MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djtango | 2025-07-07 08:59:15+00:00
YMMV, I'm now at a stage where I am limited by my ability to play arpeggios and scales fast and accurately enough and tbh I think it's probably more productive to just practise scales and arpeggios than to practise the passage in question.

Scales and Arpeggios also bed the keys into your muscle memory which I've found it has made learning harmony a lot quicker as I can take a progression and experiment with it in the various keys and also experiment with different voice leadings by messing with the inversions.

But if the pressing concern is staying motivated and/or enjoying the instrument through playing then I agree that an excessive focus on fundamentals is going to be a slog
by whilenot-dev | 2025-07-07 08:59:47+00:00
I don't know about others, but I much prefer if some reductionist tries to conclude what's technically feasible and is proven wrong over time, than somebody yelling holistic analogies á la "it's sentient, it's intelligent, it thinks like us humans" for the sole dogmatic reason of being a futurist.

Tbh I also think your comparison that puts "UI events -> Bits -> Transistor Voltages" as analogy to "AI thinks -> token de-/encoding + MatMul" is certainly a stretch, as the part about "Bits -> Transistor Voltages" applies to both hierarchies as the foundational layer.

"chain of thought" could probably be called "progressive on-track-inference" and nobody would roll an eye.
by BlackFly | 2025-07-07 08:59:49+00:00
In order to hold someone accountable for their actions you need to allow them a choice in the first place. Disallowing children from making choices is one way of protecting them from the consequences of a bad decision: by not allowing them to make it in the first place. That is what coddling is, protecting from the environment. Protecting them from the choice is just a more extreme version of shielding them from the consequences.
by submeta | 2025-07-07 09:01:04+00:00
They should not, and they cannot. Doing therapy can be a long process where the therapist tries to help you understand your reality, view a certain aspect of your life in a different way, frame it differently, try to connect dots between events and results in your life, or tries to help you heal, by slowly approaching certain topics or events in your life, daring to look into that direction, and in that process have room for mourning, and so much more.

All of this can take months or years of therapy. Nothing that a session with an LLM can accomplish. Why? Because LLMs won’t read between lines, ask you uncomfortable questions, have a plan for weeks, months and years, make appointments with you, or steer the conversation into totally different ways if necessary. And it won‘t sit in front of you, give you room to cry, contain your pain, give you a tissue, give you room for your emotions, thoughts, stories.

Therapy is a complex interaction between human beings, a relationship, not the process of asking you questions, and getting answers from a bot. It’s the other way around.
by quonn | 2025-07-07 09:01:32+00:00
> To claim that LLMs do not experience consciousness requires a model of how consciousness works.

Nope. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Hitchens's razor.

You know you have consciousness (by the very definition that you can observe it in yourself) and that's evidence. Because other humans are genetically and in every other way identical, you can infer it for them as well. Because mammals are very similar many people (but not everyone) infers it for them as well. There is zero evidence for LLMs and their _very_ construction suggests that they are like a calculator or like Excel or like any other piece of software no matter how smart they may be or how many tasks they can do in the future.

Additionally I am really surprised by how many people here confuse consciousness with intelligence. Have you never paused for a second in your life to "just be". Done any meditation? Or even just existed at least for a few seconds without a train of thought? It is very obvious that language and consciousness are completely unrelated and there is no need for language and I doubt there is even a need for intelligence to be conscious.

Consider this:

In the end an LLM could be executed (slowly) on a CPU that accepts very basic _discrete_ instructions, such as ADD and MOV. We know this for a fact. Those instructions can be executed arbitrarily slowly. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that it should feel like anything to be the CPU to say nothing of how it would subjectively feel to be a MOV instruction. It's ridiculous. It's unscientific. It's like believing that there's a spirit in the tree you see outside, just because - why not? - why wouldn't there be a spirit in the tree?
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-07 09:02:06+00:00
"Not conscious" is a silly claim.

We have no agreed-upon definition of "consciousness", no accepted understanding of what gives rise to "consciousness", no way to measure or compare "consciousness", and no test we could administer to either confirm presence of "consciousness" in something or rule it out.

The only answer to "are LLMs conscious?" is "we don't know".

It helps that the whole question is rather meaningless to practical AI development, which is far more concerned with (measurable and comparable) system performance.
by kosolam | 2025-07-07 09:02:56+00:00
I can design such a system in a couple of minutes. As the adjacent commenter said it can be done with a blockchain, using smart contacts. 1. Sender deposits fee 2. Message includes unlocking code that itself only can be unlocked by the recipient 3. Message getting wrapped with details of forwarders while it moves between peers 4. Recipient unlocks the message via the smart contract thereby releasing the micropayments to the forwarders
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-07 09:03:06+00:00
Well with recent versions of Windows 11 there are breaking changes in the File Explorer that are sometimes unsurmountable if you are using the Basic Display Adapter.

This might just be a quick and easy substitute.

Coming from Microsoft it looks really up-to-date, showing the recognizable "inetpub" folder in the example screenshot.

It is a little disappointing they have not posted an exe though.
by dataflow | 2025-07-07 09:03:23+00:00
I think you're missing a key point here.

The (business) reason you don't punish people for a mistake as a general policy isn't that you're being a forgiving soul and giving them a second chance. It's because humans have a natural unavoidable tendency to eventually make certain errors in certain roles, and it's counterproductive to punish the poor soul that happened to make that mistake. It could've been anyone else, and you're punishing the one who has the best experience for avoiding the same mistake in the future. You should instead use their experience to design a process that catches those mistakes.

That rationale goes completely out the window when you're talking about lapses in judgment that the average employee would absolutely not make, like a random unauthorized Easter egg that could put the company in legal jeopardy. It's like if a surgeon brought his Playstation to the operating room. It's not a case of "we just spent $cost training him" anymore - that was never even part of his job description in the first place, nor something anyone would have expected him to even try. There was simply no reason for it; it was just an employee fooling around and planning to apologize for it afterward. (!) At that point you're dealing with something that's much closer to an insider threat than a human error.

So, as a matter of general policy, firing him for that would have absolutely made sense. Of course individual cases may warrant different reactions, but the general reasoning for blameless mistakes simply would absolutely not have applied here.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-07 09:04:00+00:00
Not any more, it does not. You are reading a warning that was put on that page a few years ago. Things have changed over the 6 years since Windows 10 release 1903. In particular, a couple of years later Microsoft was (interestingly, not always but sometimes, and no-one has really pinned down in what exact circumstances) turning that setting on by default in Windows 11.
by freehorse | 2025-07-07 09:04:19+00:00
> a key facet of a "diagnosed" disorder tends to be whether or not it (negatively) affects your life.

Which also brings us to an important point that is totally missed in the article and most of the discussion imo: maybe one of the (many) things that have changed is that lives are more negatively affected by stuff nowadays (or more reported to be so). We live in increasingly complex societies, we have to socialise with more and more people and navigate more demanding and fluid social dynamics. Traits that can be advantageous in a certain context can be disadvantageous in another (and affect one's life negatively).
by rsynnott | 2025-07-07 09:04:27+00:00
See, this is the thing, I don't think there is. Like, maybe low single-digit percentages, but Trump is very good at getting his people to fall in line, and balancing the budget, for most Republicans, seems to be more a kind of symbolic creed than an actual goal.

If one was serious about balancing the budget, why would one vote for Trump, who, remember, _already_ massively expanded the deficit in his first term?
by t43562 | 2025-07-07 09:04:36+00:00
You could have a way to earn credits which would allow your own messages to get sent. i.e. it wouldn't be about money.

Ontop of that, I think payment isn't critical. You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself - all you need then is to limit how much power you're prepared to spend on it. What does it matter to you if 100 people use your phone or none? ....other than power.

To put it another way, I think money would introduce a commercial motive which would end up gobbling up the system like bitcoin mining.
by voidUpdate | 2025-07-07 09:05:28+00:00
I mean, I think the dances used to promote the song are just part of the film, like any other music video that isn't just the band playing the song (my mind immediately fell to The White Stripes: Fell In Love With a Girl but there must be tonnes of examples).

I think that a song by a vtuber is unlikely to top the charts right now because they're still not quite mainstream enough for that. I think the current perception of them is similar to how anime was perceived in the past ("Look at all those weebs simping over their fictional girlfriends"), but it is heading towards mainstream. HoloEN did a lot to popularise it in the western world, and I don't think it's unlikely that a song by a vtuber could gain more widespread popularity in the near future. They have the talent for it, it's just not quite escaped the "streamer" bubble
by CurtMonash | 2025-07-07 09:06:07+00:00
I was told that a book published in honor of Oscar Zariski's 80th birthday included a paper by Oscar Zariski, either proving or at least making progress on a longstanding conjecture by Oscar Zariski.

I was in the relevant department at the time (Harvard math), but I wasn't much of an algebraic geometer, so I took that at face value without probing for details.
Created a Clipboard Tool for Researchers
by zhangsihai | 2025-07-07 09:06:21+00:00
The function is very simple, compressing some time-wasting operations into three seconds: copy -> shortcut key pops up currently supported operations -> select the operation and paste. For example, doi is converted to bibtex, matrix is converted to latex, and style selection is supported, table is converted to latex, and style selection is supported. All these not difficult but time-wasting operations can be quickly converted through this small tool without interrupting current thinking and switching web applications. If this tool is useful to you, I hope to get your suggestions
by Luker88 | 2025-07-07 09:07:14+00:00
It is probably connected.

Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing.

Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers.

Like the article says: "situations like these are surprisingly few in English"
by kristjank | 2025-07-07 09:08:28+00:00
Oooh, boy. Almost no-one wants to talk about it because it's considered harmful (or even taboo) to blame being gay and especially being trans on social contagion and similar phenomena.

If you point out that a controversial phenomenon is very dependent on social elements, you also invite discussions whether something should be fine-tuned in our society to influence it, which turns into a political issue.
by 082349872349872 | 2025-07-07 09:09:13+00:00
Are you saying Gen-A/Z is subaltern in a way different to the traditional disaffection of youth?

> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment..." —HMH's Bishop
by voidUpdate | 2025-07-07 09:09:24+00:00
Honestly, I'm not too surprised. "Fictional" bands have existed for a while and gotten a lot of attention, for example Gorillaz, and they've gotten lots of awards. Feel Good Inc. has charted extremely well in the past (apparently it only got to number 14 in the us? though they are English so maybe it didn't translate perfectly). K-Pop is also becoming more widely popular outside of Asian countries (see BTS), so I think it was inevitable. Pop/Stars by K/DA is very similar, being a kpop song by a "fictional" group, and that has had similar success in the past
by iainmerrick | 2025-07-07 09:09:44+00:00
I remember that crayon picker very well! I was always intrigued that it had a slightly different visual style than the rest of the UI, but I would never have guessed it was created by the author of Glider.

In hindsight, this is a really well-designed UI. It's skeuomorphic in that it resembles physical crayons with some 3D shading; but at the same time has a flat layout -- the crayons are in a regular grid rather than a realistic 3D perspective. Good combination of attractive, clear and usable.
by pmontra | 2025-07-07 09:10:01+00:00
Yes, I'll always remember the long time spent asking for the whereabouts of Ocean Drive, mispronounced by me because the correct pronunciation would require the word to be written as Oshean or maybe Oshan. It was 1995. I have had very few occasions to hear native speakers. A lot of people and I were figuring out plausible but incorrect pronunciations by applying the most usual pronunciation rules to the written words.
by randomtoast | 2025-07-07 09:10:14+00:00
Although ESRI officially states that ArcGIS Enterprise runs on both Linux and Windows, the reality is that on Linux it operates through Wine, meaning there is no true native Linux version. As a result, most organizations choose to install it on Windows Server.

When it comes to the installation itself, be prepared for a highly involved process. ESRI typically schedules two full days with your company just for the installation and you will likely need every minute of it. The setup involves a long series of steps, many of which feel reminiscent of software deployment practices from the 90s.
by amyxs | 2025-07-07 09:10:16+00:00
AirDroid and its products are developed by SandStudio, a tech company based in Singapore, not China.

Regarding security, your claims are unfounded. AirDroid has published official statements outlining a pretty robust setup for security and privacy. They explicitly talk about using end-to-end encryption for remote access, HTTPS/SSL for data transfer, and they clearly state they don't sell user data. They also specify that access to your device is only based on the permissions you grant.
by vlade11115 | 2025-07-07 09:10:32+00:00
> do I have to pay API based costs Usually, yes, you do. However, in this case, opencode kinda cheats by using Antropic client ID and pretending to be Claude Code, so it can use your existing subscription. > We recommend signing up for Claude Pro or Max, running opencode auth login and selecting Anthropic. It’s the most cost-effective way to use opencode. https://opencode.ai/docs/
by adrian_b | 2025-07-07 09:10:51+00:00
While Lunar Lake has excellent energy efficiency and AMD does not really have any CPU designed for low power levels, Lunar Lake had also a very ugly hardware bug (sporadic failure of MWAIT to detect the waking event).

This bug has disqualified Lunar Lake for me, and I really do not understand how such a major bug has not been discovered before the product launch (the bug has been discovered when in many computers running Linux the keyboard or the mouse did not function properly, because their events were not always reported to the operating system; there are simple workarounds for the bug, but not using MONITOR/MWAIT eliminates one of the few advantages that Intel/AMD CPUs have over Arm-based CPUs, so I do not consider this as an acceptable solution).
by bjackman | 2025-07-07 09:11:07+00:00
Yeah I think it's pretty inconceivable at this point that Sapiens were the first ones to have language.

I think it's still reasonable to argue that Neandertals lacked certain capacities that we have, based on differences in the evidence from tools and art that's attributed to them vs Sapiens.

But IMO this would clearly have been a difference of degree, not at atomic shift. They were obviously _people_.
by flir | 2025-07-07 09:11:12+00:00
Agreeing with you, this is a "can a submarine swim" problem IMO. We need a new word for what LLMs are doing. Calling it "thinking" is stretching the word to breaking point, but "selecting the next word based on a complex statistical model" doesn't begin to capture what they're capable of.

Maybe it's cog-nition (emphasis on the cog).
by pjc50 | 2025-07-07 09:11:19+00:00
It's helpful to remember the history of how they got here. Commodity producers (farms, oil) need to make investments before production, but want to reduce their exposure to changes in the spot price in the future. Hence futures: the ability to sell oil or onions six months in the future at an agreed price, rather than wait until the day to find out spot. This is genuinely valuable to them in terms of shifting risk to the finance industry in return for a price. It's like insurance.

Options are then futures where you don't necessarily have to close out the position. They are a means of insuring against price changes .. or to get paid for providing such insurance.

However, in things like farming and oil exploration much of the risk is real and physical. The further away you get from that to derivatives of other financial instruments, the more it becomes just a mix of what the other market players are doing.

Then there's "we priced these risks as de-correlated but actually they're correlated", which blew up a lot of people in 2008.
by Ygg2 | 2025-07-07 09:11:26+00:00
> Kids almost never gets it their way.

Speak for yourself. I've seen 2 year olds being able to choose their clothes and if they don't get their way, they throw a temper tantrum so bad they vomit.

And I fear, the child will turn into another Cartman. I.e. spoiled beyond any belief.
by yorwba | 2025-07-07 09:11:34+00:00
It's true that the last layer's output for a given input token only affects the corresponding output token and is discarded afterwards. But the penultimate layer's output affects the computation of the last layer for all future tokens, so it is not discarded, but stored (in the KV cache). Similarly for the antepenultimate layer affecting the penultimate layer and so on.

So there's plenty of space in intermediate layers to store a plan between tokens without starting from scratch every time.
by CurtMonash | 2025-07-07 09:12:05+00:00
I was one of several math grad students who started at Harvard at age 16 or 17 aroud the same time. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi went on to conventional academic math careers. I took a less straightforward career path.

But I was offered an assistant professorship at the Kellogg School of Business at age 21, and have often wondered whether I should perhaps have taken that, or else the research position I was offered at RAND.
by svachalek | 2025-07-07 09:12:19+00:00
You mean the classic easter eggs from the 70s and 80s? There were no corporate drones writing software back then. I learned to program in 1980 and have been doing it for a living since 1990.

Most programmers were enthusiasts working for themselves or for small companies. Microsoft was like 20 people including non technical staff? Apple was tiny too. They tended to be independent minded, anti establishment types, completely unlike today's crop of youth who spout hustle culture and corporate jargon. Go look at pictures of what teams at Apple, Microsoft, or Atari looked like. It was a very different time.

For comparison I guess look at the top scientists at OpenAI or something, do you think they're bored and disaffected while doing some of the most impactful work of their time?
by KronisLV | 2025-07-07 09:13:27+00:00
> we will end up spending all of our time on what we previously considered to be the most difficult 50% of tasks

Either that, or replacing the time with slacking off and not even getting whatever benefits doing the easiest tasks might have had (learning, the feeling of accomplishing something), like what some teachers see with writing essays in schools and homework.

The tech has the potential to let us do less busywork (which is great, even regular codegen for boilerplate and ORM mappings etc. can save time), it's just that it might take conscious effort not to be lazy with this freed up time.
by sardine5 | 2025-07-07 09:14:03+00:00
I'd stayed away from WiFi Direct because Android and iOS don't play nicely with it - but looks like the EU has forced Apple to support WiFi Aware in iOS 26. It still looks like it would require A LOT of manual pairing through the system UI if you join a group with new people though. I really wanted to keep the single password (or qr code scan/NFC tap) to join.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-07 09:14:25+00:00
> Lookup tables are always faster than calculation - is that true?

Maybe on the Z80. Contemporary RAM was quite fast compared to it, by our sad standards.

A table lookup per byte will see you hit a pretty hard limit of about 1 cycle per byte on all x86 CPUs of the last decade. If you’re doing a state machine or a multistage table[1] where the next table index depends on both the next byte and the previous table value, you’ll be lucky to see half that. Outracing your SSD[2] you’re not, with this approach.

If instead you can load a 64-bit chunk (or several!) at a time, you’ll have quite a bit of leeway to do some computation to it before you’re losing to the lookup table, especially considering you’ve got fast shifts and even multiplies (another difference from the Z80). And if you’re doing 128- or 256-bit vectors, you’ve got even more compute budget—but you’re also going to spend a good portion of it just shuffling the right bytes into the right positions. Ultimately, though, one of your best tools there is going to be ... an instruction that does 16 resp. 32 lookups in a 16-entry table at a time[3].

So no, if you want to be fast on longer pieces of data, in-memory tables are not your friend. On smaller data, with just a couple of lookups, they could be[4]. In any case, you need to be thinking about your code’s performance in detail for these things to matter—I can’t think of a situation where “prefer a lookup table” is a useful heuristic. “Consider a lookup table” (then measure), maybe.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/ch05.pdf

[2] https://lemire.me/en/talk/perfsummit2020/

[3] http://0x80.pl/notesen/2008-05-24-sse-popcount.html

[4] https://tia.mat.br/posts/2014/06/23/integer_to_string_conver...