MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-27 13:13:54+00:00
That’s not accurate. The Turing test was always intended as a benchmark for general intelligence. Turing’s 1950 paper explicitly proposed it as a way to operationalize the question “Can machines think?” not as a parlor trick about conversation but as a proxy for indistinguishability in intellectual behavior. The whole point of the imitation game was to sidestep metaphysical arguments and reduce intelligence to functional equivalence. If a machine could consistently hold its own in unrestricted dialogue, it would demonstrate the breadth, adaptability, and contextual understanding that characterize general intelligence.

The term AGI may have come later, but the concept it represents traces directly back to Turing’s framing. When early AI researchers talked about “strong AI” or “thinking machines,” they were using the same conceptual lineage. The introduction of the acronym doesn’t rewrite that history, it just gave a modern label to an old idea. The Turing test was never meant to detect a “negative” but to give a concrete, falsifiable threshold for when positive claims of general intelligence might be justified.

As for Cleverbot, it never truly passed the test in any rigorous or statistically sound sense. Those 2011 headlines were based on short exchanges with untrained judges and no control group. Passing a genuine Turing test requires sustained coherence, reasoning across domains, and the ability to handle novel input gracefully. Cleverbot couldn’t do any of that. It failed the spirit of the test even if it tricked a few people in the letter of it.

By contrast, modern large language models can pass the Turing test in flying colors. They can maintain long, open-ended conversations, reason about complex subjects, translate, summarize, and solve problems across many domains. Most human judges would be unable to tell them apart from people in text conversation, not for a few sentences but for hours. Granted, one can often tell ChatGPT is an AI because of its long and overly descriptive replies, but that’s a stylistic artifact, not a limitation of intelligence. The remarkable thing is that you can simply instruct it to imitate casual human conversation, and it will do so convincingly, adjusting tone, rhythm, and vocabulary on command. In other words, the test can be passed both intentionally and effortlessly. The Turing test was never obsolete; we finally built systems that can truly meet it.
by kaoD | 2025-10-27 13:14:29+00:00
Being invented by $company does not preclude it from being a standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_standard

> A technical standard may be developed privately or unilaterally, for example by a corporation, regulatory body, military, etc.

PDF is now an international standard (ISO 32000) but it was invented by Adobe. HTML was invented at the CERN and is now controlled by W3C (a private consortium). OpenGL was created by SGI and is maintained by the Khronos Group.

All had different "ownership" paths and yet I'd say all of them are standards.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-27 13:14:39+00:00
What a great and helpful write-up, love when people share things like this so I can learn.

It's less about whether I would have a use case for this exact thing (or whether or not it was appropriate for this use case, i dunno, prob don't have enough context to know).

More just seeing what is possible, how they thought about it and analyzed it, what they found unexpected and how, etc. I learned a lot!
by Aurornis | 2025-10-27 13:14:48+00:00
> You must spend an additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?)

I made a simple wood mount and painted it to match the crib. It worked well. There was no software enforcement requiring you to buy their mount at the time. Has this changed recently?
by louthy | 2025-10-27 13:14:54+00:00
> all

I’m not anti-AI, although I am anti a 3rd-party recording everything on my screen like some sort of voluntary Stasi.

I can’t however think of a single time when this kind of functionality would have been something I would reach for.

So, if you’re going to say “all”, please give me one example where I needed it.
by getnormality | 2025-10-27 13:15:19+00:00
I have no position on the OP, but this comment has more shame than content. The couple fig leaves of quibbling over dubiously relevant points doesn't really clarify whether the OP's point is incorrect. I have no reason to take your opinion as more authoritative than the OP's when you don't even really engage with what the OP says.

*edited for nuance
by everdrive | 2025-10-27 13:15:25+00:00
It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a few years head of a general global trend towards authoritarianism. At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions? Will age verification require an agent run on your Windows or macOS computer? (or worse, require the use of a smart phone just to use the internet?)

We're not anywhere there yet, but we're closer than we've ever been, and things keep moving in the wrong direction.
by rini17 | 2025-10-27 13:15:44+00:00
I do understand the concepts and exactly because of that I doubt I myself would be able of airtight opsec against any determined adversary, not even state-level one. I think it's humility, you think I infantilize myself lol.

I do use password manager and disk encryption, just for case of theft. Still feels like one stupid sleepy misclick away from losing stuff and no amount of MFAs or whatever is going to save me, they actually feel like added complexity which leads to mistakes.
by cgriswald | 2025-10-27 13:16:15+00:00
Your substitution would make that sentence nonsensical. We can’t begin pure and through action be revealed to actually be impure.

Both Rousseau’s and Franklin’s views have utility. One requires one to express one’s inherent goodness. The other defines whether one is good by whether they do good acts. These both promote good acts.

Taking inherent nature from Rousseau but ascribing bad acts to that inherent nature just means no one is truly responsible for their actions. If they are good they do good. If they are bad it is because they are bad. Anyone believing they are just “a bad person” has no reason to even try to be good except to avoid consequences. It’s a bigger cop out than “society made me” while simultaneously puritanical in ignoring the role of outside influence like society.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-27 13:16:19+00:00
Yes, demonstrably.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/meta-smartwatch-leaked-a...

That abomination should have been killed from the start.

the lack of attention to user experience in any of the RL based products

The utterly stupid "blockchain compatibility" policy, which was too late, to fucking stupid and poorly executed.

The inability to run any project in RL that delivered any kind of value

(horizon's many many many iterations is an affront to any kind of good governance)
by twostraws | 2025-10-27 13:16:40+00:00
If I only released an up-front payment version, people would complain that they weren't able to try the app first. If I only released a free version with in-app purchases, people would complain that they don't like in-app purchases. I did both, and I'm still getting complaints. I get that my solution is imperfect, but I'm trying my best.
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-27 13:16:44+00:00
a few days removed, this felt like a knee-jerk overreaction from the market. similar things have happened around other major changes related to the skins economy in the past. [1]

prices have slightly recovered in some cases, but indeed the new inputs for the trade-ups have been inflated beyond measure.

in the past, before trade restrictions, one could "trade up to a knife". now it is literally possible through trash skins you can receive in drops in game. if the lower prices these items are here to stay, then the highest tier stuff will become even more attractive and valuable in the long run.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21392007
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-27 13:16:58+00:00
You picked one trivial failure and built an entire worldview around it while ignoring the tidal wave of success stories that define what these models can already do. ChatGPT can draft legal documents, debug code in multiple languages, generate functional architectures, summarize thousand page reports, compose music, write poetry, design marketing campaigns, and tutor students in real time. It can hold domain specific conversations with doctors, engineers, and lawyers and produce coherent, context aware reasoning that would have been considered impossible five years ago.

And you’re pointing to a single pizza dough error as if that somehow invalidates all of it. If that’s your bar, then every human who ever made a mistake in a kitchen is disqualified from being intelligent too. You’re cherry picking the single dumbest moment and pretending it defines the whole picture. It doesn’t.

The real story is that these models already demonstrate reasoning and generalization across virtually every intellectual domain. They write, argue, and problem solve with flexibility and intent. They’re not perfect, but perfection was never the standard. The Turing test was passed the moment you could no longer draw a clear line between where imitation ends and understanding begins.

You can sneer about yeast all you want, but the irony is that while you mock, the machines are already doing useful work coding, researching, analyzing, and creating, quietly exceeding every benchmark that once defined general intelligence.
by omgbear | 2025-10-27 13:17:04+00:00
Down a lot now, but likely peaked in the 70s -- Kids growing up then are likely 50-60 which are the higher turnout voting brackets.

There's a lagging effect from lead exposure, so it's difficult to pinpoint when those exposed would be most impacted.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-americans-vote-and-ho...
by dundercoder | 2025-10-27 13:17:23+00:00
Not sure I understand your point, but if it’s helpful, I’m blind, prefer to be called blind, but get tired of educating people on what “blind” actually means as it’s a spectrum and not a binary condition.

In my community we refer to non-blind people as “sighted” which I suppose is also a spectrum.

Blind is very descriptive, and in my opinion not derogatory. I’d rather it not be my primary differentiator or descriptor unless comparing me to virtually identical people who have full or near full vision. “The blind engineer on the team” is ok with me as it’s the fastest way to describe me if we’re all middle aged guys with beards. If I’m the only bearded guy on the team of middle aged engineers I’d prefer “the engineer with a beard”
by tuukkah | 2025-10-27 13:18:13+00:00
> Since when? What have they been replaced with?

The Helsingborg-Helsingør train ferry was replaced (car ferries remain) by railway on the Öresund Bridge (from the 2011 TV series The Bridge) between the big cities Malmö, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge

The Puttgarden-Rødby train ferry was replaced by a new longer but faster railway route via the Great Belt Bridge and Flensburg until the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is ready. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/hamburg-to-copenhag...
by noir_lord | 2025-10-27 13:18:23+00:00
I'm curious what they think the future looks like, Linux is growing on the desktop/laptop (in part driven by Valve/Steam), Users care less and less about PC's outside of the office generally - the primary computing device of most people is a phone not a PC doubly so if you exclude work - gaming has been a huge part of why many people still have PC's in the home and see above.

Not sure what their actual moat is in preventing a slow bleed out from multiple factors over the long term.

I think they'll hold businesses that are already on Windows for everything - like it/love it/loathe it Active Directory/Exchange etc do work for businesses but there has always been a halo effect from the same OS been used in the office as at work, i.e. people knew how to use word when they got into work because they'd used word at school (Chromebooks are very strong there) or home etc.
by fsf4alltemp | 2025-10-27 13:18:50+00:00
In my country, the same verification service is used to access banks, health services (private and public), taxes, and even verify online retail purchases. This verification app on Android requires Play Integrity on first time activation so fresh installs of something like GrapheneOS will not let you use the app. It's still currently possible to use a hardware token alternative to the app. It is only getting less convenient and possible to opt out of the digital verification systems even if there's technically still workarounds. In the past, even when such verification systems existed, they were less user constricting (no requirements on remote attestation for example).

I believe if we look at the past compared to now, and then extrapolate towards the future, without proper action, we will keep slipping down the slope.
by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 2025-10-27 13:18:51+00:00
> tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations

Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.
by dugmartin | 2025-10-27 13:18:57+00:00
I know this was a joke:

<div id="root"></div> <script src="bundle.js"></script>

but I feel there is a last tag missing:

<main>...</main>

that will ensure screenreaders skip all your page "chrome" and make life much easier for a lot of folks. As a bonus mark any navigation elements inside main using <nav> (or role="navigation").
by begueradj | 2025-10-27 13:19:14+00:00
>"The repetition of behavior, not the sincerity of belief, is what shapes character"

To perform behavior X repeatedly and consciously for a long time, you have to have a belief (whether it is good or bad). Hence it is the sincerity of belief which shapes character.

Like when you wash yourself every now and then: you repeat that because you have a belief that keeping yourself clean is useful. Without that belief, you won't waste your time on that. Behavior is just an expression of a belief.
by JeremyNT | 2025-10-27 13:19:24+00:00
Alternate take: it's exactly as bad as you expected, but your timeline was off.

And even so, perhaps it's later than you realize. Device attestation in the browser is the final nail in the coffin, and it's a question of "when" not "if" major sites start requiring it in the name of "safety" from bots.
by tribaal | 2025-10-27 13:19:26+00:00
I was very skeptical of the claim that gaming on linux is good now, but fully switched over last weekend.

All of the games I play on a regular basis just worked out of the box with no fiddling at all (nVidia graphics card, X11, pop_OS - but I'm pretty sure any modern distribution would work just as well). Fresh OS install (nvidia drivers just worked), install the steam flatpack, click "download", click "play". That's it.

This includes "modern" games such as Borderlands 4 and e.g. Helldivers 2.
by layer8 | 2025-10-27 13:20:12+00:00
The respective mailserver likely checks which domains it is forwarding mails to, e.g. only allowing netbsd.org, or only allowing mails from localhost. In the more distant past, that wasn’t the case, so spammers would send their mails to the domain of such mail servers, who would blindly forward it to whatever domain is encoded after the percent sign in the local part. They’d effectively serve as an open mail relay then.
by brookst | 2025-10-27 13:20:19+00:00
I think you’re calling out two different phenomena: 1) the gold rush mentality leads to bad investments (at least in the short term), and 2) in a hype bubble companies are incentivized to attach everything to the hype, even if it’s not real (many companies talk AI but aren’t seriously investing).

Both are true in many cases. But to the extent companies are making major investments that are strategically correct but won’t make money for years, it’s still the right move to hide stuff in financial statements.

Markets don’t reward long term investments. Everything has to be short term, and if it’s not paying off instantly, short term investors get no value and want it stopped.

Net result: lots of PR about AI, but almost every company is incentivized to downplay it financially.
by matt_kantor | 2025-10-27 13:20:33+00:00
> The question is why we would model an AGI after verbal language as opposed to modeling it after the native intelligence of all life which eventually leads to communication as a result.

Because verbal/written language is an abstracted/compressed representation of reality, so it's relatively cheap to process (a high-level natural-language description of an apple takes far fewer bytes to represent than a photo or 3D model of the same apple). Also because there are massive digitized publicly-available collections of language that are easy to train on (the web, libraries of digitized books, etc).

I'm just answering your question here, not implying that language processing is the path towards AGI (I personally think it could play a part, but can't be anything close to the whole picture).
by wongarsu | 2025-10-27 13:20:44+00:00
Just based on the number of ads I get for thinly veiled erotic chatbots, and the success sites like character.ai have with pretty bad LLMs, there has to be a lot of money in erotic LLM content. OpenAI turning to that market is a sign they are running out of easy investor money, but if they can survive the associated controversy without lobotomizing the models this sounds like a method to turn the entire company profitable over night. They might have to raise prices or abandon the flatrate model to deal with heavy users, but locking adult content behind separate plans might even increase acceptance

Not sure if increased availability of LLM porn or the gradual erosion of LLMs with ads and sponsored content would be the greater evil on a societal level. Neither is particularly great. But they will certainly drive shareholder value
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-27 13:20:45+00:00
The Turing test was proposed as an operational criterion for machine intelligence: if a judge cannot reliably tell machine from human in unrestricted dialogue, the machine has achieved functional equivalence to human general intelligence. That is exactly the property people now label with the word general. The test does not ask what parts the system has, it asks what it can do across open domains, with shifting goals, and under the pressure of follow up questions. That is a benchmark for AGI in any plain sense of the words.

On teachability. The Turing setup already allows the judge to teach during the conversation. If the machine can be instructed, corrected, and pushed into new tasks on the fly, it shows generality. Modern language models exhibit in context learning. Give a new convention, a new format, or a new rule set and they adopt it within the session. That is teaching. Long division is a red herring. A person can be generally intelligent while rusty at a hand algorithm. What matters is the ability to follow a described procedure, apply it to fresh cases, and recover from mistakes when corrected. Current models can do that when the task is specified clearly. Failure cases exist, but isolated lapses do not collapse the definition of intelligence any more than a human slip does.

On the claim that a model is solid state unless retrained. Human brains also split learning into fast context dependent adaptation and slow consolidation. Within a session, a model updates its working state through the prompt and can bind facts, rules, and goals it was never trained on. With tools and memory, it can write notes, retrieve information, and modify plans. Whether weights move is irrelevant to the criterion. The question is competence under interaction, not the biological or computational substrate of that competence.

On the idea that LLMs have not passed the test because you can ask for a system prompt. That misunderstands the test. The imitation game assumes the judge does not have oracle access to the machinery and does not play gotcha with implementation details. Asking for a system prompt is like asking a human for a dump of their synapses. It is outside the rules because it bypasses behavior in favor of backstage trivia. If you keep to ordinary conversation about the world, language, plans, and reasoning, the relevant question is whether you can reliably tell. In many settings you cannot. And if you can, you can also tell many humans apart from other humans by writing style tics. That does not disqualify them from being generally intelligent.

So the logic is simple. Turing gave a sufficient behavioral bar for general intelligence. The bar is open ended dialogue with sustained competence across topics, including the ability to be instructed midstream. Modern systems meet that in many practical contexts. If someone wants a different bar, the burden is to define a new operational test and show why Turing’s is not sufficient. Pointing to a contrived prompt about internal configuration or to a single brittle task does not do that.