MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robotresearcher | 2025-10-18 17:32:23+00:00
>> any human who ever lived > Is this falsifiable? Even restricting to those currently living? On what tests? In which way? Does the category of error matter?

Software reliably beats the best players that have ever played it in public, including Kasparov and Carlsen, the best players of my lifetime (to my limited knowledge). By analogy to the performance ratchet we see in the rest of sports and games, and we might reasonably assume that these dominant living players are the best the world has ever seen. That could be wrong. But my argument does not hang on this point, so asking about falsifiability here doesn't do any work. Of course it's not falsifiable.

Y'know what else is not falsifiable? "That AI doesn't understand what it's doing".

> can you name one functional difference between an AI that understands, and one that merely behaves correctly in its domain of expertise?

> I'd argue you didn't understand the examples from my previous comment or the direct reply[0]. Does it become a duck as soon as you are able to trick an ornithologist? All ornithologists?

No one seems to have changed their opinion about anything in the wake of AIs routinely passing the Turing Test. They are fooled by the chatbot passing as a human, and then ask about ducks instead. The most celebrated and seriously considered quacks like a duck argument has been won by the AIs and no-one cares.

By the way, the ornithologists' criteria for duck is probably genetic and not much to do with behavior. A dead duck is still a duck.

And because we know what a duck is, no-one is yelling at ducks that 'they don't really duck' and telling duck makers they need a revolution in duck making and they are doomed to failure if they don't listen.

Not so with 'understanding'.
by janmo | 2025-10-18 17:32:39+00:00
The only way to temporarely get rid of my tinnitus (completely gone or at least very reduced for up to 30 seconds) is to listen to this beep tone from 8 to 12 KHZ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k

apparently the phenomenon is called residual inhibition. If only there was a way to make this work permanently...
by tharne | 2025-10-18 17:32:58+00:00
That's a tough question. There's no one "right" sample size. It depends on the size of the effect you're trying to measure, how much noise is in the data, whether or not you want to analyze subgroups within the data, and many other factors.

The sample size here, 136, is not bad at first glance, many studies get published with smaller ones. It's large enough for the purposes here, but you'd definitely want to replicate the experiment a few more times.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-18 17:33:17+00:00
I learned on Turbo Pascal many years ago. It was amazing. There's another aspect beyond the TUI though: compiler speed. Turbo Pascal was designed for compilation speed. It was significantly faster than, say, Turbo C++ for an equivalent program.

But this brings up something I think about every now and again: resource bloat.

When Turbo Pascal was currently it'd be common for PCs to have 1MB of RAM. In fact with the DOS memory model you had to do weird stuff to use more memory than that (IIRC it was called "large mode").

Obviously running in a graphical environment is going to use more memory but we had pretty capable Windows environments with Win 95/98/SE/NT3.5/NT4/XP with not much RAM (256MB to 1GB depending on year).

Now with modern windowing systems we have capabilities that didn't exist in early windowing OSs like scalable rather than bitmapped fonts, UI scaling, etc. But we've had those things for 20+ years now and the resource requirements still keep going up.

Yes we have Javascript UIs running in a browser now and that will never be as cheap as native apps but we've also had those for ~20 years now (GMail is ~20 years old).

In the 90s we had graphical X Windows systems on Linux with 4-16MB of RAM. I know. I ran them.

Why do resource requirements keep going up? Is there demand for a low resource OS that could be user-facing? I know hardware is particularly cheap with Raspberry Pis and similar. We have ARM CPUs for a few dollars now that would've cost millions in the 1990s. So maybe that's why there's no demand.

But this is really something I expected to top out at some point and it just hasn't.
by general1465 | 2025-10-18 17:33:22+00:00
> And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on a non-linux OS, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done.

If you can make them working. Sorry you can't connect if user is logged on this computer. Whoops RDP session is active, so I will show you this black screen after typing your username and password until user disconnects (Why not kick out the user?). VNC is even bigger pain when you need to boot up server from SSH and sometimes restart it when it gets stuck.

While on Windows you can just install TightVNC and it works. No screwing with screens. On MacOS you can just tick Remote Screen Sharing, put your VNC password and it just works. Even Android can do that droidVNC-NG, But Linux is such a PITA to make VNC or RDP working.

And RDP also assumes that you are running X11 and not Wayland.
by jama211 | 2025-10-18 17:33:33+00:00
Yeah, basically when they said that it should’ve begged the question “why is he not used to those conventions?” And the answer would be because the conventions it uses aren’t used by anything else (which means they can barely be called conventions), and makes no effort to adopt any conventions of the platform it’s running on even just to get you started.

Also, another user said it has a tutorial when opened which should teach the basics in “10 to 15 min” but I have a feeling I would need 0 minutes to learn the basics of turbo c++.

I get that there are diehard eMacs and vim fans and honestly I’m happy for them. But at the end of the day scientifically speaking ease of use is not JUST down to familiarity alone. You can objectively measure this stuff and some things are just harder to use than others even with preloaded info.
by claytonwramsey | 2025-10-18 17:34:04+00:00
This is covered in a previous article: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

In short, most peasant farmers must sharecrop at least some of their land, and on sharecropped land, extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).
by rkomorn | 2025-10-18 17:35:01+00:00
Honestly hard to disagree with your first point even though it's sarcasm.

It's still quite easy to end up with a terminal you need to reset your way out of (eg with a misguided cat), not to mention annoying term mismatches when using remix/screen over SSH, across OSes, or (and this is self inflicted) in containers.
by briandw | 2025-10-18 17:35:15+00:00
This is not my field but: I did a search for polymersome-based drugs on the market, and didn't find anything. Similar drugs might include Doxil. Doxil took 15+ years to commoditize and is around 800USD per dose, so even assuming that this works, it'll be a long time before they are available and expensive. Anyway great to see new ideas being researched.
by cnnlives8387 | 2025-10-18 17:35:57+00:00
I’ve noticed that if I’m eating more salt, don’t sleep well, under a lot of stress, or taking anything that increases my blood pressure or affects vasodilation (supplements, some foods, stimulants, etc.), it causes me to have tinnitus. Loud concerts / music / sound-reducing headphone / noise can do it also.
by kragen | 2025-10-18 17:36:16+00:00
I'd never done that calculation, but that's about right; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent is 6 gigajoules:

You have: 6 gigajoules / 10 years (8 hours/day) You want: W * 57.039776 / 0.017531626

That's at least in the ballpark.

I think that from a moral point of view it's accurate to say that we ended slavery in general, or at least mostly ended it. Energy slaves made of barrels of oil or solar panels don't involve the same suffering and cruelty that human slavery does.
by xen0 | 2025-10-18 17:36:27+00:00
Part 4c (this is quite a long series) goes into some detail here. https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

My own interpretation is that it's difficult to precisely compare how peasants were exploited to modern taxation regimes in the developed world. Perhaps more as an unfavorable relationship with the only employer in town?
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 17:36:59+00:00
If it helps: I've gone through years of coping strategies and coming to peace with it; it'll probably annoy you a lot less a year from now than it does today. (I had a really rough run in my teenage years, but these days a cure for tinnitus is kind of only academically interesting to me; I mean, I'd do it, but it probably wouldn't change my life much.)
by nick__m | 2025-10-18 17:37:11+00:00
The fact that it clears the plaques quickly is not what so promising about this drugs candidate.

Unkike monoclonal antibodies of dubious effectiveness like elecanemab, donanemab and cie; this work upstream of the plaques. If a compromised BBB is a cause and not a symptom of another underlying cause this has a chance of doing something positive in the clinic. And that is also why this substance is an interesting leads for ALS and parkison.
by guilamu | 2025-10-18 17:37:28+00:00
A message of hope.

I got mine in my 30's too. The first week I thought I was going crazy, and this was the end of my life. I was shocked, I couldn't go to work for a whole week.

I then saw a doctor who said to me: "Man, I've got tinnitus since 20 years and I barely hear it anymore. The more you accept it, the more it'll fade."

A decade later, my own experience is exactly this. I accepted it as one of the body malfunctions that comes with age for everybody. I barely hear it anymore except in extremely low noise situations and it doesn't bother me at all.

I wish you well.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-18 17:37:30+00:00
> Why should I care?

AI training is fair use. For pirating books, they probably calculate that the fine will be lower than their profits.

Assuming you're putting videos on YouTube, you should care because they have leverage over you and can ban you.

You seem to imply some kind of moral terms or reasons based on principles but that's not how corporations work. And either way they will get a pass because their stuff is extremely valuable for intelligence agencies and the military.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-18 17:37:34+00:00
It seems that way (re empathy as a luxury) but I don't think it's true.

Empathy builds cooperation and biases towards game theory optimal, which increases chances of survival and furniture thriving.

It doesn't seem like this right now, because all our luxuries are built on momentum enabled by past empathy.

In fact it's the lack of empathy (and curiosity) for others that is causing more suffering and an increasing trend towards lose-lose dynamics, it's just hard to see because the scale across people, time and space is so vast.

Like everything else (reality as vibrations), it seems that global empathy oscillates up and down across generations, with a long-term trend upwards.

So I don't think empathy is a luxury, empathy enables luxury. It's just hard to see past the silver spoon narcissists and collective victim mentality in the current context. I'm optimistic more empathy is in our future, even if not short or medium term.
by meroes | 2025-10-18 17:37:47+00:00
This all just boils down to the Chinese Room thought experiment, where Im pretty sure the consensus is nothing in the experiment (not the person inside, the whole emergent room, etc) understands Chinese like us.

Another example by Searle is a computer simulating digestion is not digesting like a stomach.

The people saying AI can’t form from LLMs are in the consensus side of the Chinese Room. The digestion simulator could tell us where every single atom is of a stomach digesting a meal, and it’s still not digestion. Only once the computer simulation breaks down food particles chemically and physically is it digestion. Only once an LLM received photons or has a physical capacity to receive photons is there anything like “seeing a night sky”.
by GioM | 2025-10-18 17:38:06+00:00
I have had tinnitus from an infection, which (very thankfully, and I admit very luckily) slowly resolved over a period of years.

That said, I have experienced occasional reoccurrence. One thing that helps is I ask my masseuse to concentrate on the sides of my neck- there is a specific muscle that when tense can cause ringing.

Does your tinnitus get momentarily worse when you tense your neck muscles?
by layer8 | 2025-10-18 17:38:15+00:00
It depends on the database system, but for systems that support functional indexes, you can create an index using the same function expression that you use in the query, and the query optimizer will recognize that they match up and use the index.

For example, you define an index on UPPER(name_column), and in your query you can use WHERE UPPER(name_to_search_for) = UPPER(name_column), and it will use the index.
by alphabettsy | 2025-10-18 17:38:30+00:00
> current left-wing philosophy that provides any sort of meaningful place or role for masculinity as it is commonly understood

I think this strongly depends on your reality and perception.

How is masculinity commonly understood and what examples do you have of the left and democrats not making space?

On the other side, how can you not see examples of toxic masculinity demonstrated from prominent Republicans including the president?
by foofoo12 | 2025-10-18 17:38:41+00:00
By all means, go full avant-garde. I have nothing against experimental stuff like this. The "throw it at the wall an see what sticks" idea.

According to my own experience, it's entirely possible to write a rancid spaghetti carbonara all by yourself. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it (it's a heck of a learning experience) or it should be banned or prevented or anything. But if the language comes with a tin of e. coli, at least list the side effects.
by pornel | 2025-10-18 17:38:45+00:00
OTOH Leaf is a proof that old batteries can be replaced and upgrade an old car.

Original Leafs were sold with a 24kWh capacity. Current ones have 48kWh for the same price, and 64kWh replacement batteries are available. So you can go from half of the crappiest range to 3× more range than when the car was brand new.

Old batteries with reduced capacity don't even have to be thrown out. There are projects that reuse old Leaf batteries for grid energy storage (any capacity is useful when they're sitting on the ground).

I'm betting that the current-gen mainstream cars will benefit similarly, especially that production volume is orders of magnitude higher now (lots of brands share the same platform and battery modules).
by TrackerFF | 2025-10-18 17:39:01+00:00
Wonder if increased testosterone made some of the subjects seek out hobbies/communities/etc. which in turn influenced them politically.

When I was in my 20s, I started really working out. This in turn opened my eyes to bodybuilding, fitness, and such. I became engaged in that, and the bodybuilding/fitness scene / community is (or at least used to be) very right leaning. Echo chamber of bro-science and populistic rightwing ideology.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-18 17:39:07+00:00
I see your perspective about the inevitability of death causing a forcing-function directedness for agents, but that's a much much weaker claim than (emphasis mine):

> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.

My original question was why could agency not exist without death, not why it was hampered without it. For clarity, I'm coming at from an analytic philosophy angle, not its more rhetorical counterpart that I struggle to wrap my head around.

I don't really view death or evolution as a necessity for agency. Nebulous AGI predictions aside: if a self-aware, conscious and intelligent being, capable of affecting consequential changes to its environment, becomes functionally immortal, it doesn't somehow lose its agency. I'd actually go further and say losing the forcing function of inevitable death is the biggest freedom a species can aim for. Without it, our agency is limited to solving problems of survival, in one form or another.

The existence of death is ultimately arbitrary and random, as random as our existence in the first place. The "direction" we get for evolution as a result of it, is another random function on top, also taking: the random circumstances the soup of organic molecules live in, as another parameter. Only once this random inevitability is conquered can we truly shape our lives and environments in ways that are a true reflection of who we are. Only then are we genuinely free. And "agency" without freedom is impotent at best.

(Addendum: I know positing "Immortality is good actually" can cause negative associations with "billionaires who want to cryopreserve themselves". This association has melded with the general romanticization of death in various philosophical and religious beliefs that has existed since millennia, further empowering the distaste against trying to reverse aging and eventually remove death as moral goals. While I personally have no plans (or means) to cryopreserve myself when I get old, I do believe it's a goal worth fighting for. One of the more important ones, alongside ensuring we have a planet to live on in the interim)
by whaleofatw2022 | 2025-10-18 17:39:18+00:00
Not terrible unless you are lead footing both the accelerator and brake.

Also as far as Stop and go... its typically also lower speed; wind resistance is not linear based on speed, so 'crawling' is not that bad.

Im in the US and drive a hybrid rather than an EV, that said 'stop and go' is when I will often seem an MPG -increase-, so long as I gently accelerate (in severe stop and go, just letting my foot off brake and not touching gas).

That's also some of the justification for 'mild hybrids' that have an auto stop and maybe at best a 11kW/120Nm electric motor to kick things off. If you don't drive with a lead foot they can improve efficiency (but overcomplicate things compared to Toyota HSD)

I suppose main counter condition would be in low temperature conditions; AC is fairly efficient, Heating less so, and then in severe cases the batteries need to activate their own self heaters.
by projektfu | 2025-10-18 17:39:24+00:00
I snickered a little because I know Visual Studio didn't have a version 1.0. Wikipedia identifies the first version as Visual Studio 97, which was at version 5.0. I remember before that there was "Microsoft Developer Studio 4.0" which came out around Windows 95, and could run on 95 or on NT 3.51. There was a Visual C++ 1.0 and a Visual Basic 1.0 released at different times. Meanwhile there were also the workhorses, Microsoft C and MASM. In those days, Borland and Watcom were real competitors to Microsoft for C and C++.
by qingcharles | 2025-10-18 17:39:25+00:00
What amazes me every day is that I'm using literally the exact same GUI to build apps that I was over 30 years ago, with Visual Studio.

You could sit someone down from 1991 (Visual Basic 1.0) in front of Visual Studio 2026 and they would immediately know where everything is. (it still has BASIC in there too)
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-18 17:40:06+00:00
> Based on our understanding of biology and evolution we know that a squirrel understands its world more similarly to the way we do than an LLM.

Bro. Evolution is random walk. That means most of the changes are random and arbitrary based on whatever allows the squirrel to survive.

We know squirrels and humans diverged from a common ancestor but we do not know how much has changed since the common ancestor and we do not know what changed and we do not know the baseline for what this common ancestor is.

Additionally we don’t even understand the current baseline. We have no idea how brains work. if we did we would be able to build a human brain but as of right now LLMs are the closest model we have ever created to something that simulates or is remotely similar to the brain.

So your fuzzy qualitative statement of we understand evolution and biology is baseless. We don’t understand shit.

> We also see that a squirrel, like us, is capable of continuous learning driven by its own goals, all on an energy budget many orders of magnitude lower. That last part is a strong empirical indication that suggests that LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

So an LLM cant continuously learn? You realize that LLMs are deployed agentically all the time now so they both continuously learn and follow goals? Right? You’re aware of this i hope.

The energy efficiency is a byproduct of hardware. The theory of LLMs and machine learning is independent from the flawed silicon technology that is causing the energy efficiencies. Like how a computer can be made mechanical an LLM can be as well. The LLM is independent of the actual implementation and energy inefficiencies. This is not at all a strong empirical indication that LLMs are a dead end. It’s a strong indication that your thinking is illogical and flawed.

> Also remember that Sutton is still of an AI maximalist. He isn't saying that AGI isn't possible, just that LLMs can't get us there.

He can’t say any of this because he doesn’t actually know. None of us know for sure. We literally don’t know why LLMs work. The fact that training transformers on massive amounts of data produced this level of intelligence was a total surprise for all the experts and we still have no idea why this stuff works. His statements are too overarching and glossing over a lot of things we don’t actually know.

Yann lecuun for example called LLMs stochastic parrots. We now know this is largely incorrect. The reason Yan can be so wrong is because nobody actually knows shit.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-18 17:40:28+00:00
Once the major (though exceedingly rare) problems have been ruled out, the best course of action is to start learning to live with it.

It’s not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s the pragmatic approach that works best from everything I’ve seen.

The people who become involved in tinnitus forums, support groups, and chasing experimental treatments think they’re helping themselves but they’re really only bringing it to top of mind over and over again.

It feels frustrating to give up and disconnect from all things tinnitus related on th internet, but disconnecting is exactly what helps with the process of letting it fall into the background of your life. Constantly bringing it to the foreground and reading about it only makes it worse.
by bitwize | 2025-10-18 17:41:06+00:00
I know, man.

Unless your window full of text is GPU-accelerated, tear-free and composited, with raytraced syntax highlighting and AI-powered antialiasing, what is even the point?

TUIs are great if your structure them around keyboard input. There's more of a learning curve, but people develop a muscle memory for them that lets them fly through operations. I think the utility of this is sorely underestimated and it makes me think of my poor mom, whose career came to an end as she struggled with the new mouse-driven, web-enabled custoner service software that replaced the old mainframe stuff.

The late 80s/early 90s trend of building GUI-like TUIs was really more to get users on board with the standard conventions of GUIs at a time when they weren't yet ubiquitous (among PC users). Unifying the UI paradigms across traditional DOS and Windows apps, with standard mouse interactions, standard pull-down menus, and standard keyboard shortcuts was a good thing at the time. Today it's less useful. Things like Free Pascal have UIs like this mainly for nostalgia and consistency with the thing they're substituting for (Turbo Pascal).
by quuxplusone | 2025-10-18 17:41:08+00:00
Isn't this just a potato battery, except with a banana? It's certainly not "AI", although it could be a hoax in the same sense as perpetual-motion-machine demos, sure.

As to why someone would hoax a banana battery: For monetization. More clicks equals more subscribers equals more ad impressions equals more money.

Your submitted title is editorializing, btw. You should use the title of the video in question.