MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdix | 2025-08-07 22:38:53+00:00
I could certainly be wrong. Maybe I'm just not thinking creatively enough.

I just don't see how this doesn't get commoditized in the end unless hardware progress just halts. I get that a true AGI would have immeasurable value even if it's not valuable to end users. So the business model might change from charging $xxx/month for access to a chat bot to something else (maybe charging millions or billions of dollars to companies in the medical and technology sector for automated R&D). But even if one company gets AGI and then unleashes it on creating ever more advanced models, I don't see that being an advantage for the long term because the AGI will still be bottlenecked by physical hardware (the speed of a single GPU, the total number of GPUs the AGI's owner can acquire, even the number of data centers they can build). That will give the competition time to catch up and build their own AGI. So I don't see the end of AGI race being the point where the winner gets all the spoils.

And then eventually there will be AGI capable open weight models that are runnable on cheap hardware.

The only way the current state can continue is if there is always strong demand for ever increasingly intelligent models forever and always with no regard for their cost (both monetarily and environmentally). Maybe there is. Like maybe you can't build and maintain a dyson sphere (or whatever sufficiently advanced technology) with just an Einstein equivalent AGI. Maybe you need an AGI that is 1000x more intelligent than Einstein and so there is always a buyer.
by munificent | 2025-08-07 22:39:34+00:00
> Just hire devs and kick them out if they dont fit ur needs.

A developer is likely quitting another job they are heavily invested in, possibly moving across the country, and taking a risk when changing health insurance.

If you ask them to do all of that and then immediately turn around and fire them because you didn't really hire them, you just did so probationally without telling them, then you are running an absolutely toxic business. Word will get out and no decent candidate will even consider working for you.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-07 22:39:42+00:00
Money-printing has been used many times historically, and in each case the structure of a positive feedback system inherent in centralized structures caused failures, and this goes back many times throughout the historic record.

The core issues are for production of food, we depend on order. The cascade failures are based in mathematical chaos, which we cannot tame, and which also given such properties prevent immediate recognition in time to act to change outcomes.

There is no alternative under a money-printing system. The dynamics are well known, and each time the people involved think they know better, and bring ruin to the people who vested them with that trust/power.

AI makes everything worse because it not only imposes additional cost on all parties involved in economic transactions, but also at the same time drains any demand in certain low-rung job areas of the sequential career pipeline which must continue as we age; lest everything collapse.

The vast majority of jobs being automated means starvation for those that cannot work. Even with welfare, the draw on the state forces inflation and prices higher and at whipsaw intervals than policy can be set to react.

60% of the workforce jobs are white-collar jobs, they will be replaced including the CEOs. Manufacturing and Blue-Collar work are for the most part severely limited because its far cheaper to bring in immigrant/slave labor through foreign currency manipulation (as China has done for decades).

You want an answer, but there isn't a tractable one because these problems are hard problems. Like the Riemann Hypothesis or a much harder case of the 3-body (n-body) problem in astrophysics.

There exist impossible to solve problems, and in such cases the only solution is to not play that game because the conclusions are known ahead of time, not specifically but in the overwhelming number of times those situations have repeated historically.

The only real solution is to build up your own isolated community and grid as a foundation, to bootstrap the long dark ahead. All empires fall, and when they do under malthusian constraint in an ever more adverse environment, it can be devastating (and existential).

There's maybe at most 10 years (2 years ago) before you see everything going off a cliff, and the kicker is you may only have 1-2 years to stop the momentum, after which even if you stop full tilt you won't be able to avert catastrophe.
by belter | 2025-08-07 22:40:01+00:00
LLMs lack mechanisms for persistent memory, causal world modeling, and self-referential planning. Their transformer architecture is static and fundamentally constrains dynamic reasoning and adaptive learning. All core requirements for AGI.

So yeah, AGI is impossible with today LLMs. But at least we got to watch Sam Altman and Mira Murati drop their voices an octave onstage and announce “a new dawn of intelligence” every quarter. Remember Sam Altman 7 trillion?

Now that the AGI party is over, its time to sell those NVDA shares and prepare for the crash. What a ride it was. I am grabbing the popcorn.
by imchillyb | 2025-08-07 22:41:17+00:00
You jest, but the US Department of Defense already created SkyNet.

It does, almost, exactly what the movies claimed it could do.

The, super-fun, people working in national defense watched Terminator and instead of taking the story as a cautionary tale, used the movies as a blueprint.

This outcome in a microcosm is bad enough, but take in the direction AI is going and humanity has some real bad times ahead.

Even without killer autonomous robots.
by nielsbot | 2025-08-07 22:41:35+00:00
> Israel did not “put Hamas in power.”

I said helped put Hamas in power. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

> not a reason to ignore Hamas’s current actions

The problematic actions under discussion are the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

> Israel cannot unilaterally give them citizenship without dismantling those agreements, which Palestinians also signed

So you're saying they wouldn't go for it? Let's ask them.

> both sides claim historic ties to the land

You act as if the land was empty when the Zionists showed up.

> Security and morality are not mutually exclusive

Depends how you define security. Israel is defining it as genocide. And we're not even mentioning the horrible actions happening in the West Bank. Or in Syria and Lebanon for that matter.

> Both sides deserve accountability and safety

This is not symmetrical. One side has modern weapons, surveillance, air power, an modern army and an embargo on the other with the backing of the US (and other Western states.)
by p1necone | 2025-08-07 22:41:36+00:00
This half makes sense to me - 'deception' is an undesirable quality in an llm, so less of it is 'better/more' from their audiences perspective.

However, I can't think of a sensible way to actually translate that to a bar chart where you're comparing it to other things that don't have the same 'less is more' quality (the general fuckery with graphs not starting at 0 aside - how do you even decide '0' when the number goes up as it approaches it), and what they've done seems like total nonsense.
by derekstavis | 2025-08-07 22:43:58+00:00
We thought a lot about this, and decided to not wait since we are a pretty small team and having more hands helping us to catch any problems early on would help us to make better technical decisions as we continue evolving the core platform. In addition to that, we gained a pretty robust CI step to keep us accountable around the guarantees that we want to provide. Reliably and consistently storing data is of utmost importance for us.

The plan is to engage with Jepsen again once we have a system that passes the current suite, expand the test surface even further, and continue iterating until we are satisfied with the results. There won't be a public release before that is true.

Working with Jepsen also sparked a couple other interesting ideas, like building a Python language fuzzer to ensure that many shapes of Python programs work as intended in Capela. That's something we would love to do in the future.

Re: Antithesis - absolutely. Kyle mentioned them to us and we think it will be a very interesting product for us to adopt to further ensure we're delivering a reliable product.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-08-07 22:44:08+00:00
I wouldn't go that far, but maybe split the difference at a modern i3 or the lowest spec Mac from last year.

It would be awesome if Apple or someone else could have an in-OS slider to drop the specs down to that of other chips. It'd probably be a lot of work to make it seamless, but being able to click a button and make an M4 Max look like an M4 would be awesome for testing.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-07 22:44:20+00:00
The attacks to rolling code keys are well known but these keys continue to exist. They allow you to pair a key yourself to the car that you buy online. Particularly in the US it's quite common that people buy used cars and then another key online that they pair themselves.

You won't be able to do this for instance with VAG cars that have KESSY. First of all the immobilizer is paired to the key, secondly the only way to pair a new key to it is via the manufacturer or a licensed dealership because you need a blob from their central server. But the consequence is that people feel like they are being fleeced when they need another key, because it can cost you hundreds of dollars to pair one.

In general these types of attacks are much harder in Europe where immobilizers have a legal minimum standard that manufacturers have to meet. On the other hand in the US immobilizer are entirely optional, which has famously led to KIA and Hyundai cars shipping without them and the Kia Boys TikTok phenomenon.
by morleytj | 2025-08-07 22:45:08+00:00
I'm pretty curious about the same thing.

I think a somewhat comparable situation is in various online game platforms now that I think about it. Investors would love to make a game like Fortnite, and get the profits that Fortnite makes. So a ton of companies try to make Fortnite. Almost all fail, and make no return whatsoever, just lose a ton of money and toss the game in the bin, shut down the servers.

On the other hand, it may have been more logical for many of them to go for a less ambitious (not always online, not a game that requires a high player count and social buy-in to stay relevant) but still profitable investment (Maybe a smaller scale single player game that doesn't offer recurring revenue), yet we still see a very crowded space for trying to emulate the same business model as something like Fortnite. Another more historical example was the constant question of whether a given MMO would be the next "WoW-killer" all through the 2000's/2010's.

I think part of why this arises is that there's definitely a bit of a psychological hack for humans in particular where if there's a low-probability but extremely high reward outcome, we're deeply entranced by it, and investors are the same. Even if the chances are smaller in their minds than they were before, if they can just follow the same path that seems to be working to some extent and then get lucky, they're completely set. They're not really thinking about any broader bubble that could exist, that's on the level of the society, they're thinking about the individual, who could be very very rich, famous, and powerful if their investment works. And in the mind of someone debating what path to go down, I imagine a more nebulous answer of "we probably need to come up with some fundamentally different tools for learning and research a lot of different approaches to do so" is a bit less satisfying and exciting than a pitch that says "If you just give me enough money, the curve will eventually hit the point where you get to be king of the universe and we go colonize the solar system and carve your face into the moon."

I also have to acknowledge the possibility that they just have access to different information than I do! They might be getting shown much better demos than I do, I suppose.
by jameslk | 2025-08-07 22:45:21+00:00
I found this analysis insightful:

https://x.com/dampedspring/status/1953070287093731685

> However, this pace is likely unsustainable going forward. The sharp acceleration in capex is likely behind us, and the recent growth rate may not be maintained. Any sustained weakness in final demand will almost certainly affect future investment, as AI demand ultimately depends on business revenues and profits, which are tied to nominal GDP. Realized and forecasted capex remain elevated, while free cash flow and cash and cash equivalents are declining for hyperscalers.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-07 22:45:35+00:00
> Producing a very complex, context-exceeding objective is a daily (maybe hourly) ocurrence for me. All I care about is how these systems manage context and stay on track over extended periods of time.

For whatever reason Github's Copilot is treated like the redheaded stepchild of coding assistants. Even through there are Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google models to choose from. And there is a "spaces"[0] website feature that may be close to what you are looking for.

I got better results for testing some larger task using that than I did through the IDE version. But have not used it much. Maybe others have more experience with it. Trying to gather all the context and then review the results was taking longer than doing it myself; having the context gathered already or building it up over time is probably where its value is.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/spaces
by jopsen | 2025-08-07 22:46:09+00:00
Edit: I'd be interested in a more basic car, even new, not because of cost. But because I don't want my car to be a gadget that is outdated in 3 years.

I'll buy a new phone for the fun of it. Not a new car. So don't put a tablet in my car :)

Sadly, I'd suspect a tablet is actually cheaper than physical buttons.
by jchw | 2025-08-07 22:47:10+00:00
There is actually a gray area about what code "counts" as source code to the point where you would consider it "open source" if it were licensed as such. I think if you had a repository consisting of only generated code and not the code used to generate it, it would definitely raise the question of whether it should be considered "source code" or "open source", and I think you could make arguments both ways.

On the other hand, I don't really think that argument then extends to model weights, which are not just some number of steps removed from source code, but just simply not really related to source code.
by ertian | 2025-08-07 22:47:39+00:00
Money isn't a difficult concept? Tell that to the people of Turkey, on Venezuela, or Argentina. Ask them about the utility of money as a "store of value" or means of transaction. It can be mismanaged to disastrous effect.

Assuming you're in the US or EU, you have a privileged perspective: your currency is widely adopted and has been (relatively) stable. I think smaller countries (and especially the businesses therein) are better able to appreciate a global-by-default, noninflationary store of value they can use to transact with anyone, at an established rate.

You could cut Visa and other CC companies out of the loop: they'd be obsolete. Their functionality would be inherent in the network. That's huge savings, reduced complexity, and you don't have arbitrary companies with the ability to blackmail you.

Microtransactions online would become feasible, and would use the very same infrastructure as multi-billion-dollar global transactions. Nice and simple. No fax machines or SWIFT codes or intermediary banks. No reliance on banks with a monopoly on access to the financial system, that can pull a plug on a project at any time for any reason--or prevent interesting experiments from happening in the first place.

You know some places pay like 20+% fees on remittances? That's a shitload of money that the (relatively poor) destination countries badly need! There's a lot of gouging and rent-seeking that goes on in the economy (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-eve...), and a lot of it is enabled by the rigid, crufty and archaic financial system. A simple, open, global public system would fundamentally change that.

I dunno. Your attitude seems the same, to me, as somebody from 1994 who's happily using AOL to read the news, chat, and send emails (though only to other AOL members, of course) saying "What's the utility of this 'internet' thing? I can already do all that stuff! Networking is well-understood, and the 'internet' doesn't bring anything new to the table!" Their perspective on what was desirable or possible was strictly limited by the status quo. Just as was the case then, the best and most interesting use cases of cryptocurrency probably aren't even imagined yet: the infrastructure is necessary to imagine them.
by mnw21cam | 2025-08-07 22:47:40+00:00
The UK Biobank definitely has a bias, but it's in the opposite direction to that you are suggesting here. It's primarily healthy people who are enrolled only when they reach the age of 40 and still have no significant health problems. So, if you are in the UK Biobank, you are less likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-08-07 22:47:46+00:00
What practical use does this have? From my reading if I capture an unlock signal, the car will not unlock for the owner, so they’ll press their remote a few times.

If I capture a lock signal, presumably I can instead prevent it from locking. The only real world malicious action I can see is being viable is to block the car lock, meaning the car is still in an unlocked state, open the boot (which I’m guessing can be done from the car dash anyway) then locking it afterwards?
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-07 22:48:16+00:00
At my work every dev had two machines, which was great. The test machine is cattle, you don't install GCC on it, you reflash it whenever you need, and you test on it routinely. And it's also the cheapest model a customer might have. Then your dev machine is a beast with your kitten packages installed on it.
by habinero | 2025-08-07 22:48:58+00:00
Even that is insanely difficult. There's a great book by Michael Levi called On Nuclear Terrorism, which never got any PR because it is the anti-doomer book.

He methodically goes through all the problems that an ISIS or a Bin Laden would face getting their hands on a nuke or trying to manufacture one, and you can see why none of them have succeeded and why it isn't likely any of them would.

They are incredibly difficult to make, manufacture or use.
by prmph | 2025-08-07 22:49:04+00:00
Yep, that's a peeve of mine. I've resorted to using AGENT.md, and aliasing Claude, Gemini, etc to a command that calls them with an initial instruction to read that file. But of course they will forget after some time.

The whole agentic coding via CLI experience could be much improved by:

- Making it easy to see what command I last issued, without having to scroll up through reams of output hunting for context - Making it easy to spin up a proper sandbox to run sessions unattended - Etc.

Maybe for code generation, what we actually need is a code generator that is itself deterministic but uses AI, instead of AI that does code generation.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-07 22:49:10+00:00
> It also raises questions like "if the sensor is reporting 400C then either the building is on fire or the sensor is broken", or "how do we get the alert if the building is indeed on fire" and the inevitable followup: do we even need to get an alert if the building is on literal fire?

Haha, I was looking at a BAS front end with a customer and we were trying to figure out why an air handler kept tripping out. The return air duct static pressure sensor was reading 65536 kpa, so either the sensor was faulty or the building was moments away from being vaporized in a massive explosion. Replacing the sensor corrected the issue and hundreds of lives were saved ;)
by godelski | 2025-08-07 22:49:29+00:00
I think it qualifies as a hallucination. What's your definition? I'm a researcher too and as far as I'm aware the definition has always been pretty broad and applied to many forms of mistakes. (It was always muddy but definitely got more muddy when adopted by NLP)

It's hard to know why it made the error but isn't it caused by inaccurate "world" modeling? ("World" being English language) Is it not making some hallucination about the English language while interpreting the prompt or document?

I'm having a hard time trying to think of a context where "they" would even be first person. I can't find any search results though Google's AI says it can. It provided two links, the first being a Quora result saying people don't do this but framed it as it's not impossible, just unheard of. Second result just talks about singular you. Both of these I'd consider hallucinations too as the answer isn't supported by the links.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-07 22:49:57+00:00
> 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".

"do just fine" is really pushing it I think. I don't think the core mod team or the default-client's moderation service is biased toward the right or the left (at least in how they apply moderation, not necessarily their personal beliefs.) I think the core team is doing the best job they can given their resourcing. The community on the site is a different story.

There was an attempt by AI researchers to join the site and they all got bullied until they left, largely by the community. Pretty much every reply to an NYT article that doesn't denigrate Trump is either "wow how does the NYT have the time to write about fashion/lifestyle/<anything but how Trump is awful>, it's because they've an evil right wing publication" or "how dare the NYT platform this opinion it's an evil right wing opinion". If you look at feature rollouts or social posts by the team you get lots of well-liked comments about how the mod team enables right wing behavior.

I use the platform a lot and am really rooting for them to succeed, but I feel that there's just a lot of lefty toxicity on the platform and that the community on there loves politics and often brings politics into unrelated threads. They seem interested in a sort of pop politics too, not the kind of harder political analysis that a good think tank or non-fiction book can provide either. I feel that if you're into lots of pop left politics and the culture that emerges from a community with this love then you'll like Bluesky. For now I think the community is too political to really foster wider conversations the way pre-Elon Twitter did.
by gjm11 | 2025-08-07 22:50:14+00:00
"Cet animal est très méchant, Quand on l'attaque il se défend."

Saying in public that someone "replied with a bunch of very unconstructive crap-on criticism" and "[m]aybe he's different in person but based on that interaction I have no desire to find out" is, by any reasonable standards, an attack on that person, and if that person doubts your description it is perfectly reasonable for them to object.

(That doesn't mean you're in the wrong and gwern's in the right, of course. It could well be that your account of things is entirely correct and gwern was gratuitously dickish to you, in which case it's fair enough to point it out. Something can be fair and correct and also a personal attack that it's reasonable to respond to by trying to counter it.)
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-07 22:50:27+00:00
Software can do a lot of things. It can automate processes, it can help you optimize, it can make enough data accessible for you to not need a process, it can partition and generalize processes, it can control stuff...

The relationship between software and productivity is really not as simple as you put. But also, the AI being hyped today is completely incapable of removing humans from a process. Several other forms of AI do this, the one on the hype doesn't.