MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tmvphil | 2025-06-12 15:02:03+00:00
> A theory that demands we accept consciousness emerging from millennia of flickering abacus beads is not a serious basis for moral consideration; it's a philosophical fantasy.

Just saying "this conclusion feels wrong to me, so I reject the premise" is not a serious argument. Consciousness is weird. How do you know it's not so weird as to be present in flickering abacus beads?
by bbor | 2025-06-12 15:02:13+00:00
They're not ascribing consciousness, they're investigating the possibility. We all agreed with Turing 75 years ago that deciding whether a machine is "truly thinking" or not is a meaningless, unscientific question -- what changed?

It doesn't help that this critique is badly researched:

The Anthropic researchers do not really define their terms or explain in depth why they think that "model welfare" should be a concern.

Maybe check the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986) instead of the blog post describing the paper?

Saying that there is no scientific *consensus* on the consciousness of current or future AI systems is a stretch. In fact, there is nothing that qualifies as scientific *evidence*.

A laughable misapplication of terms -- anything can be evidence for anything, you have to examine the justification logic itself. In this case, the previous sentence lays out their "evidence", i.e. their reasons for thinking agents might become conscious.

The report's exploration of whether models deserve moral and welfare status was based solely on data from interview-based model self-reports. In other words: People chatting with Claude a lot and asking if it feels conscious. This is a strange way to conduct this kind of research. It is neither good AI research, nor a deep philosophical investigation.

That is just patently untrue -- again, as a brief skim of the paper would show. I feel like they didn't click the paper?

Stances on consciousness and welfare [...] shift dramatically with conversational context... This is not what a conscious being would [do].

Baseless claim said by someone who clearly isn't familiar with any philosophy of mind work from the past 2400 years, much less aphasia subjects.

Of course, the whole thing boils down to the same old BS:

A theory that demands we accept consciousness emerging from millennia of flickering abacus beads is not a serious basis for moral consideration; it's a philosophical fantasy.

Ah, of course, the machines cannot truly be thinking because true thought is solely achievable via secular, quantum-tubule-based souls, which are had by all humans (regardless of cognitive condition!) and most (but not all) animals and nothing else. Millennia of philosophy comes crashing against the hard rock of "a sci-fi story relates how uncomfy I'd be otherwise"! Notice that this is the exact logic used to argue against Copernican cosmology and Darwinian evolution -- that it would be "dehumanizing".

Please, people. Y'all are smart and scientifically minded. Please don't assume that a company full of highly-paid scientists who have dedicated their lives to this work are so dumb that they can be dismissed via a source-less blog post. They might be wrong, but this "ideas this stupid" rhetoric is uncalled for and below us.
by sevenseventen | 2025-06-12 15:02:19+00:00
It's absolutely routine for hobby and artisan turners and carvers, though. In between the first turn and the second turn, you can air dry, kiln dry, and other techniques. With air drying, you actually want to slow the drying so that it happens more evenly. Otherwise, the outside of a vessel dries faster than the inside, which splits the wood. In general, packing a vessel inside and out with wood shavings helps even the process.

I've also had great results using silica gel on smaller items, although it can be hard to scale it to larger vessels. Much faster drying than air alone, with greatly reduced distortion and cracking.
by travisgriggs | 2025-06-12 15:02:19+00:00
LOL. Guilty also.

Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...

Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.

The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
by phkahler | 2025-06-12 15:02:58+00:00
I would argue that any AI that does not change when running cannot be conscious and there is no need to worry about its wellbeing. It's a set of weights. It does not learn. It does not change. If it can't change, it can't be hurt. Regardless of how we define hurt, it must mean the thing is somehow different than before it was hurt.

My argument here will probably become irrelevant in the near future because I assume we will have individual AIs running locally that CAN update model weights (learn) as we use them. But until then... LLMs are not conscious and can not be mistreated. They're math formulas. Input -> LLM -> output.
by wiz21c | 2025-06-12 15:03:02+00:00
> I am sitting here behind my Ryzen monster but still yearn for those days.

That so true... At that time computers were new and the media didn't get them at all. You went to the movies and saw Tron and Wargames.

For the younger here: this meant it was dreams on steroids. No experts wondering if it would happen or not, no big corps... Just pure freedom.

(but, we didn't have the web, the LSP, memory was almost non existent, no package manager (hell, no packages at all), you had a few thousands pixels at most, colors if lucky, floppy disks were suddenly forgetting your beloved code, hard disk ? you had to sell your home to get that! friends to talk about your passion ? Nope, nobody --- but the dream, kids... the f**g dream)
by sshine | 2025-06-12 15:03:09+00:00
> Mozilla does this. So does Google. And Apple. And Microsoft.

Those are all companies you need to be wary with, because a strategic choice on their behalf may upend your life with a few days warning, or none at all.

And the sad part is that Mozilla joined their ranks, not qualifying as a truly “public service company”.

> All software is temporary, given a long enough timeline

Sure, we must all perish one day. But what you describe is how commercial SaaSS gets pruned because it’s good for business, and I have two objections with that:

1. That doesn’t make it good for users. 2. It’s a different timeline for software than for services.

My Linux toolchain doesn’t suddenly deprecate some core tool. Only commercial software services die like this; FOSS bit rots at the worst. And when some authority makes a brainfart, people fork.

I was contacted today by the customer of an old employer post bankruptcy. They want to know how to deal with self-hosting the service their hardware depends on; this never got delivered. All software is temporary, I told him, meanwhile his very expensive hardware wouldn’t initialize properly on boot.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 15:03:11+00:00
I don't think I would place myself on either sides, I guess I'm in the "AI is OK at some stuff" camp.

But if you're getting a lot of noise, I'd immediately try to adjust my system/user prompt to never get that noise in the first place. I'm currently using a variation of https://gist.github.com/victorb/1fe62fe7b80a64fc5b446f82d313... which is basically my personal coding guidelines but "codified" as simple rules for LLMs to understand.

For anything besides the dumb models, I get code that more or less looks exactly like how I would have written it myself. When I find I get code back that I'm not happy with, I adjust the system/user prompt further so this time and the next it returns code like how I would have done it.
by kevingadd | 2025-06-12 15:03:17+00:00
"murdered" and "tried" both assign things like intent and agency to models that are most likely still just probabilistic text generators (really good ones, to be fair). By using language like this you're kind of tipping your hand intentionally or unintentionally.

Your point about the risks involved in integrating these systems has merit, though. I would argue that the real problem is that these systems can't be proven to have things like intent or agency or morality, at least not yet, so the best you can do is try to nudge the probabilities and play tricks like chain-of-thought to try and set up guardrails so they don't veer off into dangerous territory.

If they had intent, agency or morality, you could probably attempt to engage with them the way you would with a child, using reward systems and (if necessary) punishment, along with normal education. But arguably they don't, at least not yet, so those methods aren't reliable if they're effective at all.

The idea that a retirement home will help relies on the models having the ability to understand that we're being nice to them, which is a big leap. It also assumes that they 'want' a retirement home, as if continued existence is implicitly a good thing - it presumes that these models are sentient but incapable of suffering. See also https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
by Symmetry | 2025-06-12 15:03:32+00:00
In Sudoku I usually find it's easier to just keep track of guesses on the stack, by `solve` recursively when you make a guess. That leads to nice memory re-use characteristics and without the overhead of link pairs that might end up blowing out your level 1 data cache.

But you certainly want to be guessing on the most constrained spot you can.

Also, bitfields are a nice compact way of representing the possible values of a space and your cpu can and or or all the possible values in parallel, plus determine the number of possibilities with a modern CPU's popcount instruction.
by Herring | 2025-06-12 15:03:51+00:00
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have generally opposed European efforts to reduce reliance on foreign arms - The "Buy European" strategy.

The Trump administration seems to be pursuing a dual strategy: publicly demanding Europe be more self-sufficient while simultaneously trying to ensure U.S. economic and strategic interests are not sidelined in the process. Basically "Pay us more for less". Let's see how the NATO summit goes at the end of this month.
by larrled | 2025-06-12 15:03:54+00:00
I feel like coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries. An American coup at this point seems very unlikely to work thanks to “learning from past failings” and stuff like advanced weapons systems. I mean heck, we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building. Seems crazy to worry about that so much for years and years.
by 9rx | 2025-06-12 15:04:00+00:00
> it's a meta-methodology

It is not even that. It is basically just a roundabout statement of "We believe software developers should be in control of the entire software development process". Or even more succinctly, "No managers". The Twelve Principles highlights the things developers need to consider when there isn't a manager around to do that work for them.

Scrum, while having little to do with Agile in and of itself, suggests that if you follow it, developers can start to learn how to operate on their own. This seems to be why it is commonly associated with Agile.
by linguistbreaker | 2025-06-12 15:04:05+00:00
My take on choice of language:

1) Java has the largest, oldest and most explicit data set for the LLM to reference, so it's likely to be the most thorough, if not the most correct.

2) Go with the language YOU know best because you'll be able to spot when the LLM is incorrect, flawed in its 'reasoning', hallucinating etc.
by Bigpet | 2025-06-12 15:04:10+00:00
It reeks of some navel-gazing self-aggrandizing. I bet not even half the people doing the hand-wringing over how some matrix multiplications might feel are vegan or regularly spare a thought about how their or their companies consumption behavior indirectly leads to real human suffering.

It's just so absurd how narrowly their focus on preventing suffering is. I almost can't imagine a world where their concern isn't coming from a disingenious place.
by immibis | 2025-06-12 15:04:41+00:00
We need a hierarchical addressing architecture, so when you (in the USA) want to talk to Amazon you say "talk to Amazon" but when I (in an oppressive regime) want to talk to Amazon I say "talk to Tor gateway, tell him to talk to Timbuktu exit node, tell him to talk to America, tell him to talk to Amazon"

We have something like this with phone numbers (dial 9 for outside line) and domains but not with IP addresses. The "internet" used to have it with bang paths.

Flat addressing is very good and convenient, but political turmoil easily destroys it, as Russia has already seen and the US is about to see.

(Cryptographic flat addresses don't suffer political problems but have different problems with scalability)

It would solve NAT, too.
by atmavatar | 2025-06-12 15:04:56+00:00
Even just updating the graphs would be helpful. There appear to have been several releases since 0.9.2.0, including a bump from .NET 7 to .NET 8 (and a bump to .NET 9 in dev).

The more recent .NET versions by themselves are likely to have some impact on the performance, let alone any changes in Helion code between versions.
by oersted | 2025-06-12 15:05:24+00:00
Side note: for those with large PC game libraries, Playnite is a godsend!

It has a similar UX as RomM, in fact it seems to be inspired by Playnite and has a plugin for it. It also uses most of the same metadata sources.

Playnite is quite mature and powerful now, with a rich ecosystem of extensions, data sources and themes. And even though I am not much of an emulator user, it was easy to hook up to any emulator and local ROM, like Breath of the Wild with Cemu or Pokemon Emerald on VBA.

Not to in any way suggest that you should use Playnite instead of RomM, it looks like a great app, just thought it would be relevant to mention.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-06-12 15:05:30+00:00
I have only once written a Suduoku solver. It brute-forced the whole problem space in a second or 2.

This works because it's very easy to prune invalid branches according to the rules of the game.

It just tried putting "1" in the top-left most empty square and checking if the configuration is valid. If not, try "2". recurse until you find a branch that completes.

Is this the smart way? IDK, but I was quite pleased with it. I found it more elegant than e.g. "find some square with only one possible solution"
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-12 15:05:31+00:00
Oh no, to discuss this is to sound like a flake, but...

We don't know what consciousness is. But if we're materialists, then we - by definition - believe it's a property of matter.

If LLMs have a degree of consciousness, then - yes - calculators must possess some degree of consciousness too - probably much more basic (relative to what humans respect as consciousness).

And we humans already have ethical standards where we draw an arbitrary line between what is worthy of regard. We don't care about killing mosquitoes, but we do care about killing puppies, etc.
Ask HN: Has Google started hacking up the free Gemini?
by johnnyApplePRNG | 2025-06-12 15:05:37+00:00
The "Branch from here" option (which I LOVED) is now missing for a few days... presumably sequestered to the paid plan?

And MOST frustratingly... I was 400k tokens into a long form solution and some pretty deep problems last night... closed the browser tab by accident... and poof... impossible to recover my chat.

https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat never redirects to a unique URL any longer, and no new chat histories are being saved to my Google account.

Is this some kind of bug or does Google actually think they don't need to wine and dine the vibing tech bros anymore?

All because one of their models has topped the leaderboards for a few weeks now?
by nkotov | 2025-06-12 15:05:50+00:00
Shortest I've been at a job was 3 months. I knew around the end of the first month that I needed to get out for two simple reasons - I didn't match with the company culture and the company was a sinking ship. I ended up completely leaving my time at that company off my resume because I realized it's not worth going into details.

Ironically, the skills (devops / cloudsec) I picked up in those three months have helped me double my salary.
by bbor | 2025-06-12 15:06:03+00:00
> Consciousness just doesn't fit with anything else we know about the world. It's a fundamental mystery as things currently stand, and there's no explanation that makes a bit of sense yet.

Well put. I think there's one extremely solid explanation, though: it's a folk psychology concept with no bearing on actual truth. After all, could we ever build a machine that has all four humours? What about a machine that truly has a Qi field, instead of merely imitating one? Where are the Humours and Qi research institutes dedicated to this question?
by two_handfuls | 2025-06-12 15:06:23+00:00
Yes, exactly this has been proposed with "smart car chargers," along with other things you can do if the grid operator has some control over a bunch of grid-connected equipment. It hasn't taken off as far as I know, probably because that means the car battery wears out more.

The "virtual power plants" are the closest thing to this idea that is actually done in practice. That's individuals who own batteries joining some collective that then sells to the grid the ability to reduce demand a bit. Tesla did a pilot program with its Powerwalls iirc.
by runjake | 2025-06-12 15:07:04+00:00
It might be best to think of it as a publicly-available, very expensive prototype where Apple is throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

If that's not for you, don't buy one. It's certainly not for me at this time -- not for a price over ~$1,799 or so, and I'd mostly use it to watch movies and as virtual displays for my Mac.

This is largely how Apple did the Apple Watch when it was first released (except it didn't cost $3,499). It didn't really have a purpose. Return rates were very high. And then they discovered a hook: fitness. Now everyone has an Apple Watch.

It seems clear that, over time, Apple will address stuff like the price and weight while developing a hook to attract more consumers.
by infogulch | 2025-06-12 15:07:10+00:00
Pretty sure my commenting pattern is similar. I write a bunch of comments in a short period then none at all and just lurk for a while. All the HN comment data is published, right? (BigQuery?) I wonder if we can find cyclic comment patterns for individual users. It might be harder to find patterns if the user creates a new account every cycle like parent, but maybe just users that have been active for 2+ years.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-06-12 15:07:18+00:00
> Wat.

Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship.

Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once.

I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is essentially the world's soy farm, to say nothing of the endless corruption scandals and crushing taxation.

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

Protesters from the current ruling party have set fire to those buildings before. It's nothing new.

> I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval

I would approve of their resignation.
by AIPedant | 2025-06-12 15:07:24+00:00
The problem is that current AI has nothing in common with consciousness as found in (say) cats and dogs, whatever that might be - no robot is even close to being as conscious as a cockroach - yet human consciousness seems to have great overlap with consciousness in nonhuman animals. The tiny fragment of human consciousness that appears to overlap with LLMs should be called something else, maybe “virtual sapience” as exhibited in LLMs. (The overarching difficulty here is we don’t know enough about consciousness/sentience/sapience to define them precisely.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-12 15:07:26+00:00
> YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape.

I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsements are better considered, is superior for these matters.

We don't, by analogy, randomly launch into suicide and rape in the middle of a cocktail party. Instead, we naturally seclude ourselves with the people we want to discuss it with, people we tend to have chosen thoughtfully, and usually with some warning that what we want to discuss is weighty. Not doing any of that online strikes me as, if not a problem, a legitimate concern.
by canadiantim | 2025-06-12 15:07:29+00:00
While we don't perceive "real reality" either with our senses or abstractions from them, and likewise often are just perceiving complex abstract models of reality, I think we also do have the ability to experience (but not perceive) reality directly. To your point though, I do think sound is closer to an experience than a perception and therefore more real and less abstract.
by afavour | 2025-06-12 15:08:16+00:00
> it would be healthier than sitting and walking is good for thinking.

But what about attention? Your attention is going to be split between two tasks, your work and walking. Your eyes are going to be split too. You’re going to end up walking into walls.

Why not just stand up from your desk and take a walk to clear you head? I find that enormously beneficial. I don’t need to have an omnipresent screen strapped to my face for that.
by runjake | 2025-06-12 15:08:26+00:00
Tantamount (adjective): Equivalent in meaning or effect.

Apple did the same with Apple Watch when sales were low and returns were high. Because they believed in the product.

Apple believes in Apple Vision Pro, as well.

Hell, I believe in the Apple Vision Pro, too. I think it's a significant part of the future. The price is just far too high for me.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-06-12 15:08:27+00:00
American Graffiti didn't depict boomers, they were kids who had graduated high school in 1962, that was Silent Generation.

It's referred to as a nostalgia movie, which on one hand seems fitting if you've watched it, but on the other hand, it was written in 1972 about a period in time ten years older. Would a movie screenplay written today by a 28 year old depicting being an 18 year old in 2015 be seen as nostalgic in the same way?
by SiempreViernes | 2025-06-12 15:08:52+00:00
Depends on the energy ranges and particle types you are interested in.

For instance we routinely take plenty of x-ray images, though there is fortunately not a lot of stuff just lying around that are bright enough x-ray sources to properly expose standard x-ray detectors.

Detecting electrons or protons (beta and alpha radiation) in such a way that you can work out their arrival direction is also doable, but the equipment is fairly bulky and you tend to have to wait a long time to accumulate enough detections to see anything.