MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exmadscientist | 2025-08-07 18:12:04+00:00
That monograph is not appropriate to this discussion because it is written for practitioners, not researchers. There is plenty of information on some of the things lithium is doing. My point was not "we have a complete understanding", but "we have some idea what is going on here, but there is still a lot we don't know".

Lithium is one of a large class of drugs that modulate the chemical potentials of the body's voltage-gated ion channels. There are a lot of drugs in this class, and most have been used with at least some degree of success to treat bipolar disorder. This class is also first-line treatment for many forms of epilepsy. The GABA system is directly tied in here too, and GABAergic agents are generally considered part of this class... and, guess what, they often help in bipolar as well. Lithium is a unique member of this class, and it is completely obvious (to a biochemist) that adding another species of alkali metal in sufficient concentration will disrupt the chemical potentials of sodium and potassium ion transport in the ion channels.

My point is: the first-level effect of lithium is well understood, and it affects an area that is well known to be affected by other drugs that have similar effects. So it is not total voodoo. However, you are also very correct that our understanding starts to break down after this. We can come up with new ion channel modulating drugs, and can reasonably expect them to be effective candidates for helping bipolar patients. What we cannot do is predict other targets or classes of drugs that might be interesting. That is where our understanding breaks down.
by mehmetoguzderin | 2025-08-07 18:12:07+00:00
Context-free grammar and regex support are exciting. I wonder what, or whether, there are differences from the Lark-like CFG of llguidance, which powers the JSON schema of the OpenAI API [^1].

[^1]: https://github.com/guidance-ai/llguidance/blob/f4592cc0c783a...
by alephnerd | 2025-08-07 18:12:11+00:00
Something I've noticed with German business law is that it is very much structured in such a way that if you aren't an incumbent player, you are essentially incentivized to be absorbed by them.

In the US we do have issues with businesses, but it's not like the Bosch, Thyssen, or Tschira family are any less unethical.

The level of hierarchy I've noticed in German firms and founders is insane to say the least. I'd love to do some quantitative research into this, but I haven't been in academia or policy for years now.
by jackero | 2025-08-07 18:12:25+00:00
There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components.

If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers.

The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing. UX easily takes a backseat.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-07 18:12:44+00:00
Just about, yup!

I don't know about your specific link there, but the "zero knowledge" part comes from the token sent to the provider being non-reversible. A token cannot be used to identify the person who generated the token, even by ID validator.

This works because the token is just used as material in (simplified) a hash function.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-07 18:12:52+00:00
This is a claim that's going to require support. Bluesky's moderation service (just adds metadata/labels to posts/accounts) is all client side opt-in. It's force-enabled by the default client but any third party client allows you to opt-out (or doesn't even use it by default).

And PDS level/"account" bans are just at the PDS. If you've been "banned", that's just bluesky the PDS host telling you they don't want to host you and that you need to go host your data yourself or find someone else to host it for you. i.e. find another PDS.

Basically every form of ban or moderation in atproto/bluesky is "soft" moderation and you can fairly trivially bypass it and continue doing your own thing.

The overwhelming majority of right wing accounts that get banned do so soon after joining (and generally after going to pick fights). And they never even bother to try to keep their accounts, instead choosing to create new accounts to get banned again or abandon the platform. It's disingenuous behavior and for right wing personalities it feels almost more like a sticker of pride that they were "banned from bluesky".

Plenty of right leaning and libertarian accounts exist on bluesky. Project Liberal [1] and Liberal Party USA [2] (run by Josh Eakle[3] and Kevin Gaughen[4] respectively) exist just fine on bluesky and they are large splinter groups from the Libertarian Party following the whole Mises Caucus coup attempt thing. Likewise a number of libertarian groups such as the Libertarian Party of Lousiana [5] do just fine on bluesky. And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky". The worst thing that happens is people block or mute you and you don't have to deal with them anymore rather than toxicly fighting each other each time you see each other.

TLDR: Everyone is welcome on bluesky but there's no requirement for people to tolerate you. Even if you violate every transgression, as long as you aren't posting literal child porn to the network you'll still be able to exist just fine however people might just ignore you.

------------

1. Project Liberal: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d5nigw7kzpsglf3gtl2dvbev

2. Liberal Party USA: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:v3jmda7lwwdoofcvgmjwsbcg

3. Josh Eakle: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2adtngm3y6e6ol6jastnkxzm

4. Kevin Gaughen: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4oyecf2hz4ajhm4zqp52hxqo

5. LP of Lousiana: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mongiv55fh5l5e7vi7cbjajw
by sarchertech | 2025-08-07 18:13:18+00:00
>There it goes, your other metric.

1. It’s impossible to measure that except in aggregate

2. The only thing you can actually measure is how soon did it launch because the quality of the thing is too wrapped up in what it’s supposed to do.

How many bugs were there? That’s heavily dependent on how complicated the problem it’s solving.

The absolute best thing anyone has come up with is velocity, which just measures how good a team is at estimating. That also only works at the team level and it’s only accurate for teams repeatedly doing similar work that haven’t changed in composition for years.

> You can't accurately measure any coastline, but we don't stop at that.

We actually can accurately measure the relative lengths of coastlines such that we can compare them by picking a measurement resolution and using that for all of them.

You can’t do that here. It doesn’t work.

If we could accurately map business value creating back to ICs, tech companies would look very very different.

Even if you could objectively measure how good an IC is at meeting objectives. The developers I’ve met who were best at that metric tended to be terrible at their jobs in general because they’d just take anything product wanted and build it exactly as described.

So you want some amount of pushback. But not too much or they just end up not doing anything.

Try to come up with a metric for that. To do that though it needs to be normalized by how good the PM is at designing features. If the PM was terrific, you wouldn’t want pushback.

So now you have to rate all your PMs before you can rate your ICs. Then you need to rate the PMs bosses and so on. Until you have an uncomputable mess.

The best you can do is have enough EMs so they can get a feel for how ICs are doing. You can also probably expose the absolute worst performing engineers with metrics because they’re just literally doing nothing. But even then, you’ll get some false positives.
by hinkley | 2025-08-07 18:13:28+00:00
Boeing does 6 minutes, which means that it’s impossible to have a 45 minute meeting. My coworkers decided that if the meeting went over its .8 hours and if we cleared out on time or earlier that it’s .7 hours.

I don’t know why you would do 7. That doesn’t divide into 60 at all. Nor 480.
by chucky_z | 2025-08-07 18:13:45+00:00
I'll +1 this. I've personally committed code to Vault and the OpenBao changes go hand-in-hand with the style of the Vault codebase. I enjoy both projects and appreciate that they both exist.

It's all Go anyway, it all looks pretty similar. I think if anything it looks/feels this way because it's a security-first project. By that I mean the way the code is written tends to care more about security over anything else.

Also the Hashicorp projects in general tend to use a lot of their own libraries/code so it's just a little different than other stuff. Code quality isn't too important so long as the code is maintainable (clearly it is, it's had a lot of versions) and works (again, clearly it does. a lot of folks use vault just fine, including me).

All previous CVEs are handled in a very straightforward manner with reasonable notifications as well, just like this one. This just has a big fancy article attached to it because it's Blackhat week and folks want to get a big fancy release. If you need further proof of the Blackhat effect go look up the 'death of http/1.1' article.
by nzach | 2025-08-07 18:13:52+00:00
One interesting thing I noticed in these "fixing bugs" demos is that people don't seem to resolve the bugs "traditionally" before showing off the capabilities of this new model.

I would like to see a demo where they go through the bug, explain what are the tricky parts and show how this new model handle these situations.

Every demo I've seen seems just the equivalent of "looks good to me" comment in a merge request.
by timr | 2025-08-07 18:14:11+00:00
Except it isn't "completely wrong". The article the OP links to says it explicitly:

> “What actually causes lift is introducing a shape into the airflow, which curves the streamlines and introduces pressure changes – lower pressure on the upper surface and higher pressure on the lower surface,” clarified Babinsky, from the Department of Engineering. “This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift – here the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it is rigged and so it acts as an aerofoil. In other words, it’s the curvature that creates lift, not the distance.”

The meta-point that "it's the curvature that creates the lift, not the distance" is incredibly subtle for a lay audience. So it may be completely wrong for you, but not for 99.9% of the population. The pressure differential is important, and the curvature does create lift, although not via speed differential.

I am far from an AI hypebeast, but this subthread feels like people reaching for a criticism.
by gruez | 2025-08-07 18:14:22+00:00
>In the US the official inflation figure between 2019 and 2025 was 28%, but I feel like most people "on the ground" are seeing a much higher inflation rate in housing, food and transportation.

People's vibes are notoriously inaccurate. The most famous one is perceptions of crime, which (prior to covid) been dropping for decades, but you wouldn't get that impression from asking the average joe on the street. Same if you asked people basic economic figures like whether the stock market is up or down.
by addaon | 2025-08-07 18:14:40+00:00
> Output: $10 / 1M tokens

It's interesting that they're using flat token pricing for a "model" that is explicitly made of (at least) two underlying models, one with much lower compute costs than the other; and with use ability to at least influence (via prompt) if not choose which model is being used. I have to assume this pricing model is based on a predicted split between how often the underlying models get used; I wonder if that will hold up, if users will instead try to rouse the better model into action more than expected, or if the pricing is so padded that it doesn't matter.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-07 18:15:01+00:00
> It may be possible for a swarm of ultralight nanocrafts—propelled by a laser and traveling at a third of the speed of light—to make it to a black hole within about a century.

> For a spacecraft like that to reach a black hole in such a relatively short time, there would have to be a black hole 20-25 light-years from Earth, and none so close have been observed yet.
by stouset | 2025-08-07 18:15:34+00:00
From Tom Murphy's excellent Do the Math blog[1].

Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes? When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?

Seriously, if you haven't read his take on things yet, at least the first few posts are a must-read. It's on par with the Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture at UC Boulder by Al Bartlett (popularly titled "The Most Important Video You'll Ever See", which is less hyperbole than you might think; the lecture is riveting)[2].

To very TL;DR things: solar and tidal energy (and their derivatives like wind) are essentially the only sources of energy we can rely on as our energy requirements grow. We are shockingly close (~300 years) to measurably raising the equilibrium temperature of earth's surface through purely thermodynamic effects if energy use trends continue. This is completely independent of greenhouse gases, and assumes that Earth is a perfect blackbody radiator. Once we exhaust our energy budget from these sources, that's it. No magical unobtanium source of energy can solve the fact that producing additional energy on the surface of the Earth will raise its temperature. We will stop increasing our energy use one way or another once we hit this wall.

If we want to continue using more energy we'll need a whole second Earth to do it on. Great, we've colonized mars! What does that get us? Based on a 2.3% growth rate and the Rule of 70[3], we'll use up that second Earth in thirty years. We'll now need two Earths to keep growing for the next thirty years.

[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/#:~...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&pp=ygUodGhlIG1vc...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72
by bccdee | 2025-08-07 18:15:38+00:00
No, it's never good enough, because it's flat-out wrong. This statement:

> Air over the top has to travel farther in the same amount of time

is not true. The air on top does not travel farther in the same amount of time. The air slows down and travels a shorter distance in the same amount of time.

It's only "good enough for a classroom of children" in the same way that storks delivering babies is—i.e., if you're content to simply lie rather than bothering to tell the truth.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-07 18:15:38+00:00
Yep! I agree! At MSRP BT is a great buy.

> I think the bourbon "market" kind of popped recently

It def did. The overproduction that was invested in during the peak of the COVID collector boom is coming into markets now. I think we'll see some well priced age stated products in the next 3-4 years based on by acquaintances in the space.

Ofc, the elephant in the room is consolidation - everyone wants to copy the LVMH model (and they say Europeans are ethical elves who never use underhanded mopolistic and market making behavior to corner markets /s).
by n_u | 2025-08-07 18:15:47+00:00
Thank you.

From the doc

> Automerge uses a combination of LWW (last writer wins) and multi-value register. By default, if you read from doc.foo you will get the LWW semantics, but you can also see the conflicts by calling Automerge.getConflicts(doc, 'foo') which has multi-value semantics.

> Note that "last writer wins" here is based on the internal ID of the opeartion [sic], not a wall clock time. The internal ID is a unique operation ID that is the combination of a counter and the actorId that generated it. Conflicts are ordered based on the counter first (using the actorId only to break ties when operations have the same counter value).

Seems like they use LWW with Lamport clocks to order operations and a unique ID for each client as a tie-breaker.
by murukesh_s | 2025-08-07 18:16:11+00:00
Even if there are zero tariffs, the per capita difference is so huge. US was so far reaping the benefit of product made with labour from developing countries and consumers getting wages from developed country, making buying a new phone a rather insignificant portion of total yearly salary, however for a common man in developing country, owning an Apple device is sometimes equal to your yearly salary. So yea even if manufacturing moves to US and prices doubles, the consumers can absorb it.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-08-07 18:16:16+00:00
The bitter lesson doesn't say that you can't split your solution into multiple models. It says that learning from more data via scaled compute will outperform humans injecting their own assumptions about the task into models.

A broad generalization like "there are two systems of thinking: fast, and slow" doesn't necessarily fall into this category. The transformer itself (plus the choice of positional encoding etc.) contains inductive biases about modeling sequences. The router is presumably still learned with a fairly generic architecture.
by Animats | 2025-08-07 18:16:27+00:00
> As for the GPU timeline, I've been experimenting with timeline semaphores. E.g. all the images (and image views) in descriptor set D must be live as long as semaphore S has value less than X. This coupled with some kind of deletion queue could accurately track lifetimes of resources on the GPU timeline.

> What I would really like to experiment with is using async Rust for GPU programming.

Most of the waiting required is of the form "X can't proceed until A, B, D, and Q are done", plus "Y can't proceed until B, C, and R are done". This is not a good match for the async model.

That many-many keeps coming up in game work. Outside the GPU, it appears when assets such as meshes and textures come from an external server or files, and are used in multiple displayed objects.
by geodel | 2025-08-07 18:16:31+00:00
Reminds me story

Once a little boy, old man and their donkey traveling on feet.

First passerby "What morons, they have donkey and no one is riding on it. So boy sits on donkey.

Second passerby "Look, what a shame, young lad sitting on donkey and poor old man is forced to walk on feet. So they swap.

Third passerby "Wow, this grownup adult is riding donkey while little kid is walks in hot sun. So they both sit on donkey.

Fourth passerby "Amazing, just amazing, two able bodied people riding on this poor animal. Can't they at least take turns like a decent human."
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-07 18:16:38+00:00
I really believe in

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

and would say the bright side of the "enshittification cycle" is that we get nice places for a while and then we can move on. It's not like people party at the Mudd Club or CBGB anymore and why should they? Theory at

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114988462585487831
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-07 18:16:59+00:00
>Password managers are those proprietary programs that you need to install, give full access to your computer, register an account and trust their word that your passwords are uploaded to the cloud securely? No thanks.

cf. pass(1)[0][1]

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/

[1] No, it's not hosted in the cloud (i.e., on someone else's servers) and that's a good thing. It's FOSS and can be compiled for Android/IOS (and has, see [2][3][4], least for Android). The DB (just a GPG store) can also be shared across multiple devices.

[2] https://f-droid.org/packages/app.passwordstore.agrahn/

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.msfjarvis....

[4] Not sure about IOS versions, I don't have any Apple devices.
by jumploops | 2025-08-07 18:17:01+00:00
Is GPT-5 using a new pretrained base, or is it the same as GPT-4.1?

Given the low cost of GPT-5, compared to the prices we saw with GPT-4.5, my hunch is that this new model is actually just a bunch of RL on top of their existing models + automatic switching between reasoning/non-reasoning.
by tokai | 2025-08-07 18:17:10+00:00
>it's highly recommended to be administered by doctors due to side effects after long term use

This is at a clinical dose which is somewhat high. It is the dosage fund reliable as treatment for bipolar type 1. As long as you get your kidney numbers checked twice a year, at that dose, its mostly unproblematic as issues show themselves in the numbers before major damage.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-07 18:17:18+00:00
It seemed like you were questioning the definition of pedophilia, so I literally gave you a definition with a link. Republican arguments do typically include wanting to lower the age to match up with puberty. But that seems like a pretty unseemly argument. If Trump was having sex with 14 year olds, but they were 'developed', so it is not technically pedophilia, so can't call him a pedophile. Is a pretty weak argument.

I mean, isn't it a pretty common joke that pedophiles like to argue this point:

"hmm, indubitably, my good sir, it is actually ephebophilia, completely different, totally ok. A common mistake I often have to explain to my 14 year old's girlfriends parents that keep calling the police on me. Why just look at her, very developed, very mature, not a child at all".

But have to agree. Not sure what you are trying to say at this point, or what is the argument?
by timr | 2025-08-07 18:17:18+00:00
I'm not saying that particular point is wrong. I'm saying that for most people, it doesn't matter, and the reason the "fallacy" persists is because it's a good enough explanation for the layman that is easy to conceptualize.

Pretty much any scientific question is fractal like this: there's a superficial explanation, then one below that, and so on. None are "completely incorrect", but the more detailed ones are better.

The real question is: if you prompt the bot for the better, deeper explanation, what does it do?
by beeflet | 2025-08-07 18:17:24+00:00
Perhaps it is not possible to simulate higher-level intelligence using a stochastic model for predicting text.

I am not an AI researcher, but I have friends who do work in the field, and they are not worried about LLM-based AGI because of the diminishing returns on results vs amount of training data required. Maybe this is the bottleneck.

Human intelligence is markedly different from LLMs: it requires far fewer examples to train on, and generalizes way better. Whereas LLMs tend to regurgitate solutions to solved problems, where the solutions tend to be well-published in training data.

That being said, AGI is not a necessary requirement for AI to be totally world-changing. There are possibly applications of existing AI/ML/SL technology which could be more impactful than general intelligence. Search is one example where the ability to regurgitate knowledge from many domains is desirable
by porphyra | 2025-08-07 18:18:31+00:00
It seems that the new tricks that people discover to slightly improve the model, be it a new reinforcement learning technique or whatever, get leaked/shared quickly to other companies and there really isn't a big moat. I would have thought that whoever is rich enough to afford tons of compute first would start pulling away from the rest but so far that doesn't seem to be the case --- even smaller players without as much compute are staying in the race.