MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by walterbell | 2025-08-13 00:17:56+00:00
Author is Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about

> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
by sbinnee | 2025-08-13 00:18:16+00:00
I started seeing a lot of dhh talking about Omarchy on twitter. It's been a joy to see fellow hyprland user, vocal about hyprland and linux. Linux users have been talking that every year that it's going to be the year of linux desktop, but now it feels so close when a person with big influence talks loud on social media.

I checked my git-log from my dotfiles. It says I installed hyprland 2023-07-23.

> 319649c 2023-07-23 (sbinnee) install(hyprland): wayland wm tag: hyprland

I used to run i3, dwm, bspwm (my favorite on X11) and tinkered with other wms. Since this commit, I have been full-time on Wayland. When Hyprland were young, it certainly had rough edges. But these days I don't feel overwhelmed even when I update several releases at once. It is stable and just works. The creator of hyprland, vaxry, is an incredible developer and maintainer. He's made so much progress on usability of Wayland.
by jongjong | 2025-08-13 00:19:41+00:00
Good point about no one batting an eyelid over Mac or Windows laptop mandate but people are shocked at a Linux mandate... But imagine their second shock when they realize how good Linux is nowadays. I always had the sense that Linux has been the victim of a conspiracy between other OS makers since its inception. It's been suppressed within enterprise environments and rarely discussed anywhere. Linux's success on the server side has been entirely organic, working against all media narratives and vested interests.

As a developer, I am much more productive with Linux than any other OS. The workspaces feature is better (on most distros I tried), the commands more closely align with the prod environment, no need for complex virtual machine setups, no weird delays or missing critical commands when using bash. Everything just works and performs.

IMO, this is the payoff of having architected the system properly from the ground up, it's more stable. You don't get so many weird glitches as you do on Windows.
by goatlover | 2025-08-13 00:20:06+00:00
> course, if physics does exist - i.e. the universe is governed by a finite set of laws

That statement is problematic. It implies a metaphysical set of laws that make physical stuff relate a certain way.

The Humean way of looking at physics is that we notice relationships and model those with various symbols. They symbols form incomplete models because we can't get to the bottom of why the relationships exist.

> that doesn't mean that we can predict the future, as that would entail both measuring things precisely and simulating them faster than their operation in nature, and both of these things are... difficult.

The indeterminism of Quantum Mechanics limits how how precise measure can be and how predictable the future is.
by xpe | 2025-08-13 00:20:22+00:00
I've found NixOS is fantastic for evolving my environment. Update `configuration.nix` and then `sudo nixos-rebuild switch`. Done.

What kind of "tweaks" are you doing? You could use `nix-shell` to try out a new environment. If you like it the environment, you can make it declarative by creating a `shell.nix` file.

If you want to go further, you might make consider making a flake, but I would recommend reading https://nix.dev/concepts/flakes.html first.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-13 00:20:52+00:00
> I don't think it's meaningful to blame any other countries like China and Vietnam for this development.

Obviously, they sold what the buyer was asking to buy.

> Global economic output increased and economic inequality in rich countries increased. > critique against globalization/our current system of trade should be taken seriously.

Globalization promised increased economic output and delivered, I assume you're OK with that.

Then your serious critique must be directed towards the increased economic inequality. However, there's no reason to believe that globalization has anything to do with that, on the contrary, given a trickle-down distribution system, inequality would increase with or without globalization.

It's kind of obvious now that globalization was implemented the way it was in order to increase inequality and... blame "globalization" for that outcome. This little trick allowed the libertarian foundations of trickle-down and competition-is-for-losers to remain intact, out of scrutiny and boosted by a giant dose of steroids.

In other words, the critique against globalization is a coverup for more of the same.

Trade can be balanced without tariffs... why tariffs then? Simple, because tariffs are a tax on the population at large, not on the top tier of inequality who created this mess. The latter get... why, they tax cuts ofcourse.

Do you still blame inequality on globalization?
by sfink | 2025-08-13 00:22:58+00:00
> What if "increasing intelligence", which is a very vague goal, has diminishing returns, making recursive self-improvement incredibly slow?

This is sort of what I subscribe to as the main limiting factor, though I'd describe it differently. It's sort of like Amdahl's Law (and I imagine there's some sort of Named law that captures it, I just don't know the name): the magic AI wand may be very good at improving some part of AGI capability, but the more you improve that part, the more the other parts come to dominate. Metaphorically, even if the juice is worth the squeeze initially, pretty soon you'll only be left with a dried-out fruit clutched in your voraciously energy-consuming fist.

I'm actually skeptical that there's much juice in the first place; I'm sure today's AIs could generate lots of harebrained schemes for improvement very quickly, but exploring those possibilities is mind-numbingly expensive. Not to mention that the evaluation functions are unreliable, unknown, and non-monotonic.

Then again, even the current AIs have convinced a large number of humans to put a lot of effort into improving them, and I do believe that there are a lot of improvements that humans are capable of making to AI. So the human-AI system does appear to have some juice left. Where we'll be when that fruit is squeezed down to a damp husk, I have no idea.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-13 00:23:27+00:00
I'm not in any way discounting the danger represented by those missiles. In fact I think AI only makes it more likely that they might someday be launched. But I will say that in my experience the error-condition that causes a system to fail is usually the one that didn't seem likely to happen, because the more obvious failure modes were taken seriously from the beginning. Is it so unusual to be able to consider more than one risk at a time?
by lyu07282 | 2025-08-13 00:24:57+00:00
There was this interview with Diane Benscoter who talked about her experience and reasons for joining a cult that I found very insightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ibk5vJ-4-o

The main point is that it isn't so much the cult (leader) so much as the victims being in a vulnerable mental state getting exploited.
by goostavos | 2025-08-13 00:26:29+00:00
I don't think you can capture the complexity of the world with a single variable. I'm at Amazon. We all make about the same. Some more than me. Some less. However, while I don't have to worry about changing jobs, or _not_ having a job (for awhile), they do. They're working with an entirely different set of pressures and constraints.

For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
by brulard | 2025-08-13 00:27:35+00:00
I think you misunderstand how context in current LLMs works. To get the best results you have to be very careful to provide what is needed for immediate task progression, and postpone context thats needed later in the process. If you give all the context at once, you will likely get quite degraded output quality. Thats like if you want to give a junior developer his first task, you likely won't teach him every corner of your app. You would give him context he needs. It is similar with these models. Those that provided 1M or 2M of context (Gemini etc.) were getting less and less useful after cca 200k tokens in the context.

Maybe models would get better in picking up relevant information from large context, but AFAIK it is not the case today.
by monooso | 2025-08-13 00:27:42+00:00
> Just like art and people's appearances, there's unanimously objective on what's beautiful and what's ugly.

Neither of those things is true. Plenty of artistic movements have been both praised and derided, and many people have a "type" which influences who they do (or don't) find attractive.

As to idea that there's a universally agreed-upon definition of objectively pleasing design, I suggest you take a look at the work of the Memphis Group.
by guerrilla | 2025-08-13 00:28:03+00:00
If you're interested in what's going on with GNU in general, GUIX is awesome. It's a package manager like Nix but purely GNU (using GNU Guile scheme). It's developed in tandem with the GNU Shepherd init system (instead of sysvinit/systemd/openrc/etc.) and there are distributions based on GNU Hurd kernel (or the Linux-libre kernel).

Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown [3] but I recommend booting up a VM image. It's actually quite beautiful. I love the purity of GNOME on a GNU/Hurd system with GUIX and Shepherd where the whole thing is configured in guile[4]. There's just something very aesthetic about the combination. I wish I could use it as my daily driver.

1. https://guix.gnu.org/

2. https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guix

4. https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-13 00:28:03+00:00
Original titled edited for length:

> Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study

Also available at:

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-1253(25)00133-5

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24681...

I haven't yet found the full text, so if someone else has a pre-print or something, that would perhaps aid the discussion.

In the news:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/gastroenterology/coloncancer/11...

> Relying on AI in Colonoscopies May Erode Clinicians' Skills

Maybe Socrates had a point after all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Discussion...

> No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain, Socrates states, but rather can only remind those that already know what writing is about. Furthermore, writings are silent; they cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense.

We have created the very situation that Socrates likely never thought possible, or even likely or desirable. We're in new territory, but Sophists and sophistry will always be with us. I think this study is important food for thought.

We shape our tools, and our tools shape us.
by gastonmorixe | 2025-08-13 00:29:59+00:00
I was dating someone and after a while I started to feel something was not going well. I exported all the chats timestamped from the very first one and asked a big SOTA LLM to analyze the chats deeply in two completely different contexts. One from my perspective, and another from his perspective. It shocked me that the LLM after a long analysis and dozen of pages, always favored and accepted the current "user" persona situation as the more correct one and "the other" as the incorrect one. Since then I learned not to trust them anymore. LLMs are over-fine tuned to be people pleasers, not truth seekers, not fact and evidence grounded assistants. Just need to run everything important in a double-blind way and mitigate this.
by lacker | 2025-08-13 00:30:18+00:00
This claim from the article is too extreme: "It is safe to say that prior to 1610 not a single significant scientific argument had turned on a question of fact."

Just in astronomy alone, in the previous century Tycho Brahe was debating against the Copernican models, with his own hybrid model where most of the planets orbit the sun, but the sun orbits the earth. Facts about which model predicted the location of what planets were really important.

The book "The Copernican Revolution" by Kuhn is really interesting for anyone curious to know more about this period.
by andrekandre | 2025-08-13 00:30:55+00:00
> There is absolutely no reason sufficiently large companies can't handle their own payment infrastructure. You should be able to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu or Disney+ without paying the Apple Tax.

its not only that (an annoying tax) but its actively harmful to some customers/businesses where the payment flow isnt one-person-one transaction; some businesses have multiple accounts per customer or have trial periods incompatible with appstore's in-app purchase model and people get confused, to say nothing about the bugs this causes on the backend...
by jperaino | 2025-08-13 00:31:22+00:00
Norm is building AI that understands regulations for regulatory compliance. Our AI currently automates compliance determinations for federally regulated financial content, though our vision is to build a platform that can handle any regulation in any industry. As AI begins to permeate our society, Norm aims to become a critical building block for other AI systems that need regulatory intelligence. You can read more about our vision here: https://www.norm.ai/post/building-regulatory-ai-agents

We've raised $87m from top-tier investors to pursue this vision. We're growing very quickly and have major, household-name financial institutions as clients and investors. We're working on hard, interesting problems and want to push the boundaries of what's possible for AI-driven products. We're hiring for many engineering roles, including:

- Full Stack Engineer, all levels ($150k-250k)

- Senior Design Engineer ($200-250k)

- Staff Frontend Engineer ($200-250k)

- Applied AI Research Engineer ($200k-250k)

- Cloud Infrastructure Engineer ($175k-250k)

- Full Stack Deployment Engineer ($150k-250k)

We're also hiring for many non-technical roles. The best way to apply is online on our website (we review every application!). Full list here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/norm-ai?utm_source=7mlXgo3wAq.
by danpalmer | 2025-08-13 00:31:25+00:00
My examples for the home-grown tools were things like their deployment tooling which is far less well developed than other tools in the ecosystem. However I can see Omarchy going the same way.

It's very easy to quickly build something that solves 80% of your problem, and because it's tailored for what you need and you understand it, it's easy to believe that's better than the existing tools. The problem comes in the long term, in supporting more use-cases. You can decide not to support more, but that's a sacrifice (and in the case of Omarchy the end users may bear the brunt of that), or you need to put the time in to develop it.

Omarchy will have less development effort than macOS, their deployment system will have less development than Docker/Terraform/etc, and that's all a trade-off.
by brulard | 2025-08-13 00:31:29+00:00
I don't think thats the opposite. I have an idea what I want and to some extent how I want it to be done. The design document starts with a brainstorming where I throw all my ideas at the agent and we iterate together.

> Also the longer the conversation goes, the less effective it gets. (saturated context window?)

Yes, this is exactly why I said the breakthrough came for me when I learned how to keep the context clean. That means multiple times in the process I ask the model to put the relevant parts of our discussion into an MD document, I may review and edit it and I reset the context with /clear. Then I have him read just the relevant things from MD docs and we continue.
by skybrian | 2025-08-13 00:32:52+00:00
Yes, sufficiently high intelligence is sometimes assumed to allow for rapid advances in many scientific areas. So, it could be biological warfare because AGI. Or nanotech, drone warfare, or something stranger.

I'm a little skeptical (there may be bottlenecks that can't be solved by thinking harder), but I don't see how it can be ruled out.
by cxr | 2025-08-13 00:33:02+00:00
No extension is necessary. There's nothing that says a website has to have exactly 1 or 0 RSS feeds and that they most be for global syndication. Anyone in control of their site can dump a plain ol' RSS (or Atom, or JSON) feed at /foo/part-3-has-been-posted.xml. I've done this on my own site.

This is not (really) a technical problem. It's a cultural one—getting people to actually make hyperspecific micro feeds available.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-13 00:34:04+00:00
Curious, I found an epub, converted it to a txt, and dumped it into the Qwen3 tokenizer. It yielded 359,088 tokens, end to end.

Using the GPT-4 tokenizer (cl100k_base) yields 349,371 tokens.

Recent Google and Anthropic models do not have local tokenizers and ridiculously make you call their APIs to do it, so no idea about those.

Just thought that was interesting.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-08-13 00:35:34+00:00
Dear god. The linked article is a good takedown of this "idea," but I would like to pile on: biological systems are in fact extremely good at covalent chemistry, usually via extraordinarily powerful nanomachines called "enzymes". No, they are (usually) not building totally rigid condensed matter structures, but .. why would they? Why would that be better?

I'm reminded of a silly social science article I read, quite a long time ago. It suggested that physicists only like to study condensed matter crystals because physics is a male-dominated field, and crystals are hard rocks, and, um ... men like to think about their rock-hard penises, I guess. Now, this hypothesis obviously does not survive cursory inspection - if we're gendering natural phenomena studied by physicists, are waves male? Are fluid dynamics male?

However, Mr. Yudowsky's weird hangups here around rigidity and hardness have me adjusting my priors.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-13 00:37:06+00:00
My parent's hometown blocked data center construction because of concerns about traffic and water consumption.

This is the mid Atlantic where the wet bulb and dry bulb temperature are always very close so the water would be useless for cooling. And of course there are few things that add less traffic than empty buildings full of computers.

Also a lot of the non-AI stuff is still air cooled. In fact I know people at a couple large public tech companies spinning up AI hardware and even for that they're going with air cooling because it's all their OPs people are familiar with.

I wish people were more precise with communicating the actual problem.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-08-13 00:37:16+00:00
That entire paragraph suffers from monocausal reductionism. For example, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, while linked to the Continental Blockade, was not purely an economic maneuver. It was equally rooted in geopolitics, prestige, and the shifting balance of power in Europe.

That said, besides pasting a paragraph from the linked article, I was asking what causal events you are basing your opinion on. Did you form the opinion solely from the article?
by tstrimple | 2025-08-13 00:37:24+00:00
Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.

Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
by wussboy | 2025-08-13 00:37:34+00:00
Hard disagree. People use rationality to support the beliefs they already have, not to change those beliefs. The internet allows everyone to find something that supports anything.

I do it. You do it. I think a fascinating litmus test is asking yourself this question: “When did I last change my mind about something significant?” For most people the answer is “never”. If we lived in the world you described, most people’s answers would be “relatively recently”.
by bko | 2025-08-13 00:37:40+00:00
Most as in < 50%, sure. However a lot of parents do.

> Nearly 60% of households in the U.S. have a net worth of $100,000 or more after accounting for debts, with 29.2% having a net worth of $500,000 or more.

If you live your life thinking you could be great if you only had some 6 figure payout, you're delusional. Building something is hard.

https://smartasset.com/data-studies/net-worth-states-2025
by paffdragon | 2025-08-13 00:37:47+00:00
Yes, and would have been great to discuss that in a civil way.

Samsung says you need to have the devices on the same Samsung account, same WiFi with Bluetooth enabled in https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS10003445/. But I couldn't find more details on how the actual communication happens and if anything leaves the local network. The Samsung article does not go into details how this works, it does not even say explicitly that it uses the local network only. I tried to search for it, but Googling failed me on this.

But I was able to disable that sharing feature, so that isn't my main complaint, it's their clipboard data collection - [1], [2], [3]

[1]: https://cybersecuritynews.com/samsung-one-ui-security-flaw/

[2]: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/online-security/samsung-...

[3]: https://windowsforum.com/threads/samsung-clipboard-security-...
by DennisP | 2025-08-13 00:38:11+00:00
Maybe pure language models aren't world models, but Genie 3 for example seems to be a pretty good world model:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier...

We also have multimodal AIs that can do both language and video. Genie 3 made multimodal with language might be pretty impressive.

Focusing only on what pure language models can do is a bit of a straw man at this point.
by macintux | 2025-08-13 00:38:38+00:00
Apple had all the incentives in the world to provide a transition plan and leave Intel behind. Also lots, and lots of practice with platform migrations, and they were transitioning to a hardware platform they were already selling in the billions.

Microsoft has exactly none of that. I'd be astonished to see RISC-V or ARM "take over" in the Windows world in less than another two decades, unless Intel's ongoing decline drags the entire X86 platform with it.