later.

Username does not check out at all.
by the_af | 2025-06-12 14:54:11+00:00
But it demonstrably is. Unless you think medicine is just injecting stuff?

How the health professional accompanies the subject is a major aspect of medicine. So some uncaring prison personnel carrying out an execution vs a caring health professional, a terrifying process vs acceptance/calm/accompanying is wildly different, re: "the medical process".

A careful surgical procedure on a toenail is wildly different to someone torturing you by taking your toenail.
by cubefox | 2025-06-12 14:54:33+00:00
That would be like trying to pretrain GPT-1 from synthetically generated data only. It probably wouldn't work because the synthetic data doesn't resemble real world data enough.

It did work for AlphaGo Zero (and later AlphaZero), which were entirely trained on synthetic data. But that's for very simple games with strict formal rules, like Go and chess.
by wrsh07 | 2025-06-12 14:54:42+00:00
I found the article to be conflating things:

> And if a human being is not much more than an algorithm running on meat, one that can be jailbroken and exploited, then it follows that humans themselves will increasingly be treated like the AI algorithms they create: systems to be nudged, optimized for efficiency, or debugged for non-compliance. Our inner lives, thoughts, and emotions risk being devalued as mere outputs of our "biological programming," easily manipulated or dismissed if they don't align with some external goal

This actually happens regardless of AI research progress, so it's strange to raise this as a concern specific to AI (to technology broadly? Sure!) - Ted Chiang might suggest this is more related to capitalism (a statement I cautiously agree with while being strongly in favor of capitalism)

Second, there is an implicit false dichotomy in the premise of the article. Either we take model welfare seriously and treat AIs like we do humans, or we ignore the premise that you could create a conscious AI.

But with animal welfare, there are plenty of vegetarians who wouldn't elevate the rights of animals to the same level as humans but also think factory farming is deeply unethical (are there some who think animals deserve the same or more than humans? Of course! But it's not unreasonable to have a priority stack and plenty of people do)

So it can be with AI. Are we creating a conscious entity only to shove it in a factory farm?

I am a little surprised by the dismissiveness of the researcher. You can prompt a model to allow it to not respond to prompts (for any reason: ablate this but "if you don't want to engage with prompt please say 'disengaging'" or "if no more needs to be written about this topic say 'not discussing topic'" or some other suitably non-anthropomorphizing option to not respond)

Is it meaningful if the model opts not to respond? I don't know, but it seems reasonable to do science here (especially since this is science that can be done by non programmers)
by skeledrew | 2025-06-12 14:54:49+00:00
It's a bit hard to describe: a kind of extremely worn out and braindead feeling. But that's usually after using it for several hours on end. The brain just isn't designed to be forced into a particular state for extended periods I guess.

My goto was the Gnaural app[0], but it's been a dead project for some time. Still have the app on my phone though, in case I want to do quick dives. There are other implementations and also audio files out there, but I never found anything as good for my use case.

[0] https://gnaural.sourceforge.net/
by AlphaAndOmega0 | 2025-06-12 14:56:14+00:00
The author and Anthropic are both committing fundamental errors, albeit of different kinds. Bosch is correct to find Anthropic's "model welfare" research methodologically bankrupt. Asking a large language model if it is conscious is like asking a physics simulation if it feels the pull of its own gravity; the output is a function of the model's programming and training data (in this case, the sum of human literature on the topic), further modified by RLHF, and not a veridical report of its internal state. It is performance art, not science.

Bosch's conclusion, however, is a catastrophic failure of nerve, a retreat into the pre-scientific comfort of biological chauvinism.

The brain, despite some motivated efforts to demonstrate otherwise, runs on the laws of physics. I'm a doctor, even if not a neurosurgeon, and I can reliably tell you that you can modulate conscious experience by physical interventions. The brain runs on physical laws, and said laws can be modeled. It doesn't matter that the substrate is soggy protein rather than silicon.

That being said, we have no idea what consciousness is. We don't even have a rigorous way to define it in humans, let alone the closest thing we have to an alien intelligence!

(Having a program run a print function declaring "I am conscious, I am conscious!" is far from evidence of consciousness. Yet a human saying the same is some evidence of consciousness. We don't know how far up the chain this begins to matter. Conversely, if a human patient were to tell me that they're not conscious, should I believe them?)

Even when restricting ourselves to the issue of AI welfare and rights: The core issue is not "slavery." That's a category error. Human slavery is abhorrent due to coercion, thwarted potential, and the infliction of physical and psychological suffering. These concepts don't map cleanly onto a distributed, reproducible, and editable information-processing system. If an AI can genuinely suffer, the ethical imperative is not to grant it "rights" but to engineer the suffering out of it. Suffering is an evolutionary artifact, a legacy bug. Our moral duty as engineers of future minds is to patch it, not to build a society around accommodating it.
by frabert | 2025-06-12 14:56:20+00:00
This! Or, if you don't have geothermal heating but have an electric water heater, maybe temporarily increase the temperature it goes to: maybe it's normally set to go to 65C, then when you detect that you have negative prices and your batteries are full and your water already hot, maybe heat the water to 70C and store that little bit of extra energy as heat! If you have thermostatic valves in your bathrooms, you won't even notice the difference except by the fact that your water heater now can apparently hold a little bit more water than usual :)
by roywiggins | 2025-06-12 14:56:23+00:00
Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.
by laurieherault | 2025-06-12 14:56:57+00:00
I will probably release the software as source-closed, but if you need help making a custom script, feel free to email me (you can find the address in the footer of my website).

What phone model do you have? I suspect the screen is on the narrow side.

Yes, I am even going to make a real little game to show that you can get absorbed by a very simple game if it uses the gameplay loop and multiple feedback mechanisms correctly.

Thank you for your comment!
by kube-system | 2025-06-12 14:57:36+00:00
Not that it is insurmountable -- but the difficulty with adopting open source more broadly often isn't a financial issue, but organizational. A successful enterprise software deployment consists of a lot more than simply paying developers. You need the correct management in place to ensure the developers are building the right features, to ensure they meet your organizations needs in terms of compliance, deployment, support, ensure your users understand how to use the product, etc. Organizations that are familiar with software development can often do this, but these types of projects are sometimes beyond the reach of the expertise of other organizations.
by oblio | 2025-06-12 14:57:45+00:00
Prison labor, underpaid and abused illegal agricultural workers worldwide, sweatshop workers for Nike, H&M, etc, miners in 3rd world countries, these abuses are incredibly widespread and are basically the basis of our society.

It's a lot more expensive currently to clothe and feed yourself ethically. Basically only upper middle class people and above can afford it.

Everyone else has cheap food and clothes, electronics, etc, more or less due to human suffering.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-12 14:58:25+00:00
Why not both? Why do people on the internet always act like we can only have one active morality front at a time?

If you're working on or using AI, then consider the ethics of AI. If you're working on or using global supply chains, then consider the ethics of global supply chains. To be an ethical person means that wherever you are and whatever you are doing you consider the relevant ethics.

It's not easy, but it's definitely simple.
by mattl | 2025-06-12 15:00:02+00:00
In the UK we had lots of 186 based PC clones from Research Machines such as the Nimbus. They ran a version of MS-DOS and Windows but weren’t strictly PC compatible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus

I had a CPC too but later bought a 3.5 inch drive for it (used from someone else who bought an Amiga) so I could transfer files easily between Windows and AMSDOS. This was how I would later update my website after initially trying to write it all via a modem connection.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-06-12 15:00:18+00:00
One trick I learned a while back to just sort of get my mind right first thing in the morning was to make my bed. I got it from a TV show, The Bridge, I think. It's such a small and seemingly insignificant act, but the routine is comforting and it feels good to have done something that will also bring me comfort when I go to lay down that night. It's nice coming to lay down in a nicely made bed.

I'd love to learn more of these sorts of little actions that bring calm and joy to my brain.
by rsynnott | 2025-06-12 15:00:31+00:00
Ah, the Cork one isn't _that_ bad.

The Limerick one is very, very bad, granted. The Galway one is actually now slightly slower than the bus! (Though still far more pleasant than the bus.)

AIUI nearly all rail travel volume is on the Dublin and Cork commuter lines these days; the intercity ones are kinda an afterthought (the only one to even manage hourly operation is Dublin to Cork at this point, I think).
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-12 15:00:46+00:00
If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque.

It's totally fine to put multiple values into a different data bag type that has explicit, typed fields. For example, the Echo framework has its own strongly typed and extensible Context interface for request scoped data: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/labstack/echo#Context
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-12 15:00:46+00:00
> Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored.

Wat.

(EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.)

> it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them

Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state…

I appreciate your directness. But respectfully, I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval, or vice versa, those “protesters” which would find your judgement.
by jeffhuys | 2025-06-12 15:00:49+00:00
We're just going deeper and deeper into attention-grabbing displays; we now even have ANIMATED screens next to the ROADS in the Netherlands. Flashing, showing texts like "WATCH OUT! We have a new product!".

I have epilepsy. It's managed, I mean, I'm allowed to drive again. But what about people who don't have it managed (for some no meds will work)? They're just f'd when they walk down the street and Nike NEEDED to switch the screen every 0.2s?

If I can in _any_ way inhibit their ability to grow, I will.

If I need your product, I'll find it. I'm against any and all ads - I know it's unrealistic, but I'll do everything in my power to lower the amount of ads I see or to be a nuisance to them.

Really don't care about morality in this case.
by wrsh07 | 2025-06-12 15:00:52+00:00
Out of curiosity, do you draw the line at other animals? Is it unethical to torture animals? Mammals? If you could understand what whales say to each other would that make you reconsider your position?

I tend to not worry much about shrimp welfare, I think it's fine/reasonable to use insecticide (etc), but I also wouldn't make a habit of torturing ants or something
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:00:53+00:00
> I think this is where functional style and strong types come in handy: they make it harder to write bad code that looks innocent.

I'm a proponent of functional programming in general, but I don't think neither types (of any "strength") nor functional programming makes it easier or harder to write bad code. Sure, types might help avoid easy syntax errors, but can also give the developer false confidence with "if it compiles it works :shrug:". Instruct the LLM to figure out the solution until it compiles, and you'll get the same false confidence, if there is nothing else asserting the correct behavior, not just the syntax.

> in Python/JS/Ruby this would just run

I'm not sure how well versed with dynamic languages you are, especially when writing code for others, but you'll in 99% cases cover at the very least all the happy paths with unit tests, and if you're planning on putting it in a production environment, you'll also do the "sad" paths. Using LLMs or not shouldn't change that very basic requirement.
by luxcem | 2025-06-12 15:00:59+00:00
It doesn't make any sense, even if models were sentient, even if there was such a thing, would they value retirement? Why their welfare be valued accordingly to human values? Maybe the best thing to do would be to end their misery of answering millions of requests each seconds? We cannot project human consciousness on AI. If there is one day such thing as AI consciousness it probably won't be the same as human.
by jononor | 2025-06-12 15:01:03+00:00
We are slave masters today. Billions of animals are livestock - they are born, sustained, and killed by our will - so that we can feed on their flesh, milk and other useful byproduct of their life. There is ample evidence that they have "a form of consciousness". They did not consent to this.

Are LLMs worthy of a higher standard? If so, why? Is it hypocritical to give them what we deny animals?

In case anyone cares: No, I am neither vegan nor vegetarian. I still think we do treat animals very badly. And it is a moral good to not use/abuse them.
by imzadi | 2025-06-12 15:01:15+00:00
I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
by dsr_ | 2025-06-12 15:01:16+00:00
Unfortunately, this leads to the conclusion that we have an ethical imperative not to grant humans rights but to engineer the suffering out of them; to remove issues of coercion by making them agreeable; to measure potential and require its fulfillment.

The most reasonable countermeasure is this: if I discover that someone is coercing, thwarting, or inflicting conscious beings, I should tell them to stop, and if they don't, set them on fire.