MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geye1234 | 2025-09-03 21:46:04+00:00
> And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid".

Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself.

> No metaphysical stance can be proved.

That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weakness that I see in the physicalist argument. I'm pointing out that any pro-physicalist argument that is a variant of "neuroscience says X" is invalid for the reason I gave: by limiting your scope to S, you can say nothing about anything outside S. This is true regardless of whether there is actually anything outside S, so there is no assumption in my argument that physicalism is wrong.

One argument against physicalism is that if thought or knowledge can be reduced to particles bouncing around, then there is no thought or knowledge. My knowledge that 2+2=4 is about something other than, or different from, the particles in my brain. Knowledge is about the content of the mind, which is different from the associated physical state of the brain. If content is neurons, then content as something my mind considers doesn't exist. If my thought "2+2=4" just is a bunch of particles in my brain doing stuff, then my belief that my thought is true is not even wrong, as the saying goes: just absurd.

I'm no Cartesian dualist though -- the interaction problem is just one problem with his dualism. I think Aristotle and Aquinas basically got the picture of reality right, and their metaphysics can shed yuuuuge amounts of light on the mind-body problem but obviously that's a grossly unfashionable worldview these days :-)
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-03 21:46:06+00:00
> No one is forcing parents to vaccinate your kids.

Yes, they are. If your kids are not allowed to attend school, then you are being forced to vaccinate them because you may not have other options. Claiming otherwise is gaslighting.

> It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.

So do those parents get a voucher for the funds pertaining to their child’s public education, if they’re prevented?
by bluGill | 2025-09-03 21:46:21+00:00
Right. You start with any two plates and make them flat with respect to each other. One will be convex and one concave of course, then you take one of those and your third plate and make those two flat with each other, the switch out again using the third plate and the one not swaped out. Keep repeating until all three are flat with respect with each other - only true flat will have all three flat and the repititions keep getting closer.

of course if you have a known flat surface you can save effort by making the new plate flate to the known flat.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-03 21:47:19+00:00
What's interesting about this proposition, is that by the time you create a machine that's as capable in the way they want to replace humans, we'll have to start talking about robot personhood, because by then they will be indistinguishable from us.

I don't think you can get the kinds of robots they want without also inventing the artificial equivalent of soul. So their whole moral sidestep to reimplement slavery won't even work. Enslaving sapient beings is evil whether they are made of meat or metal.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-03 21:48:40+00:00
It has been proven. It has been proven to benefit EVERYONE way more than any harm it could cause. I hope you and the others that give these 'concerns' (that if we are honest, these sorts of people will never have a bar high enough that they will say they are satisfied have been met) give generously to our country's future polio beggars in the streets. You might be too young to have experienced what happens to the victims, the suffering that you consider these 'concerns' to outway. It's is horrible to inflict on the population. Measles/mumps are going to result in a lot more deaf people like it was when I was a kid. Polio in lots more paralyzed children.

This is the suffering you are OK with because 'concerns':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfoxqghXxEs
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 21:49:26+00:00
Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English.

As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-03 21:49:54+00:00
I'm grateful that Europe is increasing defence spending, but I'm cynical regarding Europe because so far, it's been absolutely no hindrance to Russia's expansionism, and in some ways it has inadvertently provided Russia with material assistance while Russia engages with expansionism.

Spending on defense is not the same as. Norway is spending more on everything all the time and getting worse outcomes all the time. We spend more on police than ever, even per capita, and crime is up, we spend more on military than ever, and our actual metrics are down. I think with most of Europe the defense spending is the same, I hope I'm wrong, but if you up regulation then you have to spend more to get the same results, and Europe has runaway regulation in addition to people who try to hijack institutions for other purposes.
by WiseRob | 2025-09-03 21:50:06+00:00
The code I have written is domain agnostic - its intention is to mine the knowledge within LLMs encoders etc to "invent" novel solutions to problems. Essentually you give it the problem and a desired solution description and the thing works away using inventive steps to create a forward trajectory toward the goal solution. I have a "red team" function that checks the validity of the steps forward against what is real and negotiates bottleneck issues or kills the idea - causing the system to try something else - it can also call itself to try to solve that bottleneck problem if the system feels it is not an intractable problem. It is all on autopilot so the user can set and forget and allow it to work away.
by DantesKite | 2025-09-03 21:50:33+00:00
I think Wordle is instructive here in that it has many lessons for how to make a game go viral or become even mildly popular.

For starters, perhaps you should make it also available on the web, if at all possible. That makes it easier to share and discover.

And maybe invest in the ability for users to export the gameplay as video. I could see it spreading more if people post long combos that last for minutes, sped up with music, for example and posting on TikTok, Twitter, etc. Otherwise, even if it's a good game, most people aren't ever going to discover it, except after many months.

Obviously it always helps to make a game more fun and compelling, but I presume you're already aware of that.
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-03 21:51:21+00:00
Hmm, personally I never really cared for dated paths, seems like a problem that's solved by metadata defined in the frontmatter.

my-blog-article-title.md seems enough, and dates usually feel like clutter, since titles are distinct as they are and you don't really need the date in the filename to do anything useful.

But again, different people prefer different setups.
by piskov | 2025-09-03 21:51:35+00:00
Basically every problematic pair with one of the letters being uppercased

Tu in Tufte

Pl in Please

We in Webpages

Al in Also

Punctuatuion symbols as in

Finally,

Markdown’s

As for small caps, on apple this is really bad “In his later books”

List goes on

Cursive in “as close as possible” has stroke width not matching the regular font. In regular font uppercased letters have thicker strokes than lowercased.

It’s really on OCD level triggering event to read that text.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-03 21:51:48+00:00
If you want general-purpose generation than it has to be able to respect constraints (e.g. figure art of a person has 0..1 belly buttons, 0..2 legs is unspoken) as it is generative models usually get those things right but don't always if they can stick together the tiles they use internally in some combination that makes sense locally but not globally.

General intelligence may not be SAT/SMT solving but it has to be able to do it, hence, backtracking.

Today I had another of those experiences of the weaknesses of LLM reasoning, one that happens a lot when doing LLM-assisted coding. I was trying to figure out how to rebuild some CSS after the HTML changed for accessibility purposes and got a good idea for how to do it from talking to the LLM but at that point the context was poisoned, probably because there was a lot of content about the context describing what we were thinking about at different stages of the conversation which evolved considerably. It lost its ability to follow instructions and I'd tell it specifically to do this or do that and it just wouldn't do it properly and this happens a lot if a session goes on too long.

My guess is that the attention mechanism is locking on to parts of the conversation which are no longer relevant to where I think we're at and in general the logic that considers the variation of either a practice (instances) or a theory over time is a very tricky problem and 'backtracking' is a specific answer for maintaining your knowledge base across a search process.
by patagurbon | 2025-09-03 21:51:58+00:00
Only in the abstract / around election time, much in the same way they run on cutting taxes for the poor and middle class. There are Republican run states that do better on certain diminished state capacity things like zoning (Texas) or 2nd amendment rights, but surveillance, rights of the accused, free speech rights, right to repair, etc are largely worse under Republican governments.

See for example the Patriot Act
by cnst | 2025-09-03 21:52:03+00:00
But those features do exist as long as you're willing to pay Apple's tax.

I feel like that's already explained in the originally linked article here.

If you don't want Bluetooth from your browser, you can always install Firefox on Android.

I feel like it's 2005, and you're arguing that web browsers should not have access to a camera.

Or is camera access by a web browser still not a standard today in 2025, either, thanks to Apple, I may guess?
by azangru | 2025-09-03 21:52:20+00:00
In a parallel discussion happening on Mastodon, someone says:

> People coming from React-land can have a hard time reasoning about the difference between a custom element and a template render function and when best to use each

> This abuse of the component system can indeed lead to a massive explosion in nodes on a page and the performance tanks because of that

I know I certainly have that hard time deciding when I need a custom element and when a render function.

[0] - https://front-end.social/@5t3ph/115135994774490769
by davepeck | 2025-09-03 21:52:34+00:00
Hi! Thanks for your deeply non-silly reply; it's nice to (virtually) meet a cofounder.

If you have time, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Mullvad's campaign here in Seattle.

For what it's worth, I suppose my perspective boils down to: the first three issues aren't issues here in town, or can be addressed in more direct ways (we have a wide choice of providers; 1st party browsers and services cover the gamut of tracking concerns; etc). Circumventing geographical restrictions is useful, but -- perhaps understandably! -- doesn't appear to be what Mullvad is advertising on the trains I ride.
by sequin | 2025-09-03 21:52:59+00:00
Making sensible choices requires thinking things through, and understanding what it really is that you are doing, or refrain from doing it. Experts are just as prone to neglecting this as novices. But expressing your misgivings about prevailing orthodoxies is an ungrateful undertaking as it tends to make people angry, and there is little honour to be had in getting vindicated.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-03 21:53:35+00:00
> Isn’t it sort of unethical to force parents to inject their child with something they think is dangerous?

Yes, it is unethical. The other comments don’t agree, but this is exactly the position a lot of people hold. In the end, parents should be allowed to judge the risk for their own children based on their experience. Not allowing for that is basically thought control.

The real issue is that parents who want herd immunity to protect their own children, don’t want to also protect their children by keeping THEM away from the public or having THEM take precautions (like wearing masks or whatever). Instead, they want the risk to be taken by other people, which is unethical.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-09-03 21:53:37+00:00
I suspect part of the reason big tech has an arduous interview process is it approximates both intelligence and hunger/drive.

Even very smart people aren't going to waltz in and be able to code fast enough to solve harder interview problems without practicing.

So, people who can pass algorithmic interviews are smart people who also had the hunger/drive to study up/practice some.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-03 21:53:38+00:00
If folks corrupt the integrity of LLM responses, as it were, they’ll destroy the value proposition.

More likely the model will be payment for low friction enablement of transactions rather than overt steering. Pick Door #1: the LLM states the product is fit for purpose. Pick Door #2: the LLM will directly complete the transaction or close to it.
by sudosysgen | 2025-09-03 21:54:04+00:00
You can do that pretty trivially for any fixed size problem (as in solvable with a fixed-sized tape Turing machine), you'll just have a titanically huge state space. The claim of the LLM folks is that the models have a huge state space (they do have a titanically huge state space) and can navigate it efficiently.

Simply have a deterministic Markov chain where each state is a possible value of the tape+state of the TM and which transitions accordingly.
by sargunv | 2025-09-03 21:54:36+00:00
I agree with this take. Desktop Linux is better than ever and I can do just about 100% of what I need on my Linux PC. I still use macOS regularly and even Windows sometimes, but I’m not too worried about Apple or Microsoft locking things down. The more they do, the more I’ll just use Fedora where the same apps I need are available.

The most critical apps for me on mobile are banking, payments, transportation, and messaging. Banking I can’t do much about. Payments I can still handle with physical cards. Messaging is getting better thanks to people adapting proprietary services to Matrix, so with some effort you can use one open source client to reach them all.

Transportation is the area I’ve been working on. I’ve been getting MapLibre (an open source map rendering library) running on Compose Multiplatform, including Compose Desktop (so map apps built in Jetpack Compose could extend to Linux based phones like Librem) and also on Huawei’s HarmonyOS. If I can cover my everyday needs with open tools, then walking away from the Google/Apple duopoly stops being a thought experiment and starts being a real option for me.
by cs702 | 2025-09-03 21:54:47+00:00
I don't think Sutton's essay is misunderstood, but I agree with the OP's conclusion:

We're reaching scaling limits with transformers. The number of parameters in our largest transformers, N, is now in the order of trillions, which is the most we can apply given the total number of tokens of training data available worldwide, D, also in the order of trillions, resulting in a compute budget C = 6N × D, which is in the order of D². OpenAI and Google were the first to show these transformer "scaling laws." We cannot add more compute to a given compute budget C without increasing data D to maintain the relationship. As the OP puts it, if we want to increase the number of GPUs by 2x, we must also increase the number of parameters and training tokens by 1.41x, but... we've already run out of training tokens.

We must either (1) discover new architectures with different scaling laws, and/or (2) compute new synthetic data that can contribute to learning (akin to dreams).
by palata | 2025-09-03 21:55:13+00:00
The thing is, it's already the case today, without passkeys. Banks routinely force you to use their own app to login, for instance. And for those that allow you to choose your own password, I'm pretty sure they force you to use some other factor of their own. And it actually does make sense for services that do need the security.

The fight should be "now that we have good third-party authentication thanks to passkey, you should allow us to use those that are secure enough". Not "we don't want that new technology that is superior in many situations because services could force us to use it the way they want, exactly like they already do without this technology".

"Now that I can login using my Yubikey, please don't force me to use your MFA apps because they are provably not superior to my Yubikey".
by bastawhiz | 2025-09-03 21:55:57+00:00
I don't know, I think it's a tie. I can have the agent do some busy work or refactoring while I'm writing code with the autocomplete. I can tell it how I want a file split up or how I want stuff changed, and tell it that I'll be making other changes and where. It's smart enough to ignore me and my work while it keeps itself busy with another task. Sort of the best of both worlds. Right now I have it replacing DraftJS with another library while I'm working on some feature requests.
by EricRiese | 2025-09-03 21:56:33+00:00
Something bothers me about these questions. In the real world, when you're solving a problem, you have so much context. These questions are like waking up from a coma and you're in a video game and you don't even know the rules.

Obviously in the real world you need to ask follow up questions sometimes, but you have at least some context for orientation.
by mdhb | 2025-09-03 21:56:45+00:00
I might have chosen my words slightly differently but my point still stands. Apple has an incredibly well known horrible reputation inside of standards meetings and bodies from their peers. It has been that way for well over a decade at this point. It’s not a one off thing and it’s not a subtle thing. It’s a very strong and very bad reputation they have built.

To be fair to them, I think a very meaningful part of that comes from upper management and is not necessarily the fault of the representative in the room and multiple people have gone out of their way to make that point to me explicitly and I think it’s worth repeating here.

But there is absolutely 100% a huge culture problem inside of Apple on this specific topic.
by kragen | 2025-09-03 21:56:55+00:00
Windmills can be surprisingly expensive. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... is not up-to-date, but I think the windmill prices in it have changed a lot less than the solar prices; the 200 MW onshore project they price out there comes to US$1265/kW (US$1.27/W), of which something like 61% is the windmills themselves. Low-cost photovoltaic solar modules currently cost €0.055/W (US$0.065/W), lower by more than an order of magnitude https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis....

So, at equal cost, the alternative to a megawatt of windmills may not be a megawatt of solar panels, but 10 megawatts of solar panels. And that can compensate for their lower capacity factor.

I don't think people are building gas-powered data centers in the US. There's a data center crunch in the US because people aren't building them because they can't get the power because of the US's anti-renewable-energy policies.
by mrtimo | 2025-09-03 21:57:03+00:00
Very cool to see Malloy mentioned here. Great stuff. There is an MCP server built into Malloy Publisher[1]. Perhaps useful to the author or others trying to do something similar to what the author describes. Directions on how to use the MCP server are here [2]. [1] https://github.com/malloydata/publisher [2] https://github.com/malloydata/publisher/blob/main/docs/ai-ag...
by wrs | 2025-09-03 21:57:54+00:00
This makes some sense. We have CEOs saying they're not hiring developers because AI makes their existing ones 10X more productive. If that productivity enhancement was real, wouldn't they be trying to hire all the developers? If you're getting 10X the productivity for the same investment, wouldn't you pour cash into that engine like crazy?

Perhaps these graphs show that management is indeed so finely tuned that they've managed to apply the AI revolution to keep productivity exactly flat while reducing expenses.
by quantummagic | 2025-09-03 21:58:00+00:00
What do you think about the idea that LLMs are not reasoning/inferring, but are rather an approximation of the result? Just like you yourself might have to spend some effort reasoning, on how a plant grows, in order to answer questions about that subject. When asked, you wouldn't replicate that reasoning, instead you would recall the crystallized representation of the knowledge you accumulated while previously reasoning/learning. The "thinking" in the process isn't modelled by the LLM data, but rather by the code/strategies used to iterate over this crystallized knowledge, and present it to the user.
by jorvi | 2025-09-03 21:58:29+00:00
What I really can't stand is inefficient cost-cutting.

Nvidia, Apple, Sony and Microsoft have all at one point (or maybe still do) use ridiculously cheap solder. This only saves them fractions of a cent on $300 devices. Every few years this leads to a device that will have it's solder crack from heat stress. This usually happens well outside the warranty window, and the manufacturer will swiftly give their customers the finger. Microsoft was the exception with the Red Ring of Death getting fixed outside of warranty. PS3 with the Yellow Light of Death? Sony gives you the finger. Nvidia card cooked or MacBook borked? Here's where you can buy our new model.

Another one is the proximity sensor on phones. On midrange models, these have been replaced by a "virtual proximity sensor". Saves Samsung or whoever maybe a couple of cents, seriously degrades your user experience.

There's hundreds of these things across all industries. Its a pretty clear symptom of the fact that businesses are no longer primarily interested in their customers, but rather their shareholders.
by taylodl | 2025-09-03 21:58:40+00:00
1. Get experience. Generally, that involves internships.

2. Look for opportunities to make a quantifiable impact. If you don't understand the business impact of your work then ask.

3. Learn how to use AI properly. It's a productivity tool, nothing more. Those who understand the strengths of AI and the strengths of human analysis and experience and know how to blend those together when creating solutions are the ones who will still have jobs in the future. It's not easy to get that blend right and you're at a disadvantage by not having a lot of solutioning experience - so practice.

I’d be careful about going into cybersecurity. AI is well poised to have a significant impact in that area and could lead to substantial job loss, especially in roles focused on monitoring and incident response. If you're considering this path, think strategically: focus on areas that require human judgment, like threat modeling, red teaming, or security architecture. Software development will also be impacted by AI, but likely at a slower pace due to its creative and architectural nature.