MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mindwipe | 2025-07-07 13:10:48+00:00
> If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).

Yes it can.

Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.

> Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.

They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.
by pmg101 | 2025-07-07 13:10:57+00:00
I remember Dawkins talking about the "intentional stance" when discussing genes in The Selfish Gene.

It's flat wrong to describe genes as having any agency. However it's a useful and easily understood shorthand to describe them in that way rather than every time use the full formulation of "organisms who tend to possess these genes tend towards these behaviours."

Sometimes to help our brains reach a higher level of abstraction, once we understand the low level of abstraction we should stop talking and thinking at that level.
by maaaaattttt | 2025-07-07 13:11:23+00:00
I've said this somewhere else, but we have the perfect test for AGI in the form of any open world game. Give the instructions to the AGI that it should finish the game and how to control it. Give the frames as input and wait. When I think of the latest Zelda games and especially how the Shrine chanllenges are desgined they especially feel like the perfect environement for an AGI test.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-07 13:12:16+00:00
As someone who wasted a lot of time trying to get a graphical project to work in Microsoft's Basic for Macintosh, I'm still angry about it, and wonder how the trajectory of my life might have changed had MacBasic been available for me to purchase instead (unfortunately, things were set/quite different when HyperCard came out, though I did greatly enjoy _The Manhole_).
by saberience | 2025-07-07 13:12:54+00:00
The Arc prize/benchmark is a terrible judge of whether we got to AGI.

If we assume that humans have "general intelligence", we would assume all humans could ace Arc... but they can't. Try asking your average person, i.e. supermarket workers, gas station attendants etc to do the Arc puzzles, they will do poorly, especially on the newer ones, but AI has to do perfectly to prove they have general intelligence? (not trying to throw shade here but the reality is this test is more like an IQ test than an AGI test).

Arc is a great example of AI researchers moving the goal posts for what we consider intelligent.

Let's get real, Claude Opus is smarter than 99% of people right now, and I would trust its decision making over 99% of people I know in most situations, except perhaps emotion driven ones.

Arc agi benchmark is just a gimmick. Also, since it's a visual test and the current models are text based it's actually a rigged (against the AI models) test anyway, since their datasets were completely text based.

Basically, it's a test of some kind, but it doesn't mean quite as much as Chollet thinks it means.
by jappgar | 2025-07-07 13:13:16+00:00
I agree that the current crop of IDE integrations really leave something to be desired.

I've been using Roocode (Cline fork) a lot recently and while it's overall great, the UI is janky and incomplete feeling. Same as Cursor and all the others.

I tried Claude Code after hearing great things and it was just Roocode with a worse UX (for me). Most of the people telling me how great it was were talking up the output as being amazing quality. I didn't notice that. I presume the lack of IDE integration makes it feel more magical. This is fun while you're vibing the "first 80%" of your product, but eventually the agents need much more hand holding and collaborative edits to keep things on track.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-07 13:13:47+00:00
LLOOOOMM web page about Shigeru Miyamoto:

https://lloooomm.com/shigeru-miyamoto.html

Shigeru Miyamoto simulated LLOOOOMM character directory:

https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

Mario's Career Pivot: From Pipes to Pipelines:

https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/blob/main/00-Character...

The Plumber Who Became an AI Architect

The Great Career Switch of 2025

In a twist that would make even Shigeru Miyamoto smile, Mario - the world's most famous plumber - has successfully transitioned into artificial intelligence. His reasoning? "All the AI experts were becoming plumbers, so someone had to maintain the digital pipes!"

The Geoffrey Hinton Paradox

When AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton advised people to become plumbers because "AI can't unclog a toilet," he inadvertently triggered what economists now call "The Great Trade Migration of 2025." As white-collar workers flooded into plumbing, Mario saw an opportunity.

"Everyone was-a going one way, so I went the other!" Mario explains. "It's-a like a warp pipe - sometimes the best path is the one nobody else is taking!"

[...]
by no_wizard | 2025-07-07 13:14:01+00:00
Its not common that people in our industry don't have bachelor degrees anymore. Its also not an industry where I routinely find the majority of people come from lower economic backgrounds etc.

I think a fair compromise would be not to require specific degrees to test, but rather a service fee (which could be sponsored) but I think a similar rigorous standards based exam would do wonders for our industry, even if it trims who can enter it on the margins
by gus_massa | 2025-07-07 13:14:09+00:00
It's not so strict, but we try most time to keep it consistent. For example, here in Buenos Aires we almost don't say the "d" at the end of the word, like in "ciudad" (city), in some pronunciation guides I saw it written with a tiny d.

If the variant get's too popular the two versions become the official spelling, for example "septiembre" and "setiembre" (September) are correct. I hate the second one and I never use it, but it's popular somewhere. After many years, sometime the old spelling disappears and is marked as archaic.
by Retric | 2025-07-07 13:14:24+00:00
It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%).

That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
by gwd | 2025-07-07 13:14:26+00:00
Like it a lot so far!

After a brief play last night, the biggest feature of aider I miss is more control over the context window -- saying "/clear" to re-start the conversation from scratch, or specifying files to add or remove as they become relevant or irrelevant. Not clear how much or how long files stay in the context window.

The other question I have is whether you use Anthropic's "prompt caching" [1] to reduce the cost of the long conversation?

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-07 13:14:58+00:00
The part I was referring to is captured in

"The cellular biology of brains is relatively well-understood"

Fundamentally, brains are not doing something different in kind from ANNs. They're basically layers of neural networks stacked together in certain ways.

What we don't know are things like (1) how exactly are the layers stacked together, (2) how are the sensors (like photo receptors, auditory receptors, etc) hooked up?, (3) how do the different parts of the brain interact?, (4) for that matter what do the different parts of the brain actually do?, (5) how do chemical signals like neurotransmitters convey information or behavior?

In the analogy between brains and artificial neural networks, these sorts of questions might be of huge importance to people building AI systems, but they'd be of only minor importance to users of AI systems. OpenAI and Google can change details about how their various transformer layers and ANN layers are connected. The result may be improved products, but they won't be doing anything different from what AIs are doing now in terms the author of this article is concerned about.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-07 13:14:59+00:00
>You generally don't want to have to change all the tests for every change

You generally don't want every change to result in a lot of work. If changing a lot of tests means looking at a table of 30 images and diffs, scanning for problems and clicking an "approve button", that isn't a lot of work though.

>Lets say person A initially created all these snapshots, person B did a change that shows 50 snapshots changed, who's responsibility is it to make sure the snapshots are correct?

The person who made the change.

>Person B doesn't know the initial conditions Person A had in mind, so also less ideal.

Yes they will because the initial conditions also had a snapshot attached. If your snapshot testing is even mildly fancy it will come with a diff too.

>When you have unit tests and functional tests you can read through the test and know what the person who wrote it wanted to test. With snapshots, you only know that "This was good",

If you made a change and you can see the previous snapshot, current snapshot and a diff and you never know if the change was ok then you probably shouldn't be working on the project in the first place.

And no, the same isn't necessarily true of unit or functional tests - I've seen hundreds of unit tests that assert things about objects and properties which are tangentially related to the end user and come with zero context attached and I have to try and figure out wtf the test writer meant by "assert xyz_obj.transitional is None". With a user facing snapshot it's obvious.
by idoubtit | 2025-07-07 13:15:10+00:00
Thank you. Without this source, it's hard to separate the facts from the bullshit in what was posted on phys.org.

I'm not a scholar, just an amateur, but two sentences were strikingly ridiculous.

"Legend has it that Noah hid them here from the floodwaters before boarding the ark." This article is supposed to be popular science about Babylonian archaeology, why mix it with a Hebrew myth derived from an older Mesopotamian myth? I guess it's just because Noah appeals to the ambient Christian culture. In other words, it's nonsense, but it sells.

"The information about the women of Babylon, their role as priestesses and the associated tasks, has also astonished experts, as no texts describing these things were previously known." There are many many texts about women and Naditu (sacred women) in Mesopotamia and in Babylon. According to the scholar article : "The passage has great importance for understanding the roles played by the various classes of priestesses: ugbakkātu, nadâtu, and qašdātu." Quite different.
by taylodl | 2025-07-07 13:15:13+00:00
I think Commodore needs to figure out who they want to be. The Commodore 64 was one of the best-selling computers of all time and offered many video and sound capabilities that were unparalleled. Ditto for the Amiga. What did these machines have in common? They were comparatively inexpensive computers for the everyday person, not business.

Apple used to market computers "for the rest of us" and created machines geared more towards creatives. They've largely abandoned that market and nobody has swept in to take it. That market aligns well with Commodore's legacy.

I would also focus on machines for the tween market, i.e. 8-12 year olds. The Commodore 64 introduced many of us to computing. Make a simple machine these kids can use and have fun with. Even better, "lego-ify" it and make it a machine they can build!

What we don't need - another Linux box with a UI looking like it came straight out of the 80s. We don't need that nostalgic, kitschy crap. We need real machines for today addressing needs others have abandoned or never even developed.
by dadoum | 2025-07-07 13:16:20+00:00
According to this paper [0] and my own experience, it's way easier to pronounce a word in French given the spelled word than in English. It's slightly harder to spell French than English for the model of the study, but it's really close. Now, in my personal experience, I feel like French has a lot of rules while English has a lot of outliers which do not follow any rules. But my native language is French, so I am obviously biased.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.13321
by phtrivier | 2025-07-07 13:16:23+00:00
My points is: if the attack happens while everyone is asleep, or in the middle of a political campaign, or during a gala, etc... it seems very easy to "waste" the few minutes that seem so important.

Or, God forbid: if it happens after telecoms have been disturbed for any reason, isn't there a scenario where the first strike is also the last strike ?
by bluGill | 2025-07-07 13:16:40+00:00
> Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.

Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-07 13:16:56+00:00
The difference to me is this: they're real analyst questions that you will have likely dealt with before in some detail, and not an obscure algorithm I maybe haven't seen since college or a leetcode not particularly real world presented or relevant brain teaser.

They're things you actually do, and I imagine most people applying to these roles have done, either in exercise (say in college) or in previous jobs. Its still a practical assessment.

Where software interviewing is different is the assessments aren't grounded in being all that practical
by neom | 2025-07-07 13:18:16+00:00
It's a slippery slope and we really don't want a 2 class system. If you start allowing doctors to bill for things that public insurance covers, you're 30 seconds away from a losing the egalitarianism that Canadians value. You can pay out of pocket for whatever you want, you can tell the doctor not to bill any insurance, and in some clinics (in my experience not many) that will get you seen faster, but it's not really common and it's very expensive.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-07 13:18:38+00:00
You are seriously underselling what LLMs do nowadays. It's not just that the grammar is correct. In most cases, the answers are substantive and factually correct.

You can ask fairly complicated questions, and it will usually reason correctly and give you a high-quality answer. I ask about programming, physics and math, and it usually answers on the level of someone with a high level of training in those fields.

It sometimes fails in strange ways, but you can't just write off all of the high-quality answers LLMs give as nothing more than plausible-sounding English.
by losvedir | 2025-07-07 13:19:07+00:00
Well "reasoning" refers to Chain-of-Thought and if you look at the generated prompts it's not hard to see why it's called that.

That said, it's fascinating to me that it works (and empirically, it does work; a reasoning model generating tens of thousands of tokens while working out the problem does produce better results). I wish I knew why. A priori I wouldn't have expected it, since there's no new input. That means it's all "in there" in the weights already. I don't see why it couldn't just one shot it without all the reasoning. And maybe the future will bring us more distilled models that can do that, or they can tease out all that reasoning with more generated training data, to move it from dispersed around the weights -> prompt -> more immediately accessible in the weights. But for now "reasoning" works.

But then, at the back of my mind is the easy answer: maybe you can't optimize it. Maybe the model has to "reason" to "organize its thoughts" and get the best results. After all, if you give me a complicated problem I'll write down hypotheses and outline approaches and double check results for consistency and all that. But now we're getting dangerously close to the "anthropomorphization" that this article is lamenting.
by chc4 | 2025-07-07 13:19:16+00:00
Using the free playground link, and it is in fact extremely fast. The "diffusion mode" toggle is also pretty neat as a visualization, although I'm not sure how accurate it is - it renders as line noise and then refines, while in reality presumably those are tokens from an imprecise vector in some state space that then become more precise until it's only a definite word, right?
by msteffen | 2025-07-07 13:19:25+00:00
> This creates a system where companies find it easier to fire good employees in bulk than to fire bad employees individually. The legal protections meant to prevent arbitrary termination end up enabling exactly that

I have some passing familiarity with how (California) law firms approach firing, which this article gave me cause to consider:

- they do fire unproductive people aggressively (law firms bill by the hour and attorneys are very expensive to employ, so it’s very obvious and financially meaningful to the business when someone isn’t contributing)

- when they fire someone, they’re very secretive about it. The person stays on the firm’s website for months, and if you call HR, they’ll say that the person still works there (they probably do, in some narrow technical sense). This makes it somewhat easier for the person to get a new job.

Also this a nit but the legal protections aren’t meant to prevent arbitrary termination, which is pretty explicitly legal. They’re meant to prevent discrimination.
by bluGill | 2025-07-07 13:20:27+00:00
> Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?

But what is durable? Pottery is fragile itself, and can break if you heat it too fast. I have not used either pottery or baskets on a fire so I can't comment myself, but I see no reason to think pottery is better. It probably depends partially on the society, if you are nomad hunter-gathers, pottery is heavy and breaks too easily, while farmers can just leave the pottery by where they cook and so it may be better.
by pmichaud | 2025-07-07 13:20:53+00:00
When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-07-07 13:21:47+00:00
You probably don't need a decentralised, delay-tolerant network to send a photo to the person in front of you. It's even very likely that this will be much less efficient than a direct Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection or an AirDrop.

What would be the use case? Send the picture to someone at the other end of the lecture theatre? It's likely that there would be a phone network or Wi-Fi available. A crisis or emergency situation where networks are down? There isn't much population density or movement to propagate the data.

This debate is not new, many teams have worked on wireless ad hoc networks, some with very encouraging results. The real problem is what the use cases are.

That's why I personally think that the use case should be related to travel, transport, sport or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Situations involving movement and loss of connectivity.
by nucleardog | 2025-07-07 13:22:13+00:00
If we take for granted that "farm requires farmers, farmers require doctor", then the doctor should charge whatever market rate is for someone to work there, and the farmers should be paying that, drawing that from salary from the farm business, and that should be priced into the cost of the farm business's output?

Why can't the farms increase prices to support a basic quality-of-life for those living there?

I don't disagree there's some breakdown of the market here, but I'm not sure that saying "well there's not enough money coming in to the area" isn't stopping a step short.
by osigurdson | 2025-07-07 13:23:43+00:00
While I didn't agree with the "junior developer" analogy in the past, I am finding that it is beginning to be a bit more like that. The new Codex tool from OpenAI feels a lot more like this. It seems to work best if you already have a few examples of something that you want to do and now want to add another. My tactic is to spell it out very clearly in the prompt and really focus on having it consistently implement another similar thing with a narrow scope. Because it takes quite a while, I will usually just fix any issues myself as opposed to asking it to fix them. I'm still experimenting but I think a well crafted spec / AGENTS.md file begins to become quite important. For me, this + regular ChatGPT interactions are much more valuable than synchronous / Windsurf / Cursor style usage. I'd prefer to review a more meaningful PR than a million little diffs synchronously.
by Retric | 2025-07-07 13:24:12+00:00
> there's no clear line between depressed and not

There’s a meaningful line in the sand for treatments with major side effects. CBT therapy may be “fine” for normal people, but the most effective treatment for depression is ECT which has major side effects. Including a ~1 in 50k chance of death.

Saying something is a bell curve distribution is an approximation, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a continuous function out to infinity and negative infinity.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-07-07 13:24:13+00:00
> better allow me being late sometimes

That would depend on the jobs requirements, wouldn't it? In some roles that might be a complete deal breaker. For example, anything customer/client facing. If you can't perform the jobs duties with reasonable accommodation, maybe you should find another job?

Similarly, if you are 3 feet tall you'll likely never be the worlds slam dunk champion. Not even if they provide you with a step-stool. It's not your fault, or the employers. Sorry, I guess.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-07 13:24:34+00:00
I think I have worded my question wrong. I asked about not about how AI affects the financials of these smaller artists, but their wellbeing in general.

There are many small artists who do this not for money, but for fun and have their renowned styles. Even their styles are ripped off by these generative AI companies and turned into a slot machine to earn money for themselves. These artists didn't consent to that, and this affects their (mental) well-beings.

With that context in mind, what do you think about these people who are not in this for money is ripped out of their years of achievement and their hard work exploited for money by generative AI companies?

It's not about IP (with whatever expansion you prefer) or laws, but ethics in general.

Substitute comics for any medium. Code, music, painting, illustration, literature, short movies, etc.