MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bodhi | 2025-06-19 23:09:21+00:00
I’ll preface with IANACL, but you seem to be making a moral argument yourself about A), that it is not reasonable.

You have, I assume, a licensed copy of Harry Potter. That license restricts you from doing certain activities, like making (distributing? Lets go with distributing) derived works. Your models are derived works. Thus when you distribute your models, you’re violating the licence terms you “agreed” to when you acquired your copy of Harry Potter.

This is no judgement by me about whether that’s reasonable or not, just my understanding of the mechanics.
by interstice | 2025-06-19 23:09:38+00:00
As stated too vague to be interpretable, I agree. The theory isn't novel either, it's well known that easier to use = less engaged, What's less clear but still somewhat well discussed is semi automated = lower quality & more mistakes.

In future I wouldn't mind doing both, since I could be driving and a passenger in multiple contexts with less overhead. Currently attempting to work this way is painful due to the aformentioned switching.
by foxmoder | 2025-06-19 23:09:54+00:00
From my understanding, it's unlikely.

Many transgender women pre-HRT have very low testosterone levels. It's possible there's some causal arrow between being transgender and having autism, but to be frank much of it could come down to reporting bias, i.e. those with autism are more likely to not care as much about societal expectations and consequently are more likely to embrace being transgender publicly.

This could also be exacerbated by the fact that autism in cisgender women is widely believed to be dramatically underdiagnosed due to gendered societal expectations around behavior and diagnostic tests that only check for traditionally 'male' autistic traits/behaviors.

It's also the case that many individuals transition long after e.g. primary brain development ceases, so it's not particularly likely in my estimation that the body is trying to compensate for past development (given the developmental stage of life is complete).
by trenbologna | 2025-06-19 23:10:36+00:00
I used to be into bodybuilding and the best I ever felt was when I was high testosterone and high estrogen. When I was not taking any aromatase inhibitors I felt amazing, happy, loving, and emotional in a way I can't explain but I felt more connected with my wife. I feel like it was a little glimpse into the female mind. When I crashed my estrogen I felt psychotic. Very interesting experience
by wat10000 | 2025-06-19 23:13:10+00:00
I don’t think so. The fact that someone with extensive experience thinks modern C++ is safe because it has semaphores and mutexes and smart pointers is legitimately scary. It’s not merely wrong, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the problem even is. It’s like an engineer designing airliners saying that they can be perfectly safe without any redundant systems because they have good wheels. That should have you backing away slowly while asking which manufacturer they work for.
by Waterluvian | 2025-06-19 23:14:07+00:00
This got me thinking about something…

Isn’t an LLM basically a program that is impossible to virus scan and therefore can never be safely given access to any capable APIs?

For example: I’m a nice guy and spend billions on training LLMs. They’re amazing and free and I hand out the actual models for you all to use however you want. But I’ve trained it very heavily on a specific phrase or UUID or some other activation key being a signal to <do bad things, especially if it has console and maybe internet access>. And one day I can just leak that key into the world. Maybe it’s in spam, or on social media, etc.

How does the community detect that this exists in the model? Ie. How does the community virus scan the LLM for this behaviour?
by titanomachy | 2025-06-19 23:15:36+00:00
According to the Supreme Court, the difference is the “medical purpose” of the treatments. Presumably trans-identifying individuals can get the treatments if they meet the same criteria as cis-identifying ones (e.g. premature puberty). If they treated the sexes differently (e.g. those born male can get hormones for gender dysphoria, and those born female can’t) then it would be clear-cut discrimination.
by SuperNinKenDo | 2025-06-19 23:16:05+00:00
I am from Australia where China has flexed its trade leverage on a pretty much yearly basis against us as a collective, and has often tried to use our University systems supposed reliance on Chinese students to try and affect discourse in our Universities.

But even then, China doesn't stoop to the pathetic level of expending thus kind of soft-power on defending some third power that has managed to get it by the balls.
by khazhoux | 2025-06-19 23:16:09+00:00
I would love a link to anything that could convince me the Rationalist community isn't just a bunch of hoo-haw.

I read the first third of HPMOR. I stopped because I found the writing poor, but more importantly, it didn't "open my mind" to any higher-order way of rationalist thinking. My takeaway was "Yup, the original HP story was full of inconsistencies and stupidities, and you get a different story if the characters were actually smart."

I've read a bunch of EY essays and a lot of lesswrong posts, trying to figure out what is the mind-shattering idea.

* The map is not the territory --> of course it isn't.

* Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this? (with exception on religion)

* People are biased and we need to overcome that --> another obvious statement

* Make decisions based on evidence and towards your desired outcomes --> thanks for the tip?

Seems to me this whole philosophy can be captured in about half page of notes, which most people would nod and say "yup, makes sense."
by fluidcruft | 2025-06-19 23:17:03+00:00
If it contains the copyrighted material, copyright laws apply. Being able to produce the content demonstrates pretty conclusively that it contains the copyrighted material.

The only real question is whether it's possible to prevent the system from generating the copyrighted content.

A strange analogy would be some sort of magical BluRay that plays novel movies unless you enter the decryption key. And somehow you would have to prevent entering those keys.
by foxmoder | 2025-06-19 23:17:40+00:00
It's a good question! My personal experience (which mostly echoes those I've heard) is that it tends to be a lot more of a rush in some ways; I recall feeling a lot more alert in some ways, and a lot more eager to quickly make decisions/launch into things.

I get a somewhat similar sensation with enough caffeine now, but the experience of testosterone in my experience is a lot more of a head-rush than caffeine is for present me.

It's kind of neat, because at the end of HRT cycles as the levels shift, it lets me experience varying proportions of one versus the other--it honestly surprised me a lot to experience for the first time how much hormones play into what it's like to be in my head day-to-day.

Ooh, and re: the last question, it's possible that that's something that not everyone experiences--I will say though that that's probably the best way I have to describe what I felt, even though I wouldn't say I actively noticed a buzzing sensation before I started HRT (when my doses are late though, it's definitely something I pick up on).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-19 23:18:08+00:00
You don't have to tell me how oral histories are preserved. I've worked as an anthropologist and documented some. What I was asking is how you operationalize what is preserved to distinguish between the various competing hypotheses for the initial peopling of the Americas and which histories you're referencing.

I probably don't need to tell someone like you who's intimately familiar with them, but for others reading oral histories don't work like the literary histories we're all familiar with from textbooks. What's preserved has some fairly consistent modifications that take place on the journey from the top of the hourglass to the bottom of the hourglass and into deep time histories.

1) Events become omitted, repeated, or conflated to support the narrative purpose of the tradition

2) Elements of the narrative that support the narrative purpose are emphasized or modified to better suit that purpose, sometimes at the expense of modern ideas of historical accuracy

3) Elements from other narratives that support the narrative purpose may be incorporated, or supplant other elements within a tradition of parallel narratives.

4) Elements that are dramatic and narratively meaningful are the ones that survive

These are more or less basic knowledge by anyone working with deep time stories, but if you insist on an indigenous source here's a paper by Roger Echo-Hawk saying the same thing much more eloquently: https://doi.org/10.2307/2694059

So, to use these stories in academic work we typically have to find some way of matching the narrative echos of the real historical events to the things that are visible archaeologically. That's incredibly difficult beyond a few hundred years, and tends to center around dramatic events like natural disasters and geographic features. Well, we don't have many of those for the LGM. Past work has usually centered around identifying either "Dark World" motifs with Beringia Standstill populations (the BSH is incompatible with the White Sands timeline), or Diving Bird myths, which are shared with many Eurasian groups. I'm not aware of any feature of Diving Bird myths that would allow a timeline for the initial peopling, hence the question.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-19 23:19:36+00:00
Rather than a moral argument, I think they're more just disagreeing that the spirit behind copyright law is being violated in that case. So while yes, there may be a rule in there that you may have agreed to, they disagree that such a rule is within the spirit of the law, and may reckon that it should not be a part of it even if it presently is. Like they explicitly mention how they're reflecting on the idea behind it all, rather than producing a legal analysis.

Or at least that's how I read it. I'm sure GP will clarify shortly.
by cbarrick | 2025-06-19 23:20:07+00:00
Big +1 to dependency failure should be recoverable.

I was part of an outage caused by a fail-closed behavior on a dependency that wasn't actually used and was being turned down.

Dependencies among servers are almost always soft. Just return a 500 if you can't talk to your downstream dependency. Let your load balancer route around unhealthy servers.
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-06-19 23:20:07+00:00
Not only messed up, but I am guessing that there are either politics involved (personal gain, friends of friends, etc), or somebody paid somebody to push Kyber over NTRU. Which is difficult or impossible to prove, ESPECIALLY if that "person" is senator or "other". (Since I failed civics, I have no idea what forces are involved in something like this, but it all sounds really fishy).
by gjm11 | 2025-06-19 23:20:14+00:00
> That post came out a year later [...] multiple links showing how much the SMTM post was spreading through the rationalist community with little question.

The SMTM series started in July 2021 and finished in November 2021; there was also a paper, similar enough that I assume it's by the same people, from July 2021. The first of those "multiple links" is from July 2021, but the second is from January 2022 and the third from May 2022. The critical post is from June 2022. I agree it's a year later than something but I'm not seeing that the SMTM theory was "spreading ... with little question" a year before it.

The "multiple links" you mention -- the actual number is three -- are the two I mentioned before and a third that (my apologies!) I had somehow not noticed. That third one is at +74 karma, again much lower than the later critical post, and it doesn't endorse the lithium theory.

The one written by E.Y. is the second. Quite aside from the later disclaimer, it's hardly an uncritical endorsement: "you are still probably saying "Wait, lithium?" This is still mostly my own reaction, honestly." and "low-probability massive-high-value gamble".

What about the first post? That one's pretty positive, but to me it reads as "here's an interesting theory; it sounds plausible to me but I am not an expert" rather than "here's a theory that is probably right", still less "here's a theory that is definitely right".

The comments, likewise, don't look to me like lockstep uncritical acceptance. I see "here are some interesting experiments one could do to check this" and "something like this seems plausible but I bet the actual culprit is vegetable oils" and "something like this seems plausible but I bet the actual culprit is rising CO2 levels" and "I bet it's corn somehow" and "quite convincing but didn't really rule out the obvious rival hypothesis" and so forth; I don't think a single one of the comments is straightforwardly agreeing with the theory.

If you've found something Scott Alexander wrote about this then I'd be interested to see it. All I found was that (contrary to what you claimed above) it looks like ACX Grants declined to fund exploration of the lithium theory but included that proposal in a list of "interesting things we didn't fund".

So I'm just not seeing this lockstep thing you claim. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. The specific things you've cited don't seem like they support it: you said there was an ACX grant but there wasn't; you say the links in the intro to that critical post show the theory spreading with little question, but what they actually show is one person saying "here's an interesting theory but I'm not an expert", E.Y. saying "here's a theory that's probably wrong but worth looking into" (and later changing his mind), and another person saying "I put together some data that might be relevant"; in every case the comments are full of people not agreeing with the lithium theory.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-06-19 23:20:21+00:00
It's yet another argument, like many arguments against Kubernetes, that essentially boils down to "Kubernetes is complicated!"

No, deployment of a distributed system itself is complicated, regardless of the platform you deploy it on. Kubernetes is only "complicated" because it can do all of the things you need to do to deploy software, in a standard way. You can simplify by not using Kube, but then you have to hand roll all of the capabilities that Kube just gives you for free. If you don't need a good hunk of those capabilities, you probably don't need Kube.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-19 23:20:34+00:00
> It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.

Bring up the rationalist community within academic philosophy circles and you'll get a lot of groans.

The fun part about rationalists is that they like to go back to first principles and rediscover basics. The less fun part is that they'll ignore all of the existing work and pretend they're going to figure it all out themselves, often with weird results.

This leaves philosophy people endlessly frustrated as the rationalists write long essays about really basic philosophy concepts as if they're breaking new ground, while ignoring a lot of very interesting work that could have made the topic much more interesting to discuss.
by squircle | 2025-06-19 23:20:54+00:00
This feels significant. What if, without understanding how AI works, or even clearly understanding how cognition works, treating is at oracle or deity, or simply just a really weird calculator, theres a tendency to allow the LLM to reason for us, or else reinforce biases (and hence pathways?) My programming ability has certainly declined, but I am also thinking with scope, and with patterns more than in the past, solving work related problems more quickly. What to do with this extra energy is a wholenother matter. If I engage in other activities not requiring the computer, would this compensate for whatever the negative effect this loss of complexity entails?
by zzyzxd | 2025-06-19 23:21:00+00:00
But you are not talking about maintaining Kubernetes, you are talking about maintaining a CI/CD system, a secret management system, some automation to operate databases, and so on.

Instead of editing some YAML files, in the "old" days these software vendors would've asked you to maintain a cronjob, ansible playbooks, systemd unit, bash scripts...
by sunrunner | 2025-06-19 23:21:54+00:00
> writing software for fun and learning as days pass

These kinds of projects always remind me that it's still possible for software itself to be fun and have a soul of sorts, similar in spirit to the wonderful why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby.

It's a far cry from what can feel like an environment that, in a lot of cases, seems to devour complexity for complexity's sake and gorge itself on solving ethereal problems that don't really need to exist. End tiny rant.
by xpe | 2025-06-19 23:22:01+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.

> As the reader I had to do too much work to discern your point and what was relevant.

Re-reading, I hope the first ~15 words make my main point:

> Either/or fallacy. There exist a varied set of ways to engage with the technology...

Was this part unclear? Something else?

> you think you're being open-minded...

"Open minded" can mean very different things to different people. I recommend the article "The Proper Use of Humility" by Yudkowsky [1] because it rings true to me. I'm open to hearing other people's points of view, up to a point, given enough time. (Everyone has their limit, whether we admit it or not.) When it comes to assessing truth, I care about good arguments and good evidence, and I heavily discount anything else. If someone says I'm not "open minded" because of what I just wrote, then my reply would be "what do you want me to be more open to?"

There is a gem from in a comment below the above article that deserves repeating:

> People often take open disagreement as a sign of intellectual arrogance, while it is a display of respect and humility; showing respect with the honest acknowledgment of your disagreement, and showing humility in affording the other person a chance to defend themselves and prove you wrong. To say nothing is to treat that person's beliefs dismissively, as if they don't matter, and then assume that discussion was futile because they're incapable of understanding the truth, and of course, couldn't possible have anything to teach you.

> ...but you offered a multiple choice question, where the choices are reductive...

I offered two specific categories (tone or substance) and a third option for "anything else". I'm not following why this feels reductive to you; it leaves space for someone to reply however they like.

> and it comes off as defensive.

I've thought about this word quite a bit. From dictionary.com defensive means "excessively concerned with guarding against the real or imagined threat of criticism, injury to one's ego, or exposure of one's shortcomings." I'm open to criticism and happy to learn. If I'm wrong, I strive to admit it and apologize where needed. At the same time, I am confident enough to push back, stand up for myself, and defend my ideas (which is a different sense of 'defensive').

Here is the backstory to my second comment. The comment I replied to did not strike me as kind, much less well-intentioned. It probably was intended to be an insult, but I replied anyway. I gave the benefit of the doubt while challenging the commenter to give constructive criticism. I strived for clarity and confidence without being defensive or going on a counter-attack. This is a hard balance to strike.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-19 23:22:37+00:00
Von Braun was just a geek who passionately wanted to work on rockets. He didn't worry much about what payloads they would carry or whom they would land on, just as people working at Meta or Palantir don't sweat those sorts of details. He wasn't so much immoral as amoral.

As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.

There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.

Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.

So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.
by michaelt | 2025-06-19 23:23:12+00:00
As I understand things, the legal theory is: Everything is copyright infringement.

If I download an MP3 to my computer, the act of copying it to my hard disk is making a copy. The act of playing it copies it from my hard disk to RAM, then from RAM to the audio output; these are also copies.

That means you either need: A license (e.g. terms and conditions when you buy a legal MP3) or an "implied license" (this is what makes it legal to play CDs) or a right explicitly conferred by law (e.g. 17 U.S. Code § 117(a) lets you copy computer programs into RAM to run them) or a right of "fair use" (which allows e.g. Google copy web pages into their index)

So I'm afraid you've infringed copyright countless times - if you run several thousand epochs of training, you've infringed copyright several thousand times.

You may note that this is completely at odds with reality, and says almost nothing can happen without a copyright lawyer's permission. A cynic would say this suits the interests of copyright lawyers, if not reality, and nobody else gets to create legal theories about copyright infringement.
by juddlyon | 2025-06-19 23:24:40+00:00
There are some wonderful photos and stories here, salute to the people at Texas Highways for putting this together.

From the article:

"The day was dubbed Emancipation Day but, slowly, the term Juneteenth — a portmanteau of June and 19th — took hold."

Debating the name instead of appreciating the holiday and gravity of the topic is missing the forrest for the trees. Just wow.