MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bloaf | 2025-08-16 04:24:03+00:00
I think it is important to remember that "decades" here means <20 years. Remember that in 2004 it was considered sufficiently impossible that basically no one had a car that could be reliably controlled by a computer, let alone driven by computer alone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004)

I also think that most job domains are not actually more nuanced or complex than driving, at least from a raw information perspective. Indeed, I would argue that driving is something like a worst-case scenario when it comes to tasks:

* It requires many different inputs, at high sampling rates, continuously (at the very least, video, sound, and car state)

* It requires loose adherence to laws in the sense that there are many scenarios where the safest and most "human" thing to do is technically illegal.

* It requires understanding of driving culture to avoid making decisions that confuse/disorient/anger other drivers, and anticipating other drivers' intents (although this can be somewhat faked with sufficiently fast reaction times)

* It must function in a wide range of environments: there is no "standard" environment

If we compare driving to other widespread-but-low-wage jobs (e.g. food prep, receptionists, cleaners) there are generally far more relaxed requirements:

* Rules may be unbreakable as opposed to situational, e.g. the cook time for burgers is always the same.

* Input requirements may be far lower. e.g. an AI receptionist could likely function with audio and a barcode scanner.

* Cultural cues/expectations drive fewer behaviors. e.g. an AI janitor just needs to achieve a defined level of cleanliness, not gauge people's intent in real-time.

* Operating environments are more standardized. All these jobs operate indoors with decent lighting.
by jstgunderscore | 2025-08-16 04:24:13+00:00
Firstly, I think a lot of commenters here should ask themselves "Do you believe that ANY machine could EVER be intelligent?"

Unless you believe in the magic sauce of a supernatural soul/mind/etc, our brains function as deterministic biological machines. There's essentially nothing that separates the processing and memory potential of silicon from neurons. And if the building blocks can be made analogous, then all the same emergent properties are possible. There's no reason to believe a circuit couldn't be made to behave in exactly the same way as a human brain. I'm not saying that's where LLMs are; only that it is theoretically possible. So if you imagine such a machine, and you deem that it is not intelligent, you have reserved intelligence as an exclusive human trait and this entire discussion is meaningless.

Secondly, although I'm not in either pro or anti LLM-intelligence camp, I find a lot of the arguments against machine intelligence disingenuous and/or unbalanced.

For instance the "Can't process information it's not familiar with" argument. Another commenter stated the case of scientific papers that it doesn't have any reference for, that it may hallucinate a garbage interpretation of the paper. Not surprising, but guess what, a human would do the same thing if they were forced! Imagine holding a gun to someone's head and telling them to explain a concept or system they've never heard of. That's essentially what we're doing with LLMs; obviously we don't need to threaten, because we haven't given them agency to say no.

Another example is the "Can't be novel, unique, or create something completely new." First of all, difficult to prove, but okay let's take it as given that an LLM can't be novel. Can you prove that a human can? We make all these assumptions on how intelligent and creative we are as humans, and how original our thoughts can be... but how original are they, and can we prove it? How do you know your original thought, or Beethoven's 5th, or the fast inverse square root trick was completely separate from any prior influences? Or... was that "original thought" the conglomeration of a thousand smaller inputs and data points that you trained on, that became part of your brains subconscious processing system, and came together in a synthesis that looks like brilliance.

Finally, whenever this discussion comes up with friends I ask them to think of the least intelligent person they know. Then imagine how many of those there are in the world (likely millions). Could you imagine any conceivable test of any length or depth which would designate all the those humans as intelligent, and all the LLMs as not? I certainly can't. I highly doubt there could be anything approaching 100% accuracy at this point.

Ultimately I think we should ditch both the intelligence and consciousness questions. We can't define them in ourselves, we certainly can't define them in another entity. Let's just come to terms with the fact we're highly functioning biological machines who are both scared and excited to have created something so similar to us.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-08-16 04:24:46+00:00
Southwest is a public company. Elliott Investment Management owns 11% of southwest. Elliot is a hedge fund, not private equity, but thats semantics. More importantly, Elliot purchased its position in direct response to the holiday meltdown in 2022. Im not a southwest flier, but it seems their problems started before the capital moved in.
by magicalist | 2025-08-16 04:24:48+00:00
> I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.

Unless your two hands are building murderbots, though, it doesn't matter what you're building if you can't grow or buy food.

I haven't personally seen how UBI could end up working viably, but I also don't see any other system working without much more massive societal changes than anyone is talking about.

Meanwhile, there are many many people that are very invested in maintaining massive differentials between the richest and the poorest that will be working against even the most modest changes.
by kachapopopow | 2025-08-16 04:24:53+00:00
This is honestly less trustworthy than nordvpn from my POV. The problem with confidential compute is that given enough technical expertise (ime exploits) all these systems are possible to compromise which is perfect for honeypots. Kinda sounds like one of those interpol plots with phones designed for criminals.

I always found confidential compute to be only good to isolate the hosting company from risk - not the customer!
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-16 04:25:18+00:00
Actually it was Nixon who single-handedly pushed manufacturing to China, and Reagan who pushed harder.

Clinton just didn't do anything serious which could reverse this, and other Republican actions are what "allowed" further Chinese growth rates than that.

IOW almost anybody who had any influence was allowing prosperity to recede from our shores more so than Clinton.

not my downvote btw
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-16 04:25:26+00:00
This is not a proof by contradiction - you have stated an assumption followed by a bunch of non-sequitors about what LLMs can and can't do, also known as begging the question. Under the conditions of your assumption (namely that LLMs are plenty powerful with the right context) why would you believe anything in your last paragraph? That's how a proof by contradiction works.

(not saying you are wrong, necessarily, but I don't think this argument holds water)
by crummy | 2025-08-16 04:25:41+00:00
> However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful and independent of humans, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots.

Aren't the markets massively puffed up by AI companies at the moment?

edit: for example, the S&P500's performance with and without the top 10 (which is almost totally tech companies) looks very different: https://i.imgur.com/IurjaaR.jpeg
by geodel | 2025-08-16 04:26:55+00:00
You make great points above and here.

I feel one key social dynamic is travel, tourism, exploring the world is relentlessly promoted as unalloyed good. Cities all over are falling over each other as great place to "explore" and "experience" much more than being good place to live, work or raise family.

If I see through this promotion I am the curmudgeon who doesn't love the joys of travel.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-16 04:27:13+00:00
I actually find it hard to understand how the market is supposed to react if the AI capabilities does surpass all humans in all domains. It's first of all not clear such a scenario leads to runaway wealth for a few, even though with no outside events that may be the outcome. However, such scenarios are so unsustainable and catastrophic it's hard to imagine there are no catastrophic reactions to it. How is the market supposed to react if there's a large chance of market collapse and also a large chance of runaway wealth creation? Besides the point that in an economy where AI surpass humans the demands of the market will shift drastically too. Which I also think is underrepresented in predictions, which is the induced demand of AI-replaced labor and the potential for entire industries to be decimated by secondary effects instead of direct AI competition/replacement at labor scale.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-16 04:27:42+00:00
> Unless you have your own fully stocked private bunker with security detail, you will be affected.

If society collapses, there’s nothing to stop your security detail from killing you and taking the bunker for themselves.

I’d expect warlords to rise up from the ranks of military and police forces in a post collapse feudal society. Tech billionaires wouldn’t last long.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-08-16 04:28:47+00:00
My favorite post in a long time. Super straightforward, confirms my own early experiences but the author has gone further than I have and I can already see how his hard-won insight is going to save me time and money. One change I’m going to make immediately is to use cheaper/faster/simpler models for 3/4 of my tasks. This will also set things up nicely for having some tasks run on local models in the future.
by philosophty | 2025-08-16 04:29:18+00:00
It's very obvious that people, seeming you as well, take some delight in the idea that Steve Jobs killed himself with arrogance.

That is morally repugnant. He was a pancreatic cancer patient coping with his diagnoses the best he could manage. The fact that he was a "billionaire" has nothing to do with it. He was a human and all sentient life is sacred in my view.

You also do not actually know the facts of the case. He did not spread disinformation to anyone. He was intensely private during this entire period and very little information is known for a fact.

But by all means enjoy your mocking, judging, and condemnation of cancer patients. I'll continue to find it morally repugnant.
by dvrj101 | 2025-08-16 04:29:21+00:00
> Americans have no more right to success in America than non-Americans. Americans literally voted to defund the education system, voted for administration(s) that will amplify spending money to hire foreigners to keep America center of top talent/skill across domains and most importantly voted for extreme capitalism.

Indians or Canadians are not forcing US to hire them bud, https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...
Design History in India
by vbhv_v | 2025-08-16 04:31:05+00:00
Written from the city of Ahmedabad. This text was an outcome of some conversations with designers and educators I met in Ahmedabad in 2024.

---

Design History in India is a bit like a forgotten library book—interesting, potentially valuable, but inexplicably missing from the shelf when you really need it. Despite a rich post-independence history where tradition and modernity mingled in strange and wonderful ways, hardly anyone thought to write any of it down. I suspect it’s because designers, by nature, are far too busy designing things to stop and write about them.

Last week I stumbled upon one of the strangest and most delightful stories of forgotten tech and design history: the Apple Newton in India. Yes, the Newton—the 1980s precursor to the iPhone and iPad that promised the future but tripped and fell into the past instead. Someone I met in Ahmedabad, who’d been on the front lines of this saga, told me about how Apple, in a final fit of desperation, decided to bring the Newton to India. The idea? Sell it to the government. You know, as one does when one’s cutting-edge tech product is at death’s door.

The plan was simple: Apple would pitch the Newton as a revolutionary tool for social development, something field workers could use to collect data. And because governments like buying things in large quantities (especially if it sounds vaguely useful), this might just save the Newton. The best part? They even carried out research in rural Rajasthan, where, much to everyone’s surprise, people actually liked and understood it. Sticky that Apple products are, field workers couldn't get their hands off them. Imagine someone in the middle of a desert casually collecting soil data on a device that looked like it belonged in Star Trek.

For a year, everything was going well. And then, in true Apple fashion, they pulled the plug. The Newton project here was shelved.

Of course, this reminded me of another quirky bit of design/tech history: the Simputer, a handheld device designed in Bangalore in the 1990s. If the Newton was the eccentric aunt, the Simputer was the mad scientist cousin—another ingenious, mostly forgotten attempt at reshaping the future by Indian technologists that didn't work out. This thing even had an accelerometer. Yes, you heard that right—an accelerometer, in the ‘90s! To demo it they created a Ball Bearing Maze game, which, had the Simputer survived, would’ve probably been more addictive than Snake on your trusty Nokia. But alas, like all good things, it vanished before we could waste hours tilting LCD screens in sheer joy.

What really gets to me is this: there are so many stories like these lurking around in dusty corners, waiting to be told. Yet, as the original storytellers grow older (and some shuffle off this mortal coil), we’re losing these tales faster than we can say, “Please back up your hard drive.”

History is slipping through our fingers, and I can’t help but think that somewhere in all this mess of forgotten devices and discarded dreams, there’s a manual on how to fix it all. It's probably filed under "Things We’ll Get To Eventually."

---
by kachapopopow | 2025-08-16 04:31:09+00:00
That's not what they;re trying to prove. Only one server is give the certificate to authenticate with you, you connect to that server, every message with that server is authenticated with that certificate.

They are proving that they are the ones hosting the VPN server - not some server that stole their software and are running a honeypot and that the hosting company has not tampered with it.

So in the end you still have to trust the company that they are not sharing the certificates with 3rd parties.
by shayief | 2025-08-16 04:32:19+00:00
> in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots

With many engineers using copilots and since LLMs output the most frequent patterns, it's possible that more and more software is going to look the same, which would further reinforce the same patterns.

For example, emdash thing, requires additional prompts and instructions to override it. Doing anything unusual would require more effort.
by jmalicki | 2025-08-16 04:33:27+00:00
None of the above purported facts are true.

From the link: Employment and Unemployment in California (Based on a monthly federal survey of 4,400 California households which focuses on workers in the economy)

This is federal not state data.

Federal unemployment data is based on this said survey. This link explicitly debunks that myth: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
by drewbeck | 2025-08-16 04:34:56+00:00
I’ve vibe coded a few very cool apps for my personal and professional life but every time I do it I’m left wondering: how revolutionary is this? It is _very_ cool and very helpful for me, but bespoke vibecoded apps are never going to replace the big apps my company spends money on: HubSpot, slack, Figma, canva, shortcut, gong, google stuff. So much of the magic in those apps is in robust multi user support and reliability. Sure I can vibe code a multiplayer app (I’ve done it!) but do I trust the auth implementation? If my team needs new features am I going to spend the time vibe coding and then QAing the full app again to make sure it hasn’t borked anything?

I think it’s great for long tail apps but I’m not at all sure what effect that will have, socially economically or culturally.

I can see huge utility in vibecoding as a front end for app customization — tell your BI platform to build you a dashboard with just the items you want, oh and add a button that opens our crm in a new window. Bespoke interfaces for existing, trusted platforms.

I love the idea that there’s some cyberpunk future waiting for us where there are no existing apps, just a way to construct utility on the fly. But imo it misses some core understanding of how people systems and apps actually work.
by edoceo | 2025-08-16 04:35:21+00:00
Once the bugs stack up, they'll call you back and it will be lots of billable hours. At least, that was the case for me; only took a few weeks before the clients own inconsistent requirements bite them in the ass. Gotta have a business+tech expert to make many products. AI is neither; and many folks can't prompt for shit (and can't spec for shit; and can't test for shit).
by w10-1 | 2025-08-16 04:35:38+00:00
This is one of many such API.

I spent decades in Java land using open-source libraries, where the quality was broad and deep. An enticing demo usually meant it was good all the way down.

With Apple, though, a nice demo means you can do exactly what they did, but be blocked if you step off the happy path. Worse, each developer needs to get bruised because there's no publicly available list of bugs for an API.

I'm grateful to those who publish critiques of API's. It's a life saver.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-16 04:35:39+00:00
> I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.

My apologies for being unclear and/or insufficiently explaining my position. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and giving me an opportunity to clarify.

The original post stated:

Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ...

To which I asserted:

This is demonstrably wrong.

And provided a link to what I thought to be an approachable tutorial regarding "How to Build Your Own Large Language Model", albeit a simple implementation as it is after all a tutorial.

The person having the account name "__float" replied to my post thusly:

That doesn't mean we _understand_ them, that just means we can put the blocks together to build one.

To which I interpreted the noun "them" to be the acronym "LLM's." I then inferred said acronym to be "Large Language Models." Furthermore, I took __float's sentence fragment:

That doesn't mean we _understand_ them ...

As an opportunity to share a reputable resource which:

.. can serve as a reference for anyone interested in large language models.

Is this a sufficient explanation regarding my previous posts such that you can now understand?
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-16 04:36:39+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22599809

DonHopkins on March 17, 2020 | prev | next [–]

Bullfrog's classic game "Theme Hospital" had really great emergent vomit cascades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y69QTjTvp1w

simcop2387 on March 17, 2020 | parent | next [–]

Two Point Hospital does fantastically as a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlaOYMU8qA

DonHopkins on March 17, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]

Cool, thank you! I'll check in and check it out. (Installing it now!) Does it have a "Bloaty Head" treatment? ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M

I played a LOT of Theme Hospital when working on The Sims 1, and aspired to make the Sims editing tools as easy to use and "clicky" as Theme Hospital was. That and some of Peter Molyneux's older games like Dungeon Keeper, with architectural editing and a lot of independent characters running around at the same time, had a lot of influence on The Sims.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-08-16 04:38:02+00:00
If your mother tongue is Korean (e.g Korean American) that only just started learning, it only take one day turnover from illiterate to literate.

Heritage speakers (of any language, not just Korean) often have limited vocabulary and limited exposure to complex grammar. Being able to sound out words wouldn't be enough to allow a heritage speaker able to fluently read a newspaper.

How many Korean-Americans know the Korean words for things like 'legislature', 'inflation', or 'geopolitical tensions'?
by itsalotoffun | 2025-08-16 04:40:02+00:00
While I'm certain you'll find plenty of people who believe in the principle of model welfare (or aliens, or the tooth fairy), it'd be surprising to me if the brain-trust behind Anthropic truly _believed_ in model "welfare" (the concept alone is ludicrous). It makes for great cover though to do things that would be difficult to explain otherwise, per OP's comments.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-16 04:40:06+00:00
They know full well models don’t have feelings.

The industry has a long, long history of silly names for basic necessary concepts. This is just “we don’t want a news story that we helped a terrorist build a nuke” protective PR.

They hire for these roles because they need them. The work they do is about Anthropic’s welfare, not the LLM’s.
by saurik | 2025-08-16 04:41:30+00:00
(First off, duskwuff's attack is pretty epic. I do feel like there might be a way to ensure there is only exactly one giant server--not that that would scale well--but, it also sounds like you didn't deal with it ;P. The rest of my comment is going to assume that you only have a single instance.)

A packet goes in to your server and a packet goes out of your server: the code managing the enclave can just track this (and someone not even on the same server can figure this out almost perfectly just by timing analysis). What are you, thereby, actually mixing up in the middle?

You can add some kind of probably-small (as otherwise TCP will start to collapse) delay, but that doesn't really help as people are sending a lot of packets from their one source to the same destination, so the delay you add is going to be over some distribution that I can statistics out.

You can add a ton of cover traffic to the server, but each interesting output packet is still going to be able to be correlated with one input packet, and the extra input packets aren't really going to change that. I'd want to see lots of statistics showing you actually obfuscated something real.

The only thing you can trivially do is prove that you don't know which valid paying user is sending you the packets (which is also something that one could think might be of value even if you did have a separate copy of the server running for every user that connected, as it hides something from you)...

...but, SGX is, frankly, a dumb way to do that, as we have ways to do that that are actually cryptographically secure -- aka, blinded tokens (the mechanism used in Privacy Pass for IP reputation and Brave for its ad rewards) -- instead of relying on SGX (which not only is, at best, something we have to trust Intel on, but something which is routinely broken).