MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-07 12:52:28+00:00
> That root post made a very civil request: what are realistic alternatives to mass deportation?

It's been kind of a weird (non-sequitur perhaps?) request, for a couple of reasons:

First because the dismissive nature of some of your responses frames you as the judge of what is acceptable/realistic, which I think we can all agree here without any offense, you're not;

Second, because mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, is itself not an acceptable solution. Indeed, "do nothing" is both more acceptable (viewed more acceptably by others) and more realistic (doing nothing is easier than doing something). Thus, it is unhelpful to rule that out as an option while preserving the even-less-acceptable option of maintaining the status quo.

And let's be clear here: the relevant question is of acceptable solutions, not simply realistic ones. As we've unfortunately seen in human history, even killing millions is realistic, but obviously not acceptable.

> [Doing nothing] goes against what the vast majority of people would consider reasonable

"The vast majority of people" find mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc, to be even more unreasonable. Why, then, must the response be more reasonable than the initial suggestion?

Maybe that's why all the replies expressed confusion at the quoting: it is missing that context, and the full context makes the quote cut against the position of pro-mass deportation of millions of citizens and noncitizens to gulags, conflict zones, etc.

> Don't gaslight

Your personal judgement that people who don't understand your out of context quotes are gaslighting, is rude. The more likely explanation, based on the evidence, is that a given message failed to provide sufficient context and/or explanation.

> The responses overall has just been completely lacking in any thought

This is even meaner. I am confident that you are capable of civil discussion focused on ideas, not on other HN posters. If you want to call your fellow posters thoughtless, you might seek greener pastures.
by hwillis | 2025-07-07 12:54:00+00:00
> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.

This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.

The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.

> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system

Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.

> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.

This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.

> Because nuclear is superior by every metric

Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?

> Are they?

Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.

[1]: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
by osigurdson | 2025-07-07 12:54:06+00:00
Many people in software have passed through similarly hard gates in the past. An engineering degree is harder to attain than a law degree for instance. The question isn't about these gates, it is about the interview practice once one is already through. Do law or medical interviews include questions unrelated to the work that they do in a reasonably analogous manner to leetcode? Maybe they do. Perhaps hiring is broken in all fields.
by myself248 | 2025-07-07 12:55:10+00:00
In a way, the Althea wireless network already does this, but it looks like a more conventional wireless ISP in some ways. If you have upstream connectivity that you provide to a downstream customer, you earn a cut. If you have access to a mountaintop or something and run a repeater that suddenly brings a lot of nodes better connectivity, you earn a cut.

Personally, I've always been surprised that traditional cellular networks didn't try to incentivize femtocell placement by awarding compensatory minutes or megs or something, to the operator of the serving femtocell. Imagine someone with an apartment over the old bakery downtown where the historical district has made it difficult to place normal towers, so they get a femtocell for their own usage. But if it carries other customers' traffic, they'd get kickbacks and incentive to place it near the window where it has the best view of the shopping area below. Suddenly they're working on RF optimization without even knowing it.

In both cases, you have an existing payment expectation that you're just piggybacking on. People already pay their ISP for connectivity, so they expect to pay Althea, and the distribution of money after that is a detail. People already pay their cellco for service, and if some of that kicks back to other customers, that's a detail.

I think your idea has legs, if you can solve the onboarding and payment expectation. There's also a critical-mass problem that Apple solved with Find My by just force-installing it on every device without consent, and you can't do that. So people will only run your software if they:

A) know about it

B) are in a place with poor enough connectivity that it's needed

C) are in a place with enough user density that it's worthwhile

D) perceive that it doesn't unduly kill their battery while in a place that also might not have a lot of opportunities to charge

That's a mighty tricky combination, especially the overlap between B and C. The only setting I can imagine is Burning Man. But micropayments directly conflict with the gifting and decommodification principles.
by rapamycin | 2025-07-07 12:55:23+00:00
Therapists are expensive, part of a moneymaking operation, they are imposed restrictions on what they can say and not, you cant tell them everything sbout suicide and stuff, they try to keep their personal life away from the convo, they are your makeshift friend (whore) that pretends to want to help you by trying to help themselves. They are just trying to get you out, prescribe u some drugs and listen to you. Therspists are useless.

It’s much better to talk to DeepSeekR1 495B snd discuss with a free and open source model that holds the whole world of knowledge. You can talk to it for free for an unlimited free time, let it remember who u are through memory and be able to talk to it about anything and everything and debate and talk about all worlds philosphy and discuss all ur problems without being judged and without having to feel like ur paying a platonic prostitute.

Therspists should die out. Thank god. Ive been to therapists and they are 99% useless and expensive.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-07 12:55:24+00:00
Pattern matching is instinct. (Or at least, instinct is a kind of pattern matching. And once you learn the patterns, pattern matching can become almost instinctual). And that's fine, for things that fit the pattern. But a human-level intelligence can also deal with problems for which there is no pattern. (I mean, not always successfully - finding a correct solution to a novel problem is difficult. But it is within the capability of at least some humans.)
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-07 12:55:26+00:00
and we're hitting that point. now. but the gist of the parent's arguement is that we didn't before.

also keep in mind that unions first popped up in places were people were, like, dying, or getting maimed: trains, mines, electrical, gasfitters, ironworkers. up until now programming has been easy money sitting indoors while sipping lattes.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-07 12:55:40+00:00
> I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired like they do in the movies

I’ve done some volunteer mentoring for a while. Fear of getting fired for small things is very widespread among younger generations right now. As far as I can tell, some of them build their mental model of the office from a combination of movies, Reddit posts, TikTok rage bait, and stories on social media. They’re so convinced that every corporation is an evil entity set on destroying their lives that small mistakes are catastrophized into career-ending moves.

The saddest part is when they make a small mistake and then let it snowball into lies and manipulation to cover it up. In the program I’m familiar with I don’t recall any stories of people being fired for singular honest mistakes, but there have been plenty of stories shared where people made a mistake and then caused far more problems by lying about it or even doing things like trying to attack and discredit people who witnessed the mistake as a defensive measure.
by oldge | 2025-07-07 12:55:42+00:00
Today’s llms are fancy autocomplete but lack test time self learning or persistent drive. By contrast, an AGI would require: – A goal-generation mechanism (G) that can propose objectives without external prompts – A utility function (U) and policy π(a│s) enabling action selection and hierarchy formation over extended horizons – Stateful memory (M) + feedback integration to evaluate outcomes, revise plans, and execute real-world interventions autonomously Without G, U, π, and M operating llms remain reactive statistical predictors, not human level intelligence.
by N19PEDL2 | 2025-07-07 12:55:54+00:00
I really like the idea and it would certainly be very useful for communicating in case of censorship or Internet outage.

However, I wonder how would the sender know how to route the message so that it gets to the correct recipient. It would have to send it to all nearby devices, which would then send it to all nearby devices, and so on, but that would be terribly inefficient; moreover, the message would continue to circulate even after the recipient received it, unless the recipient sends a receipt acknowledgement, which would then need to be propagated to all devices as well.

Apple's Find My network is not decentralized: all participating devices send the locations of objects they find to Apple's servers, which then forward the information directly to the correct recipients.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-07 12:55:56+00:00
Getting a high score on ARC doesn't mean we have AGI and Chollet has always said as much AFAIK, it's meant to push the AI research space in a positive direction. Being able to solve ARC problems is probably a pre-requisite to AGI. It's a directional push into the fog of war, with the claim being that we should explore that area because we expect it's relevant to building AGI.
by roenxi | 2025-07-07 12:56:25+00:00
By both definitions of intelligence in the presentation we should be saying "how we got to AGI" in the past tense. We're already there. AI's can deal with situations they weren't prepared for in any sense that a human can. They might not do well, but they'll have a crack at it. We can trivially build systems that collect data and do a bit more offline training if that is what someone wants to see, but there doesn't really seem to be a commercial need for that right now. Similarly, AIs can whip most humans at most domains that require intelligence.

I think the debate hqas been flat-footed by the speed all this happened. We're not talking AGI any more, we're talking about how to build superintelligences hitherto unseen in nature.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-07 12:56:33+00:00
I think the point of mine that you're missing (or perhaps disagreeing with implicitly) is that *everything* is fundamentally math. Or, if you like, everything is fundamentally physics, and physics is fundamentally math.

So classes of functions (ANNs) that can approximate our desired function to arbitrary precision are what we should be expecting to be working with.
by adithyassekhar | 2025-07-07 12:56:55+00:00
As someone who has to actually build the crazy parallax-3d-not-a-grid layout the designer may have spend an hour on, I'm glad.

Maybe free flowing designs shouldn't take place in figma, it should only be for the final output. Even then the majority of apps being built everyday are simple crud apps and shouldn't be overdesigned. They are built for people to do their jobs.
by MatekCopatek | 2025-07-07 12:56:56+00:00
You can design a racist propaganda poster, put someone's face onto a porn pic or manipulate evidence with photoshop. Apart from super specific things like trying to print money, the tool doesn't stop you from doing things most people would consider distasteful, creepy or even illegal.

So why are we doing this now? Has anything changed fundamentally? Why can't we let software do everything and then blame the user for doing bad things?
by defrost | 2025-07-07 12:57:11+00:00
It'd be more impressive if MAGA et al followed through on that principal and removed fossil fuel subsidies.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-subsidies-fossil-fuels

https://www.fractracker.org/2025/03/fossil-fuel-subsidies-fr...

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
by DocTomoe | 2025-07-07 12:57:37+00:00
Calling “whataboutism” is often just a way to derail those providing necessary context. It’s a rhetorical eject button — and more often than not, a sign someone isn’t arguing in good faith. But just on the off-chance you are one of "the good ones": Thank you for the clarification - and fair enough, I appreciate that you're applying the same standard broadly. That's more intellectually honest than most.

Now, do you also act on that in your private life? How beneficial, for instance, is your participation in online debate?

As for this phrase — "most people paying attention" — that’s weasel wording at its finest. It lets you both assert a consensus and discredit dissent in a single stroke. People who disagree? They’re just not paying attention, obviously. It’s a No True Scotsman — minus the kilts.

As for your question: evaluating AI's long-term benefit versus long-term climate cost is tricky because the landscape is evolving fast. But here’s a rough sketch of where I currently stand.

Short-term climate cost: Yes, significant - especially in training large models and the massive scaling of data centers. But this is neither unique to AI nor necessarily linear; newer models (like LoRA-based systems) and infrastructure optimizations already aim to cut energy use significantly.

Short-term benefit: Uneven. Entertainment chatbots? Low direct utility — though arguably high in quality-of-life value for many. Medical imaging, protein folding, logistics optimization, or disaster prediction? Substantial.

Long-term benefit: If AI continues to improve and democratize access to knowledge, diagnosis, decision-making, and resource allocation — its potential social, medical, and economic impact could be enormous. Not just "nice-to-have" but truly transformative for global efficiency and resilience.

Long-term harm: If AI remains centralized, opaque, and energy-inefficient, it could deepen inequalities, increase waste, and consolidate power dangerously.

But even if AI causes twice the CO₂-output it causes today, and would only be used for ludicrous reasons, it pales to the CO₂ pollution causes by a single day of average American warfighting ... while still - differently from war fighting - having a net-positive outcome to AI users' lives.

So to answer directly:

Right now, AI is somewhere near the threshold. It’s not obviously "worth it" for every observer, and that’s fine. But it’s also not a luxury toy — not anymore. It’s a volatile but serious tool, and whether it tips toward benefit or harm depends entirely on how we build, govern, and use it.

Let me turn the question around: What would you need to see — in outcomes, not marketing — to say: "Yes. That was worth the carbon."?
by bluGill | 2025-07-07 12:58:07+00:00
Given equal precision and alloys used in construction a musket will jam less than a more complex gun. However a musket and bullets built with 1700 technology/precision will jam more than a gun built to the best best modern standards standards (though there are some pretty bad modern guns out there too that may not stack up so well).

A bolt action is simple compared to any semi-automatic gun. Particularly if it is a single shot bolt action thus dispensing with the complexity of a magazine feed.
by deadbabe | 2025-07-07 12:58:25+00:00
A person’s anthropomorphization of LLMs is directly related to how well they understand LLMs.

Once you dispel the magic, it naturally becomes hard to use words related to consciousness, or thinking. You will probably think of LLMs more like a search engine: you give an input and get some probable output. Maybe LLMs should be rebranded as “word engines”?

Regardless, anthropomorphization is not helpful, and by using human terms to describe LLMs you are harming the layperson’s ability to truly understand what an LLM is while also cheapening what it means to be human by suggesting we’ve solved consciousness. Just stop it. LLMs do not think, given enough time and patience you could compute their output by hand if you used their weights and embeddings to manually do all the math, a hellish task but not an impossible one technically. There is no other secret hidden away, that’s it.
by comrade1234 | 2025-07-07 12:58:44+00:00
> The experiment, designed by Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner (opens a new tab), of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich...

I remember when this came up in the news six years ago. I looked them up (I live in Zurich) and, if I remember correctly, the grad student quit physics after this paper and went into programming...
by williamdclt | 2025-07-07 12:59:09+00:00
Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities!

Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. 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.
by sunshine-o | 2025-07-07 12:59:30+00:00
I am wondering if the explosion of porn is not also a consequence of the trauma of the previous generation.

The previous generation who grew up in the 80s and 90s was traumatised by our institutions and culture because sex meant either dying from AIDS or "ruining your life" by getting pregnant. The AIDS hysteria got so far that in our mind unprotected intercourse was equivalent to shouting heroin. I also remember being told I could get AIDS just by sitting on public toilets and only chlorine could kill the virus.

It was probably an expected swing of the pendulum after the boomers had their sexual revolution.

But this paranoia in the physical world probably pushed people hard in the digital realm the Internet just opened and we are now dealing with the next problem.
by lvl155 | 2025-07-07 12:59:46+00:00
I am not 100% sold on these CLI tools. Namely because they don’t optimize on coordination. I’d like to see a more polished AI behind the coordination based on context, memory, cost, speed, etc. It doesn’t make sense to deploy LLM to do this specific task or for me to hardcode that logic either. Right now, I’d start with o3 and delegate to other models based on strengths I perceive but I rather have all of that automated for me.
by derbOac | 2025-07-07 12:59:56+00:00
Maybe it's just because so much of my work for so long has focused on models with hidden states but this is a fairly classical feature of some statistical models. One of the widely used LLM textbooks even started with latent variable models; LLMs are just latent variable models just on a totally different scale, both in terms of number of parameters but also model complexity. The scale is apparently important, but seeing them as another type of latent variable model sort of dehumanizes them for me.

Latent variable or hidden state models have their own history of being seen as spooky or mysterious though; in some ways the way LLMs are anthropomorphized is an extension of that.

I guess I don't have a problem with anthropomorphizing LLMs at some level, because some features of them find natural analogies in cognitive science and other areas of psychology, and abstraction is useful or even necessary in communicating and modeling complex systems. However, I do think anthropomorphizing leads to a lot of hype and tends to implicitly shut down thinking of them mechanistically, as a mathematical object that can be probed and characterized — it can lead to a kind of "ghost in the machine" discourse and an exaggeration of their utility, even if it is impressive at times.