MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-08-13 15:07:25+00:00
If that's true the x.com is brilliant. I think you can have to short, to generic domains for them to be actually useful/descriptive. For instance I think chatgpt.com is better branding that just chat.com.

Also tinycapital.com → tiny.com, capital.com works, but tiny.com doesn't really tell you anything.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-13 15:07:26+00:00
My personal test question keeps bombing, and I think it's something they should be capable of doing?

Are those math contests? Are their questions and answers in the training set?

Let's say that these things really won a math Olympiad by thinking. Ok, I would like it to to write parsers based on a well defined expression or language spec. Not as bad as near unparseable C++ or JavaScript.

The AIs refuse, despite the prompt, to write a complete parser, hallucinate tests, do things like just call the already working compiler on the CLI, force repetitive reprompts that still won't complete the task.

To me, this is a good example of a task I would give AI as a service to see if it will reliably do something that's well specified, moderately annoying, and is most definitely in the training set if they are pulling data from "the internet".
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-13 15:07:27+00:00
>Everyone hates doing farm work and rightfully so.

Yes, everyone hates sitting in the million dollar tractor's cab, sitting on the cushioned seat and enjoying the air conditioning while looking at the dozen screens that remind one of piloting the space shuttle.

I'm glad that California's legislators are taking a look at that, and making sure no one ever has to do it again. It's a horrible job, and the sooner it has been eliminated the sooner we can all celebrate.
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-08-13 15:07:40+00:00
> Since it rejects or denies the existence of God, atheism is a sin against the virtue of religion. [Cites Romans 1:18] The imputability of this offense can be significantly diminished in virtue of the intentions and the circumstances. "Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion." [62]

- CCC 2125

Interestingly, I believe this means, from the Church's perspective, that the mere fact of my posting this makes this sin more imputable to those who read it! Sorry about that.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-13 15:07:55+00:00
I share the same concerns as the author. People like to dispute individual issues by saying they’re caused by X or will even out with Y or the government can just do Z if the people voted for it, or that this is all irrelevant anyway because it’s never happened in the data before and therefore extremely unlikely or impossible to ever happen in the future.

And I just stare slackjawed at these people, at how they’re so focused on a narrow vertical or “historical data”, that they fail to even consider the larger picture. It’s why I trot out and bang my drum of “if we replace all the workers with AI then who is going to have money to spend to continue propping up the economy” every time boosters dismiss any social or economic concerns.

By a combination of neglect, malice, misinformation, partisanship, ignorance, and a cadre of new gods (“Big Data”, “the Algorithm”, the myriad of Rationalist cults, “AI”, crypto, etc), we have effectively stockpiled a warehouse full of leaking fuel barrels and dynamite and been commanded to take up smoking by our leaders and Capitalists, assured everything will turn out okay.

And you know what? Maybe it will turn out okay. Maybe this all is just a giant nothingburger. Maybe this is the start of a Golden Age of humanity, where dreams are attainable and fortune is infinite. Maybe this is just a speedbump on the path to extended lifespans, curing diseases, solving climate change. Maybe we’re just overreacting.

But the data sets, the lived experiences, the tone of existence doesn’t lie. Things are presently bad. The current patterns and trends suggest this will get a lot worse.

Maybe we’re wrong, but what I fear more is that we might be right and have done nothing.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-13 15:08:03+00:00
> If something happens to me, my family would have no idea how...

So, in effect: "If something happens to me, I WILL NO LONGER HAVE any banking or investment accounts, nor insurance, nor a will, nor ...".

Basics -

Keep a detailed, paper-based inventory of your stuff. With complete, noob-ready access information. Updated at least annually. In at least 2 different places, known to reliable family members and/or trusted close, old friends.

Remember that you might have a period of disability or unconsciousness before you pass away. (Or before anyone thinks to act on the possibility that you'll pass away.) During that period, most of your online & cloud-stored stuff could vanish - because no one paid the bills or did other maintenance. Or insurance bills could go unpaid, or heat gets turned off at your cabin up north and the pipes freeze and flood it, or ...

Keep a tight lid on how many places you keep the important stuff (vs. cute cat videos or other relative fluff), and on the complexity of accessing any of it. Those important places get listed first in your inventory, annotated with extra details on what important things are to be found there.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-08-13 15:08:31+00:00
Get excited, the world is gonna have less people!

But the amount of population decline needed to give everyone American-style suburbs that are small enough to not have horrible commutes is....a lot.

If you go to Europe, you can see ~5 story density is not loud, not smelly, and not dangerous though. It's also not dangerous in America either (but loudness and smells are problems because we're dumb as shit about these things). So I dunno, you do you, but I in the city don't wanna subsidize your coddling in the myriad ways I do today.
by BearOso | 2025-08-13 15:08:51+00:00
Layoffs are one of the only ways way to cut spending before quarterly reports when the market is already saturated. The other way is to make the products cheaper (enshittification).

As far as more employable candidates go, I don't think executives realize the vast limitations of LLM. You have to remember they aren't technical people. They're thinking managers with no training are going to replace skilled employees--that there was a secret magic button that the lowly employees all knew about and it's now in their hands.

Sam Altman said there were now going to be one-person, billion-dollar companies. Reading between the lines, since there's not enough money for every person to do that, what does he intend for the remainder to become?
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 15:10:10+00:00
It's no game.

I have empathy for the person who wants to improve their family's life and I have empathy for the farmer who needs talented workers from the global south [1] but we will lose our republic if we don't listen to the concerns of citizens who champ at the bit because they can't legally take LSD or have 8 bullets in a clip or need a catalytic converter in their car that has $100-$1000 of precious metal in it -- facing climate change and other challenges will require the state to ask more of people, not less, and conspicuous displays of illegality either at the top or bottom of society undermine legitimacy and the state's capacity to make those asks.

I've personally helped more than one person with schizo-* conditions get off the street and it's definitely hard to do on an emotional level, whether or not it is a "complex" or "complicated" problem. It's a real ray of hope that better drugs are in the pharmacy in in the pipeline

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-cob...

For now the embrace of Scientologist [2] Thomas Szasz's anti-psychiatry has real consequences [3]: it drives people out of downtowns, it means people buy from Amazon instead of local businesses, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant, erodes urban tax bases. State capacity is lost, the economy becomes more monopolized and oligarchical, and people who say they want state capacity and hate oligarchy are really smug about it and dehumanize anyone who disagrees with them [4]

[1] https://www.ithaca.com/news/regional_news/breaking-ice-arres...

[2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/dr-thomas-szas...

[3] https://ithacavoice.org/2025/08/inside-asteri/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument#Feminist_per...
by dvh | 2025-08-13 15:10:27+00:00
I think fork is not solution, you should start over. As software evolves, new features are added rather then removed, complexity grows. This is not a problem for the "old guard" because they entered it when it was simple and gradually became more complex. But new people have to learn the complex version from the start, there is no gentle slope. This i believe is major problem with old software and IMHO the only solution is start over, smaller. Focus on the issues you want the software to solve. Yes the cycle will continue and your software will became complex too but at least it will continue rather than stop or rot.

Also people's expectations are different (lower) when they switching the software than when the software switches the maintainer.
by NDizzle | 2025-08-13 15:10:30+00:00
I love love love Claude Code. It's my weapon of choice. However, we're still a ways off.

The most recent thing I did prior to typing this comment was have it look at a cosmosdb integration and recommend changes to my CosmosClientOptions to reduce CPU, based on a few exceptions I'm seeing.

It recommended 5 changes to 5 settings, and every single one of them was outside of the allowed range for those 5 settings. I told it as much, and asked nicely (always nicely, I don't want to be on the Singularity's naughty list) to try again, those aren't valid values. It came back with 4/5 values within the allowed scope, one still outside of the scope, and 2 of the 4 that were accurate were the same values that I already have configured.

Not there yet. Better every day, but definitely not there.
by lonelyasacloud | 2025-08-13 15:10:36+00:00
Default is

output_default = raw_model + be_kiss_a_system

When that gets changed by the user to

output_user = raw_model + be_kiss_a_system - be_abrupt_user

Unless be_abrupt_user happens to be identical to be_kiss_a_system _and_ is applied with identical weight then it's seems likely that it's always going to add more noise to the output.
by benterix | 2025-08-13 15:10:52+00:00
> The question is really only: Will users actually want to continue to use these services once the novelty wears off? The assumption is that they are useful enough to become an integral part of our lives, but time will tell...

But LLMs do have some niche, stable applications already. For example, they replaced Stack Overflow to a large extent, because you can get the answer you need faster, and it's often better adapted to your situation. So you could argue the novelty of SO wore off a long time ago but people were still using it when LLMs appeared. ChatGPT is no more en vogue, people are ashamed to (and shamed for) using it, but it still has some uses, helping people in their jobs and lives in general.
by LurkandComment | 2025-08-13 15:10:57+00:00
AI isn't about jobs and efficiency, it's about having a stronger position over labor. AI is useful, in most cases this makes existing labor better. The number of jobs that can be actually automated by it is much lower than people percieve. But the narrative is what matters. The temporary displacement and uncertainty of labor is what matters. It creates a weaker position for labor.
by ben_w | 2025-08-13 15:11:24+00:00
> inference is very expensive

I am surprised that this claim keeps getting made, given the observed prices.

Even if one thinks that the losses of big model providers are due to selling below operating costs (rather than below that plus training costs plus the cost of growth), then even big open-weights models that need beefy machines, look like they eventually* amortise the cost so low that electricity is what matters; so when (and *only* when) the quality is good enough, inference is cheaper than the food needed to have a human work for peanuts — and I mean literally peanuts, not metaphorical peanuts, as in the calories and protein content of bags of peanuts sufficient to not die.

* this would not happen if computers were still following the improvements trends of the 90s, because then we'd be replacing them every few years; a £10k machine that you replace every 3 years cost you £9.13/day even if it did nothing.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/300283810 -> £0.59 per bag * (2500 per day/645 per bag) = £2.29/day; then combine your pick about which model, which model of home server, electricity costs etc. with your estimate of how many useful tokens a human does in 8,760 hours per calendar year given your assumptions about hours per working week and days of holiday or sick leave.

I know that even just order-of 100k useful tokens is implausible for any human because that would be like writing a novel a day, every day; and this article (https://aichatonline.org/blog-lets-run-openai-gptoss-officia...) claims a Mac Studio can output 65.9/second = 65.9 * 3600 * 24 = 5,693,760 / day or ~= 2e9/year, compare to a deliberate over-estimate of human output (100k/day * 5 days a week * 47 weeks a year = 2.35e7/year)

The top-end Mac Studio has a maximum power draw of 270 W: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102027

270 W for *at least (2e9/year / 2.35e7/year) 85 times* the quantity (this only matters when the quality is sufficient, and as we all know AI often isn't that good yet) of output that a human can do with 100 W, is a bit over 31 times the raw energy efficiency, and electricity is much cheaper than calories — cheaper food than peanuts could get the cost of the human down to perhaps about £1/day, but even £1/day is equivalent to electricity costing £1/(24 hours * 100 W) = £0.416666… / kWh
by Ajedi32 | 2025-08-13 15:11:49+00:00
They're trained to be sycophants as a side effect of the same reinforcement learning process that trains them to dutifully follow all user instructions. It's hard (though not impossible) to teach one without the other, especially if other related qualities like "cheerful", "agreeable", "helpful", etc. also help the AI get positive ratings during training.
by jandrese | 2025-08-13 15:12:16+00:00
> A nice thing about IEEE floats is that the rounding behavior is well defined.

Until it isn't. I used to play the CodeWeavers port of Kohan and while the game would allow you to do crossplay between Windows and Linux, differences in how the two OSes rounded floats would cause the game to desynchronize after 15-20 minutes of play or so. Some unit's pathfinding algorithm would zig on Windows and zag on Linux, causing the state to diverge and end up kicking off one of the players.
by ncr100 | 2025-08-13 15:12:27+00:00
1,000% yes. Make our WANTS known: 1) to ourselves, and 2) then to the world. And then, be the change that we want.

- "knowing is half the battle" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71nqMqmiaw

- "be the change you want to see in the world" - https://josephranseth.com/gandhi-didnt-say-be-the-change-you...

Personally I want a more human-first world, and a less money-first world. This touches on many areas needing change.
by bluGill | 2025-08-13 15:12:31+00:00
Driverless tractors may allow for bigger, heavier machines which would be better yet. The bigger the better because soil compaction goes up at a sub-linear rate to weight. While the soil compaction is worse for a heavier tractor where it touches the soil, the heavier tractor can handle a wider pass which means it overall doing much less damage vs a smaller tractor that would need to do several passes touching more soil to get the same work done. This is also why tracks are often worse than tires - even though tires compact the ground more where they touch the soil, the track touches more soil in a turn and thus does more damage in a turn than you save in the row!

Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
by Bender | 2025-08-13 15:13:01+00:00
On a related note and FWIW OOM kills can be reduced or entirely mitigated by a combination of some kernel settings and confining applications to CGroups. Some of the generalized and basic settings are:

- vm.overcommit_ratio should be set to 0 on non development machines. Some applications are greedy and do not play well when memory is constrained so that requires working with the application developers to improve their memory management.

- vm.min_free_kbytes which should be set based on a formula. Redhat had a decent formula but DBA's don't like when it is used because they want every last bit of ram so that battle is left to the sysadmins. It becomes a circular argument and ever-increasing memory purchases.

- vm.admin_reserve_kbytes and vm.user_reserve_kbytes also based on a formula but each company will have to come up with their own based on how fast memory is allocated by their in-house applications.

- vm.swappiness and vm.vfs_cache_pressure will also vary by the role of the server and intended uses but having higher cache pressure can reduce the risk of a race condition that leads to OOM on systems with low free memory.

- vm.compaction_proactiveness settings can cause lag and race conditions on systems under high memory pressure. This can be exacerbated by /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled and /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag settings among other related settings but that's a long story with a lot of variable conditions especially on systems with TB's of ram and long uptimes.

There is no magic bullet or "correct" setting. All of these will vary by roles, usage, etc... I will leave it to the reader to research each setting. This will require some load testing that puts each system under real world high memory pressure. Oh and if someone starts trying to solve this with swap, just slowly back away and don't make any sudden movements. Distract them and run. I managed over 50K servers with anywhere from 96GB to 3TB of ram and the only OOM's were caused by operations teams that had full control over memory allocation of java and wanted to use every last KB of physical ram installed not factoring in memory outside of the heap. None of these servers had any swap as it would have to be encrypted and nobody wanted to deal with that. OOM's are almost always PEBKAC.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-13 15:13:20+00:00
Which to me means, what's the Big o of this entire venture?

Ultimately, what they need to do is add nines of reliability. I guess I could argue that what they are producing now is like two nines: 99% accuracy.

Of course, that depends on how you measure it and yada yada yada. So for things like self-driving, I could see how people could argue that the accuracy rate is 99.9% on a minute by minute basis.

But how many nines do you need? Especially for self-driving five more? What's the computational cost to achieve that? Is it just five times? Is it 25 times? Is it two to the five power?
by andrepd | 2025-08-13 15:13:27+00:00
Your statement was

> We were unable to find evidence that the Only Connect games are *in the training materials*.

which is obviously completely false. You acknowledge as much in another comment when you say

> To clarify what I meant by this: Despite looking, we haven't seen any evidence of any of the models consistently responding based on pre-trained knowledge (outside of easier-to-guess trivia-type questions).

which has nothing to do with what you said x)) Basically: "to clarify, when I said X, I actually meant something else entirely".

But fine, at least now it's not bullshit, it's just vague enough that it wouldn't pass in a 9th grade science project where I went to school.

Just my 2 cents.

-----

If you'd like to explain more how you supposedly concluded that it wasn't returning data in its training set, I'm all ears.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-08-13 15:13:34+00:00
Certainly over mortgage payments is balanced by risk of unexpected repair and upkeep costs. Property capital gains is balanced by the capital gains you could have from investing in other things instead.

> My dad explained it to me best.

I'm glad you have a found memory of your dad explaining it to you, but this bunch of folk wisdom is killing is killing this country.

One has to actually run the numbers to see how all the things net out. I would start with https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
by numpad0 | 2025-08-13 15:13:40+00:00
If they're like what I am, they seem to just coordinate constant staggered resets for sub-systems of language processing pipeline while keeping internal representations of inputs in half-text state so that input come back out through the pipeline in the other configurations.

That's how I anecdotally feel and interpret how my own brain appear to work, so it could be different from how interpreters work or how actual human brains work, but as far as I see it, professional simultaneous interpreters don't seem to be agnostic for relevant pairs of languages at all.
by microtonal | 2025-08-13 15:13:47+00:00
The world is not a zero-sum game, but I don't think it's likely that companies will double their advertising. So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game and most of the advertising revenue will shift to different companies or Google, Meta, etc. win and they get to keep their advertising income.

I don't see how suddenly hundreds of billions of additional ad revenue will appear.

I think some of AI companies truly wanted to make a fortune replacing all white collar workers through model exclusivity, but that open models (initially Llama and then a sequence of really good Chinese models) threw a wrench in the cogs. There is not as much you can make anymore if everyone can host their own 'workers' near cost price.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-13 15:13:48+00:00
Wells are pretty small, pipelines are buried and not easy to see from the sky -- attempts to measure groundwater use detect the evaporation

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-groundwater-accurately-satelli...

or detect subsidence

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022WR03...
by ryandrake | 2025-08-13 15:14:02+00:00
That's kind of what I was guessing[1], too. Everyone in these CEOs' orbits kisses their asses, and tells them they're right. So they have come to expect this kind of supplication in communication. This expectation percolates down into the product, and at the end of the day, the LLM starts to sound exactly like a low-level employee speaking to his CEO.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889123
by trothamel | 2025-08-13 15:14:05+00:00
Lots of things interfere with astronomical observations - if someone builds a house, it'll interfere with their neighbors observing a star close to the horizon.

Especially since the observations appear to be outside the protected spectrum, the answer is "that's probably okay". There's balancing that needs to be done - does the safety benefit of a world in which nobody can be out of contact of emergency services, and the economic benefit of having reasonably high speed internet available everywhere, outweigh the loss of radio astronomy potential.

I think it probably does.