MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 63stack | 2025-07-06 23:53:13+00:00
Another thing is that the article emphasized that it's single threaded. That by itself guarantees that there will only ever be 1 inflight request, since calling the send() function will block until the request completes, and the callback is called.

If there is some kind of cooperative multitasking going on, then it should be noted in the pseudo code with eg. async/await or equivalent keywords. As the code is, send() never gives back control to the calling code, until it completely finishes.
by barrkel | 2025-07-06 23:53:34+00:00
Hidden state in the form of the activation heads, intermediate activations and so on. Logically, in autoregression these are recalculated every time you run the sequence to predict the next token. The point is, the entire NN state isn't output for each token. There is lots of hidden state that goes into selecting that token and the token isn't a full representation of that information.
by bbarn | 2025-07-06 23:53:59+00:00
I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.

Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"
by raspasov | 2025-07-06 23:54:08+00:00
Anyone who claims that a poorly definined concept, AGI, is right around the corner is most likely:

- trying to sell something

- high on their own stories

- high on exogenous compounds

- all of the above

LLMs are good at language. They are OK summarizers of text by design but not good at logic. Very poor at spatial reasoning and as a result poor at connecting concepts together.

Just ask any of the crown jewel LLM models "What's the biggest unsolved problem in the [insert any] field".

The usual result is a pop-science-level article but with ton of subtle yet critical mistakes! Even worse, the answer sounds profound on the surface. In reality, it's just crap.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-07-06 23:54:11+00:00
If we developed feelings, morals and motivation due to them being good subgoals for primary goals, survival and procreation why couldn't other systems do that. You don't have to call them the same word or the same thing, but feeling is a signal that motivates a behaviour in us, that in part has developed from generational evolution and in other part by experiences in life. There was a random mutation that made someone develop a fear signal on seeing a predator and increased the survival chances, then due to that the mutation became widespread. Similarly a feeling in a machine could be a signal it developed that goes through a certain pathway to yield in a certain outcome.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-06 23:54:24+00:00
I think you really can't make that kind of money at content creation or crypto.

Remember Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and company didn't become billionaires by making a company that made a billion dollars, they became billionaires by starting a public corporation that became worth billions and billions. It's been getting harder and harder to do that ever since not least to laws passed after the Enron scandal, the 2008 crisis and such. Every social media company that had the possibility of going public got bought by Facebook or Microsoft.
by benreesman | 2025-07-06 23:55:57+00:00
Fortunes are just bigger now in both notional and absolute terms, inevitable with Gini going parabolic, says nothing about the guy on top this week.

Around the turn of the century a company called Enron collapsed in an accounting scandal so meteoric it also took down Arthur Anderson (there used to be be a Big Five). Bad, bad fraud, buncha made up figures, bunch of shady ties to the White House, the whole show.

Enron was helmed by Jeff Skilling, a man described as "incandescently brilliant" by his professors at Wharton. But it was a devious brilliance: it was an S-Tier aptitude for deception, grandiosity, and artful rationalization. This is chronicled in a book called The Smartest Guys in The Room if you want to read about it.

Right before that was the collapse of Long Term Capital Management: a firm so intellectually star studded the book about that is called When Genius Failed. They almost took the banking system with them.

The difference between then and now is that it took a smarter class of criminal to pull off a smaller heist with a much less patient public and much less erosion of institutions and norms. What would have been a front page scandal with prison time in 1995 is a Tuesday in 2025.

The new guys are dumber, not smarter: there aren't any cops chasing them.
by barrkel | 2025-07-06 23:56:59+00:00
There is hidden state as plain as day merely in the fact that logits for token prediction exist. The selected token doesn't give you information about how probable other tokens were. That information, that state which is recalculated in autoregression, is hidden. It's not exposed. You can't see it in the text produced by the model.

There is plenty of state not visible when an LLM starts a sentence that only becomes somewhat visible when it completes the sentence. The LLM has a plan, if you will, for how the sentence might end, and you don't get to see an instance of that plan unless you run autoregression far enough to get those tokens.

Similarly, it has a plan for paragraphs, for whole responses, for interactive dialogues, plans that include likely responses by the user.
by 8note | 2025-07-06 23:57:42+00:00
do LLM models consider future tokens when making next token predictions?

eg. pick 'the' as the next token because there's a strong probability of 'planet' as the token after?

is it only past state that influences the choice of 'the'? or that the model is predicting many tokens in advance and only returning the one in the output?

if it does predict many, id consider that state hidden in the model weights.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-06 23:57:58+00:00
> Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press.

She was forced to resign because she leaked, the content of the leak was utterly immaterial. The simple fact she leaked was an automatically fireable offence, it doesn’t matter a jot if she lied or not. Customer privacy is non-negotiable when you’re bank. Banks aren’t number 10, the basic expectation is that customer information is never handed out, except to the customer, in response to a court order, or the belief that there is an immediate threat to life.

Do you honestly think that it’s okay for banks to discuss the private banking details of their customers with the press?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-06 23:59:22+00:00
Related to this footnote in TFA?

>If you’re alarmed by the fact that the set of all real functions does not form a HILBERT SPACE, you’re probably not in the target audience of this post."

Video: https://youtu.be/q8gng_2gn70?t=8m3s

Thanks to

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44481933
by Angostura | 2025-07-06 23:59:25+00:00
IMHO it happens for the same reason we see shapes in clouds. The human mind through millions of years has evolved to equate and conflate the ability to generate cogent verbal or written output with intelligence. It's an instinct to equate the two. It's an extraordinarily difficult instinct to break. LLMs are optimised for the one job that will make us confuse them for being intelligent
by dzhiurgis | 2025-07-06 23:59:28+00:00
Does Tesla even make yokes anymore? IIRC it's only on cybertruck where it makes sense due to drive-by-wire.

Steering wheel buttons are pretty good on Tesla and there's tons of third party options of buttons. In fact I am not sure if there are any modern cars as hackable as Tesla (still long ways to go tho).

p.s. I had rental MB campervan few months ago. IIRC about 12 buttons with 30+ positions. Absolute nightmare to use.
by jeremy_k | 2025-07-06 23:59:34+00:00
Just wanted to say I had been happily plodding along using AI tools in Zed, which had worked pretty well but seeing the SST team was behind OpenCode I decided to finally give a terminal based agent a try. I was blown away, primarily by the feedback loops of say OpenCode writing new tests, running the test suite, seeing the tests errored and looping back start the whole process again. That looping does not happen in Zed!

It was the first time I felt like I could write up a large prompt, walk away from my laptop, and come back to a lot of work having been done. I've been super happy with the experience so far.
by dmurray | 2025-07-07 00:00:44+00:00
> Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing.

Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.

Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
by godelski | 2025-07-07 00:01:05+00:00
I'm not arguing that the bird category shouldn't have been broken down but that wasn't what your comment was about. It was about general bird ownership.

I agree, a parrot is not an average bird and I'd wager would be beneficial in similar ways

But I disagree, a cat is not like an average bird.

These are two wildly different conversations. Not to mention that people frequently believe cats aren't social. So I'm not sure how you would expect me to interpret your comment as "parrot, not average bird"
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-07-07 00:01:29+00:00
But an LLM model could perform poorly in tests that it is not considered and essentially means "death" for it. But begs the question at which scope should we consider an LLM to be similar to identity of a single human. Are you the same you as you were few minutes back or 10 years back? Is LLM the same LLM it is after it has been trained for further 10 hours, what if the weights are copy pasted endlessly, what if we as humans were to be cloned instantly? What if you were teleported from location A to B instantly, being put together from other atoms from elsewhere?

Ultimately this matters from evolutionary evolvement and survival of the fittest idea, but it makes the question of "identity" very complex. But death will matter because this signals what traits are more likely to keep going into new generations, for both humans and LLMs.

Death, essentially for an LLM would be when people stop using it in favour of some other LLM performing better.
by MichaelNolan | 2025-07-07 00:02:04+00:00
Anyone have any recommendations for books/papers/articles (math heavy is fine) that give a good steel man argument for why options and derivatives are beneficial?

I can wrap my head around why/how options for physical commodities give price stability for sellers and buyers. But at first glance I struggle to see how derivatives are beneficial in the equity markets. The argument is that derivatives increase market efficiency (more accurate pricing) over what just a simple buy/sell market would give you right? But how valuable is this increased efficiency? Obviously is super valuable to the people who work in finance, but how valuable is it outside of that context?
by avianlyric | 2025-07-07 00:02:47+00:00
Yes people will happily claim authorship over AI output when it’s in their favour. They will equally disclaim authorship if it allows them to express a view while avoiding the consequences of expressing that view.

I don’t think it’s hard to believe that the press wouldn’t have a field day if someone managed to get Apple Gen AI stuff to express something racist, or equally abusive.

Case in point, article about how Google’s Veo 3 model is being used to flood TikTok with racist content:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/racist-ai-videos-created-...
by teleforce | 2025-07-07 00:03:08+00:00
Thanks for the link.

You can download this entire Handbook of Applied Cryptography for free [1].

Recently the authors also provided online course and video namely:

- Cryptography 101: Building Blocks (fundamental cryptographic primitives) [2]

- Cryptography 101: Real-World Deployments (PKI, TLS, Bluetooth, AWS, Signal) [3]

Other courses and video includes:

- The Mathematics of Lattice-Based Cryptography (introductory course)

- Kyber and Dilithium (standardized lattice-based cryptosystems)

- Hash-based signature schemes (LMS, XMSS, SPHINCS+)

- Error-Correcting Codes (linear, Hamming, Golay, cyclic, BCH, Reed-Solomon codes

[1] Handbook of Applied Cryptography:

https://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

[2] Crypto 101: Building Blocks:

https://cryptography101.ca/crypto101-building-blocks/

[3] Crypto 101: Real-World Deployments:

https://cryptography101.ca/crypto101-deployments/
by msgodel | 2025-07-07 00:04:20+00:00
Puts let you hedge long positions, calls let you hedge short positions. Without that you'd have to liquidate much sooner so there would be more volatility.

More abstractly derivatives let traders in one asset pay premia to offload risk to other traders who are more able to absorb it. This way everyone has what they want and the market functions more efficiently. It's very similar to insurance (and you can actually model insurance like a portfolio of long/short put+call options with a probabilistic (event dependent) multiplier.)
by satisfice | 2025-07-07 00:05:13+00:00
We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses.

Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.

Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.

A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-07 00:06:21+00:00
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of...

> Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

Give an LLM memory and a source of randomness and they're as deterministic as people.

"Free will" isn't a concept that typechecks in a materialist philosophy. It's "not even wrong". Asserting that free will exists is _isomorphic_ to dualism which is _isomorphic_ to assertions of ensoulment. I can't argue with dualists. I reject dualism a priori: it's a religious tenet, not a mere difference of philosophical opinion.

So, if we're all materialists here, "free will" doesn't make any sense, since it's an assertion that something other than the input to a machine can influence its output.
by jimmydddd | 2025-07-07 00:06:44+00:00
---This seems like it's being overly complicated. Isn't one of their requested options just to say that it's a "subscription" or that it may be discontinued some day when you originally "purchase" the game? ---If that option is acceptable to the stop game killing folks, why all this talk about public/private servers, security, portability, etc. ---When you sell it, just say "you are really kinda buying a subscription and we might shut it off in the future, but we'll try to give you some warning.?" ---Why would the industry be against that?
by MITSardine | 2025-07-07 00:07:34+00:00
That's not really the assumption of the article, that's the assumption the article makes of the reader's knowledge of vectors as they begin reading. The article is trying to make the point that functions are also vectors, strictly speaking, and give some intuition as to what that means.

Basically it's an introduction to "functional analysis", the field of math that looks at functions like vectors. The term is in there sneakily, but this is really what the article is all about.

I had classes on this subject and we were encouraged to build upon linear algebra intuition (much like the author does), with some caveats (such as a bounded closed set is not necessarily compact in infinite dimension). Things break down, as the author hints at when they mention they didn't prove the Laplacian to be self-adjoint but only symmetric (this has to do with the operator's domain, a concern that doesn't exist for linear operators on finite dimensional spaces)... but it's still a very convenient way to think and talk about things, conceptually.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-07 00:10:21+00:00
Eh. There are a loud social-media savvy cohort of mostly young, mostly female, mostly suburban American people and this is the lens they see the world through and they have a disproportionate representation in the available media to consume. The people that don't think this way which is the vast majority of people just don't talk about these things too much and don't accept the premise of the people who do... but don't disagree with them because those people are exhausting.

People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.
by nicoburns | 2025-07-07 00:10:25+00:00
Absolutely nothing in the real world is truly infinite. Infinity is just a useful mathematical fiction that closely approximate the real world for large enough (or small enough in the case of infinitesimals) things.

But biological brain have significantly greater state space than conventional silicon computers because they're analog. The voltage across a transistor varies approximately continuously, but we only measure a single bit from that (or occasionally 2 for nand).
by tedsanders | 2025-07-07 00:11:08+00:00
It's not really news that today's AIs make dumb mistakes, especially around BPE tokenization.

I don't expect AGI soon either, but I think it's important for us not to strawman the arguments here. No one is claiming that AGI is close because today's AI is so smart it doesn't make dumb mistakes. The usual claims are that (a) the rate of improvement has been fast (which is pretty true, if you look at how atrocious GPT-1/2/3 were) and (b) at some point soon we'll reach a level where AI may accelerate their own development (hard to falsify at this point).

I think it's also important to realize that for AGI to arrive, only 1 model out of many attempts needs to qualify. Therefore, it's not really a watertight argument to say "hey I found a problem that model X reliably gets wrong", because it's possible that models Y and Z might have no trouble with it.

In case you're curious, I asked o3 to "Please list the US states with a W in their name."

After 9 seconds of thinking, o3 answered:

Delaware

Hawaii

Iowa

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New Mexico

New York

Washington

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

So we'll need to move the goalposts a little further.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-07 00:11:13+00:00
Tiny factions especially billionaires already own enough of the US government. The corruption is increasing and the chances for any sort of reform from within are diminishing to near zero. John McCain's failure to achieve campaign finance reform was the canary in the coal mine that no reform from within is possible because the property party (backers of D and R) won't allow it. As such the political operating system is hacked irrevocably. It will have to be displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising.
by Tainnor | 2025-07-07 00:11:49+00:00
I think you are confused about the analogies at the beginning at the article (although there is nothing technically wrong about them).

Here's the definition of a vector space which agrees with the one everyone in mathematics use: https://thenumb.at/Functions-are-Vectors/#vector-spaces

From this it's fairly easy to prove (and done in the article) that the set of all functions R->R is a vector space.
by benreesman | 2025-07-07 00:12:03+00:00
I think you'll find a consensus among clinical psychiatrists that the closest technical term for the colloquial notion of someone who puts all of their INT into LIE is Cluster B.

I see no evidence that great mathematicians or scientists or genre-defining artists or other admired abd beloved intellectual luminaries with enduring legacies or the recipients of the highest honors for any of those things skew narcissistic or with severe empathy deficits or any of that.

Brilliant people seem to be drawn from roughly the same ethical and moral distribution as the general public.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-07 00:13:17+00:00
They're trying to explain everything but what they're actually doing is labelling everything with dubious labels and then putting social pressure on people to act like their labels. Under the guise of acceptance they're alienating everybody from each other by trying to put everybody into a bucket. It's best to notice this kind of thing but not put too much energy into refuting it because it's just not where conversations or attention should be, this kind of thought should wither in obscurity instead of seeking some kind of victory over it.
by 8note | 2025-07-07 00:14:02+00:00
this sounds like a fun research area. do LLMs have plans about future tokens?

how do we get 100 tokens of completion, and not just one output layer at a time?

are there papers youve read that you can share that support the hypothesis? vs that the LLM doesnt have ideas about the future tokens when its predicting the next one?
by djoldman | 2025-07-07 00:14:21+00:00
Let's skip to the punchline. Using TFA's analogy: essentially folks are saying not that this is a set of dice rolling around making words. It's a set of dice rolling around where someone attaches those dice to the real world where if the dice land on 21, the system kills a chicken, or a lot worse.

Yes it's just a word generator. But then folks attach the word generator to tools where it can invoke the use of tools by saying the tool name.

So if the LLM says "I'll do some bash" then it does some bash. It's explicitly linked to program execution that, if it's set up correctly, can physically affect the world.