MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-10-26 19:30:17+00:00
The reason some people treat these as equivalent is that AI algorithm research is one of the things a well-educated adult human can do, so an AGI who commits to that task should be able to improve itself, and if it makes a substantial improvement, then it would become or be replaced by an ASI.

To some people this is self-evident so the terms are equivalent, but it does require some extra assumptions: that the AI would spend time developing AI, that human intelligence isn't already the maximum reachable limit, and that the AGI really is an AGI capable of novel research beyond parroting from its training set.

I think those assumptions are pretty easy to grant, but to some people they're obviously true and to others they're obviously false. So depending on your views on those, AGI and ASI will or will not mean the same thing.
by timhh | 2025-10-26 19:30:19+00:00
> So when a little-endian system needs to inspect or modify a network packet, it has to swap the big-endian values to little-endian and back, a process that can take as many as 10-20 instructions on a RISC-V target which doesn’t implement the Zbb extension.

See this justification doesn't make any sense to me. The motivation is that it makes high performance network routing faster, but only in situations where a) you don't implement Zbb (which is a real no-brainer extension to implement), and b) you don't do the packet processing in hardware.

I'm happy to be proven wrong but that sounds like an illogical design space. If you're willing to design a custom chip that supports big endian for your network appliance (because none of the COTS chips do) then why would you not be willing to add a custom peripheral or even custom instructions for packet processing?

Half the point of RISC-V is that it's customisable for niche applications, yet this one niche application somehow was allowed and now it forces all spec writers and reference model authors to think about how things will work with big endian. And it uses up 3 precious bits in mstatus.

I guess it maybe is too big of a breaking change to say "actually no" even if nobody has ever actually manufactured a big endian RISC-V chip, so I'm not super seriously suggesting it is removed.

Perhaps we can all take a solemn vow to never implement it and then it will be de facto removed.
by al_borland | 2025-10-26 19:30:50+00:00
> how to disable highlighting than how to do line wrapping in the primitive app

In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up. I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.

> Nothing, they'll try to do nothing. Sublime Text doesn't even have a package manager embedded.

I just downloaded Sublime Text. After indenting, it preserves that indentation level when I hit return. This is something I want in a code editor, like Sublime Text. This is something I do not want it a basic text editor, like Text Edit. Both are working as expected.

It did default to Plain Text, and didn't switch on me when I did something like adding a colon at the end of the line, so that was good.

For those who don't need all the power Sublime Text has to offer and just want to write simple text, I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-26 19:31:48+00:00
If you're sufficiently-powerful that your power affects how other people feel they can interact with you, then you should consider reducing your power. If it's important for you to be that powerful, and there's really no way to achieve your goals without it, then that's a sacrifice you're willing to make.

> If someone doesn't want to do something, they say no. If they receive retribution because of that no we then investigate the retribution and as a society we turn the ne'er-do-well into a social pariah until they have better behavior.

This only works if we have accountability. You can't have accountability if there's no evidence that a conversation took place, and if decisions aren't made in open and transparent ways: you can't classify things as "retribution" or "not retribution" without… witch hunts. Oh. So it doesn't solve the witch-hunt problem. (Wearing a body-cam everywhere would, but that kind of mass surveillance has its own problems.)

"Turn the ne'er-do-well into a social pariah" doesn't help the victim of retribution.

If the (alleged) ne'er-do-well has a strong enough support network, no force on earth will turn them into a social pariah, so this becomes an exercise in eroding political support, and… oh. That's also a procedure decoupled from justice.

This is not a simple topic, and it does not have simple solutions. Many of the issues you've identified (such as selective enforcement) are issues, but that doesn't mean your proposed solutions actually work.

> "I was afraid i'd be fired if I denied Stallman." ; did anything resembling this ever occur?

Edit: while waiting for the rate limit to expire, I found some claims of Paul Fisher, quoted in the "Stallman Report" https://stallman-report.org/:

> RMS would often throw tantrums and threaten to fire employees for perceived infractions. FSF staff had to show up to work each day, not knowing if RMS had eliminated their position the night before.

This conflicts with my understanding of Richard Stallman's views and behaviour. I'll have to look into this further. I've left my original answer below.

---

I vaguely recall a time he tried to remove authority from someone, in favour of a packed committee, because he disagreed with a technical decision they made. (It didn't really work, because the committee either had no opinion, or agreed with the former authority figure about that technical decision.) Can't find a reference though.

But in this kind of context, I'm not aware of Richard Stallman ever personally retaliating against someone for saying no to him. I don't imagine he'd approve of such behaviour, and he's principled enough that I doubt he'd ever do it. (There are a few anecdotes set in MIT about pressures from other people, but these are not directly Richard Stallman's fault, so I think it's unfair to blame him for them.)

This isn't really the point, though. A community leader should be aware of "people stuff" like this, and act to mitigate it. If he doesn't want the responsibility, he shouldn't have the power. By all accounts, he doesn't want the responsibility.
by jeffbee | 2025-10-26 19:31:52+00:00
It's not at all clear that the OP is logged in, or that YouTube is doing anything at all. This is HN, where it passes for rational thought that everyone installs rootkit "privacy" extensions in their browser and uses a VPN of no reputable provenance.

The goal of my post is to communicate that this does not resemble the mainstream experience of using YouTube.
by jimbo808 | 2025-10-26 19:32:00+00:00
> The International Math Olympiad qualifies as solving original problems, for example. If you disagree, that's a case you have to make. Transformer models are unquestionably better at math than I am. They are also better at composition, and will soon be better at programming if they aren't already.

No, it does not. You're just telling me you've never seen what these problems are like.

> Every time a magazine editor is fooled by AI slop, every time an entire subreddit loses the Turing test to somebody's ethically-questionable 'experiment', every time an AI-rendered image wins a contest meant for human artists -- those are original works.

That's such an absurd logical leap. If you plagiarize a paper and it fools your English teacher, you did not produce an original work. You fooled someone.

> Heck, looking at my Spotify playlist, I'd be amazed if I haven't already been fooled by AI-composed music.

Who knows, but you've already demonstrated that you're easy to fool, since you've bought all the AI hype and seem to be unwilling to accept that an AI CEO or a politician would lie to you.

> If it hasn't happened yet, it will probably happen next week, or maybe next year. Certainly within the next five years.

I can pull numbers out of my ass too, watch! 5, 18, 33, 1, 556. Impressed? But jokes aside, guesses about the future are not evidence, especially when they're based on nothing but your own misguided gut feeling.
by fjdjshsh | 2025-10-26 19:32:02+00:00
>But all intelligence, of any sort, is "jagged" when measured against a different set of problems or environments.

On the other hand, research on "common intelligence" AFAIK shows that most measures of different types of intelligence have a very high correlation and some (apologies, I don't know the literature) have posited that we should think about some "general common intelligence" to understand this.

The surprising thing about AI so far is how much more jagged it is wrt to human intelligence
by neilv | 2025-10-26 19:32:06+00:00
This is a big problem, though I would be slow to trust anyone purporting to address this problem. (Though, to their credit, this Books by People team is more credible than the bog-standard pair of 20yo Bay Area techbro grifters I expected.)

Reportedly, Kindle has already been flooded with "AI" generated books. And I've heard complaints from authors, of AI superficial rewritings of their own books being published by scammers. (So, not only "AI, write a YA novel, to the market, about a coming of age vampire young woman small town friends-to-lovers romance", but "AI, write a new novel in the style of Jane Smith, basically laundering previous things she's written" and "AI, copy the top-ranked fiction books in each category on Amazon, and substitute names of things, and how things are worded.")

For now, Kindle is already requiring publishers/authors to certify on which aspects of the books AI tools were used (e.g., text, illustrations, covers), something about how the tools were used (e.g., outright generation, assistive with heavy human work, etc.), and which tools were used. So that self-reporting is already being done somewhere, just not exposed to buyers yet.

That won't stop the dishonest, but at least it will help keep the honest writers honest. For example, if you, an honest writer, consider for a moment using generative AI to first-draft a scene, an awareness that you're required to disclose that generative AI use will give you pause, and maybe you decide that's not a direction you want to go with your work, nor how you want to be known.

Incidentally, I've noticed a lot of angry anti-generative-AI sentiment among creatives like writers and artists. Much more than among us techbros. Maybe the difference is that techbros are generally positioning ourselves to profit from AI, from copyright violations, selling AI products to others, and investment scams.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-10-26 19:32:35+00:00
So infallibility is one of the necessary criteria for AGI? It does seem like a valid question to raise.

Edit due to rate-limiting, which in turn appears to be due to the inexplicable downvoting of my question: since you (JumpCrisscross) are imputing a human-like motivation to the model, it sounds like you're on the side of those who argue that AGI has already been achieved?
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-10-26 19:32:40+00:00
Yeah, we really need LLMs to work swimmingly with Lean 4. It is currently hot garbage and it does not understand proof composition, exploring proof extensions, lemma search, etc. It does not explore an open-ended node to a mathematical knowledge graph by substituting various options.

I'd happily work with someone on a conversational theorem prover, if anyone's up for it.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-26 19:32:43+00:00
I don't care if AI wrote the book, if the book is good. The problem is that AI writes badly and pointlessly. It's not even a good editor, it 1) has no idea what you are talking about, and 2) if it catches some theme, it thinks the best thing to do is to repeat it over and over again and make it very, very clear. The reason you want to avoid LLM books is the same reason why you should avoid Gladwell books.

If a person who I know has taste signs off on a 100% AI book, I'll happily give it a spin. That person, to me, becomes the author as soon as they say that it's work that they would put their name on. The book has become an upside-down urinal. I'm not sure AI books are any different than cut-ups, other than somebody signed a cut-up. I've really enjoyed some cut-ups and stupid experiments, and really projected a lot onto them.

My experience in running things I've written through GPT-5 is that my angry reaction to its rave reviews, or its clumsy attempts to expand or rewrite, are stimulating in and of themselves. They often convince me to rewrite in order to throw the LLM even farther off the trail.

Maybe a lot of modern writers are looking for a certification because a lot of what they turn out is indistinguishable cliché, drawn from their experiences watching television in middle-class suburbs and reading the work of newspaper movie critics.

Lastly, everything about this site looks like it was created by AI.
by spauldo | 2025-10-26 19:33:10+00:00
No, we wouldn't. Linux climbed its way up to overtake proprietary UNIX despite being less capable, which it very much was at the time.

Linux came around at the right time when the Internet was going public and regular people had access to hardware that could run a decent UNIX. People latched onto it because it was free and an interesting project. The free BSDs were just late enough to the party that they missed out on the momentum.

All the proprietary UNIX vendors (other than SCO) relied on expensive proprietary hardware sales. Intel ate their lunch while they were too busy stabbing each other in the back to notice. Linux killed SCO because SCO was, quite frankly, overpriced crap.

None of this had anything to do with the license, other that the fact you could use it for free. It was all about hardware availability, the rise of the Internet, the wave of new IT people who had experienced Linux at home, and the fact that Linux on Intel was good enough to replace those pricy proprietary machines.

Now, you wanna talk Apple, there's where your code "theft" kicks in. But that's a whole different thing.
by avazhi | 2025-10-26 19:34:43+00:00
I think for me I’m just going to accept that I won’t be reading any modern fiction, likely ever. It isn’t like there isn’t more than I could read in multiple lifetimes already out there that is pre, say, 2010. But the other side is that fiction has never been worse, because the commercial impetus to become a published fiction writer has never been lower (literally since before the 1600s, given functional literacy levels and the amount of fiction reading the average person does). The Steinbecks of the world aren’t writing novels in 2025.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-26 19:35:52+00:00
Yeah, maybe. But what matters is the end result. In the kaggle match, one of the games from the finals (grok vs o3) is rated by chesscom's stockfish as 1900vs2500. That is, they played a game at around those ratings.

For reference, the average chesscom player is ~900 elo, while the average FIDE rated player is ~1600. So, yeah. Parrot or not, the LLMs can make moves above the average player. Whatever that means.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-26 19:36:15+00:00
> Your typical Raspbian install has a lot more going on after the default install.

I believe that this is true for just about all widely popular distributions. It's probably possible to set up Arch to have power draw similar to NetBSD, but you're going to have to know what you're doing and it's probably going to require more administration/attention to keep running smoothly than NetBSD does.
by zingababba | 2025-10-26 19:36:24+00:00
For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
by mobilejdral | 2025-10-26 19:36:41+00:00
For this particular situation on D3 I personally (who is not your doctor) would go with vitamin D3-loaded nanoemulsion. The reason is that Vit D influences how tryptophan is converted down the 5-HTP and serotonin path or the Kynurenine path. We want higher serotonin AND specifically in the brain. The higher serotonin means better melatonin which not only increase sleep, but increase the ERα expression which we are trying to increase... in the brain.

There is a recent study on this showing how this form can provide better results in the brain. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S305047402...

In general: Omega-3, bcomplex with choline etc all have studies. Really it depends on the individual and what their genetic weakest issue is. Its old and boring, but eat healthy, don't eat before bed, exercise (dance!), and get good sleep always apply.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-26 19:36:45+00:00
I could not hold myself back, so I already elaborated on OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD here (albeit it is non-exhaustive): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45714491 :D

I left out FreeBSD from that comment, which has its own set of innovations: Capsicum (capability-based security framework), Jails (OS-level virtualization/containerization which predates Docker by over a decade), MAC Framework (Mandatory Access Control for fine-grained security policies), GEOM (modular disk I/O framework), Linuxulator (Linux binary compatibility layer), ZFS (FreeBSD has arguably the best ZFS implementation outside of Solaris), bhyve (type-2 hypervisor), and so forth.

Userland tools include iocage/bastille (jail managers), poudriere (package building), jemalloc (default allocator which focuses on fragmentation avoidance and scalability) among many others.

Each BSD really does have its own character. FreeBSD leans toward performance and production use, OpenBSD toward security and correctness, NetBSD toward portability and clean design, DragonflyBSD toward alternative SMP approaches!

(illumos/OpenIndiana is quite interesting, too (see DTrace, Doors IPC, Zones, SMF, Contracts, Event Ports, RBAC)).
by dandeto | 2025-10-26 19:37:05+00:00
I will try this out at work this week. I guess I don't know what I've been missing since I never seriously dove into react or vue. I rely on having my breakpoints hit for debugging, which works pretty well, but when I hear that something could make me a faster developer, I am all ears! It's also great to see more devs investing in Blazor.
by jedberg | 2025-10-26 19:38:22+00:00
To define AGI, we'd first have to define GI. Humans are very different. As park rangers like to say, there is an overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans, which is why sometimes people can't open bear-proof trash cans.

It's a similar debate with self driving cars. They already drive better than most people in most situations (some humans crash and can't drive in the snow either for example).

Ultimately, defining AGI seems like a fools errand. At some point the AI will be good enough to do the tasks that some humans do (it already is!). That's all that really matters here.
by whstl | 2025-10-26 19:38:30+00:00
> this CTO would frequently lash out at them [...] doing work he wasn't qualified to do, trying forcing them to clean up after him [...] and then yelling at them for it

Was that a Fintech in Germany, by any chance? :)

I once witnessed a meeting between a CTO and a Tech Lead. The CTO was attending from his laptop in an open office, and he was yelling in Russian for one hour straight at another Tech Lead because he wanted the tech lead to finish his work. It was a pathetic display, with the whole company watching and wondering what was going on.

Eventually he was "phased out" by having a few people promoted to VP of engineering who would deal directly with the CEO instead of him.

Last I heard he tried to rewrite the financial core in Golang by himself, but he failed since nobody wanted to work together with him and he doesn't really knew the language.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-10-26 19:38:38+00:00
> AGI is a system that learns to perform many things at the same time.

What counts as a "thing"? Because arguably some of the deep ANNs pre-transfomers would also qualify as AGI but no one would consider them intelligent (not in the human or animal sense of intelligence).

And you probably don't even need fancy neural networks. Get a RL algorithm and a properly mapped solution space and it will learn to do whatever you want as long as the problem can be mapped.
by mycodendral | 2025-10-26 19:38:48+00:00
Ok, so you want to rewrite the existing legal force framework. Again, good luck with that. Folks who argue this rarely provide a coherent alternative that holds up to scrutiny.

> ‘If a cop can arrest or shoot you, then you should be able to arrest and shoot cops too.’

Let me know when you’ve proposed a coherent legal framework that’s actually consistent with that idea.
by cj | 2025-10-26 19:39:03+00:00
> Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks.

The biggest hurdle I've encountered personally is primary care doctors deal with very sick people every day (terrible diet, terrible body composition, terrible alcohol/drug habits, etc). And that's who they optimize their care for.

If you show up to a PCP and you're in shape, all vitals on point, all bloodwork looking good, the last thing the PCP wants to do is prescribe anything because "you don't need it" and "you're not sick".

Most doctors simply don't care about helping you optimize your health once you've reached "healthier than average" status.

This leads a lot of people to doing their own research, and finding health clinics outside of insurance that cater to health optimization, anti-aging, and non-standard treatments (like prescribing GLP's to people who aren't overweight, or Cialis for people who don't have ED). These clinics also aren't very good because, while they are indeed doctors or NPs, they make money off selling you prescriptions, so they are biased and usually push medications you might not really need or want. (Which again emphasizes the importance of self-education and doing your own research).

For drugs like GLP-1's, there are a whole lot of anecdotal benefits outside of weight loss. The problem with the drug industry is once a drug is approved for its most profitable use case, drug makers don't bother to pursue additional FDA approvals for additional indications because the headache isn't worth the (marginal) extra revenue.

I very much wish there were a category of doctors specializing in treating healthy people looking to optimize their health further.
by sysguest | 2025-10-26 19:39:14+00:00
this

> From Google's perspective - someone bought a gift card in the US, and redeemed it somewhere else in the US

hmm really? is this coming from a google PR firm or what? if that's the google's "perspective", unfortunately that means google is really technically inept or morally corrupt enough to watch a lot of people, including Americans, go thru the torture and being incinerated.

if Google receives a lot of "I was scammed into this" from whoever bought the giftcard, doesn't google have the responsibility to ask the giftcard user where they got that redeem code from? At least warn them several times, and then cut those buyers too?

that's the worst justification of a big corp imaginable -- I mean, that alone justifies a congressional hearing, and could mount to a deluge of negative media press:

"how google has skin in the Cambodian scams"