MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-10-15 16:46:15+00:00
Would totally depend on the project and what kinds of risks were appropriate to take given the nature of the project. But as a general principal, for all kinds of development: "Bringing in a new dependency should be A Big Deal." Whether you are writing a toy project or space flight avionics, you should not bring in unknown code casually. The level of vetting required will depend on the project, but you have to vet it.
by sethammons | 2025-10-15 16:46:18+00:00
Several Pacific Northwest Coast tribes, including the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish were non-agricultural, complex hunter-gatherers who lived in permanent villages and maintained clear social hierarchies, including hereditary slavery. Their existence serves as a major counterpoint to the general claim that hunter-gatherer societies were universally egalitarian or lacked hierarchy.

While "sedentary life and agriculture developed in the Americas around the same time it developed everywhere else in the world," it was not the case for the coastal Salish and other tribes who lived on the resource abundant Pacific Northwest.
by nonethewiser | 2025-10-15 16:46:36+00:00
>There's already credible evidence that we came perilously close to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine which likely would've spiraled out of control.

I do agree nukes are a far more realistic threat. So this is kind of an aside and doesn't really undermine your point.

But I actually think we widely misunderstand the dynamic of using nuclear weapons. Nukes haven't been used for a long time and everyone kind of assumes using them will inevitably lead to escalation which spirals into total destruction.

But how would Russia using a tactical nuke in Ukraine spiral out of control? It actually seems very likely that it would not be met in kind. Which is absolutely terrifying in it's own right. A sort of normalization of nuclear weapons.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-10-15 16:46:38+00:00
a - a + a = b when a and b map to the same vector (or in practice, extremely close together). Your assumptions about invertibility etc don't hold in this world.... embeddings are just a bunch of empirically learned coordinates in a dense space.

So an example: a maps to [1,2,3] and b maps to [1,2,3] . Again in practice b could map to [1,2,3.0001] or something.

To summarize: king, man etc aren't symbols, they get mapped to vectors. + is element wise addition. = is "equal to or very close in multi dimensional space".

Maybe tone down the attitude. You clearly aren't in this field. The properties you have assumed to be true are not. People in AI/ML are using terms and conventions differently than you assume. When someone says "vector addition" they really do mean just element wise addition in practically every case. You are the fool here.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-15 16:46:43+00:00
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.

That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
by ltratt | 2025-10-15 16:46:55+00:00
If you've used Chrome or Safari to read this post, you've used a program that uses (at least in parts) conservative GC. [I don't know if Firefox uses conservative GC; it wouldn't surprise me if it does.] This partly reflects shortcomings in our current compilers and in current programming language design: even Rust has some decisions (e.g. pointers can be put in `usize`s) that make it hard to do what would seem at first glance to be the right thing.
by leakycap | 2025-10-15 16:47:02+00:00
The issues I see people struggle with on a Mac is that development often needs things in a non-default and often less-secure setup.

There isn't a "dev switch" in macOS, so you have to know which setting is getting in your way. Apple doesn't like to EVER show error alerts if at all possible to suppress, so when things in your dev environment fail, you don't know why.

If you're a seasoned dev, you have an idea why and can track it down. If you're learning as you go or new to things, it can be a real problem to figure out if the package/IDE/runtime you're working with is the problem or if macOS Gatekeeper or some other system protection is in the way.
by dang | 2025-10-15 16:47:07+00:00
Your account has been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines with flamewar comments and personal attacks. Moreover, you've been using HN primarily for political battle (something which is not allowed here, regardless of which politics you're for or against). Since we asked you to stop doing these things and you haven't stopped, I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Edit: the other commenter was also breaking the rules, of course. I've responded to that user elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45595217.
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-15 16:47:23+00:00
Pensions and disability payments are by definition targeting a small proportion of the society. It is one thing to make a promise to 10% of the society, and another to 100% of it. And indeed, pensions are becoming tougher as the fraction goes upwards. My point isn't that it is somehow bad that we have these benefits but that they are already quite expensive and look increasingly unsustainable. So with this knowledge, we should be very careful about making much bigger committments.

Further, people on retirement or disability benefits typically don't have much choice. Due to age or circumstances, they cannot really earn a living, or a sufficient one. It's not a choice. We're not promising them an alternative to a productive lifetime. UI is different. If it is to be worth anything, it is surely a promise that you can take economically unsound or risky choices, and if they don't work out, the state has your back. If it doesn't, it's just pocket money. It is actively encouraging people to outsource the financial responsibility for their lives to the state, even as governments globally are struggling to make ends meet.

What is even trickier is that pensions and disability benefits go to people who are generally not very economically active. Extending universal income to everyone kind of expands this to everyone else, i.e. the very people who need to work to make the society work.

We have seen in many places in Europe structural decline of industries, and in various cases, the people affected were given long term unemployment benefits, a little bit like UI. It was probably the right approach - certainly the decent thing to do - but the areas where it happened tended to decrease in productivity and creativity, rather than the other way round. The ones that bounced typically got extensive investment rather than just relied on the improved creativity and industriusness of the people on unemployment benefits.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-15 16:47:35+00:00
Naming names would not be helpful. The problem isn't any one company's business practices. The problem isn't necessarily even vendor lock-in. The problem is familiarity bias. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And, as a corollary, when you ask a hammer vendor what you should do their answer will always be to treat your problems like nails.
by random3 | 2025-10-15 16:47:46+00:00
I think dismissing possibility of evolving AI, is simply ignorance (and a huge blindspot)

This said, I think the author's point is correct. It's more likely that unwanted effects (risks) from the intentional use of AI by humans is something that precedes any form of "independent" AI. It already happens, it always has, it's just getting better.

Hence ignoring this fact makes the "independent" malevolent AI a red herring.

On the first point - LLMs have sucked almost all the air in the room. LLMs (and GPTs) are simply one instance of AI. They are not the beginning and most likely not the end (just a dead end) and getting fixated on them on either end of the spectrum is naive.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-10-15 16:47:55+00:00
As I said that's just another way of soliciting donations; it relies entirely on consumer goodwill (or ignorance/poor accessibility of the free option). There are limits to how big you can get with that (or how much you can charge) before someone just undercuts you with a fork.

I'm not saying it's impossible to survive with that model; lots of organization survive on donations. But you're not gonna be able to build the Free Software equivalent of Microsoft or Google on donations.

That said, I think doing that with business software is a particularly interesting case because it allows low level employees to justify running a donation through the regular software purchasing process without raising too many eyebrows if they care to. I've seen a few other projects with similar models.
by santadays | 2025-10-15 16:48:00+00:00
It seems like there is a bunch of research/working implementations that allow efficient fine tuning of models. Additionally there are ways to tune the model to outcomes vs training examples.

Right now the state of the world with LLMs is that they try to predict a script in which they are a happy assistant as guided by their alignment phase.

I'm not sure what happens when they start getting trained in simulations to be goal oriented, ie their token generation is based off not what they think should come next but what should come next in order to accomplish a goal. Not sure how far away that is but it is worrying.
by me_again | 2025-10-15 16:48:16+00:00
"As soon as profit can be made" is exactly what the article is warning about. This is exactly the "Human + AI" combination.

Within your lifetime (it's probably already happened) you will be denied something you care about (medical care, a job, citizenship, parole) by an AI which has been granted the agency to do so in order to make more profit.
by thfuran | 2025-10-15 16:48:17+00:00
If you say "run this http request, which will return json containing a list of numbers. Reply with only those numbers, in ascending order and separated by commas, with no additional characters" and it exploits an RCE to modify the database so that the response will return just 7 before it runs the request, it's unequivocally wrong even if a malicious genie might've done the same thing. If you just meant that that's not pedantic enough, then sure also say that the numbers should be represented in Arabic numerals rather than spelled, the radix shouldn't be changed, yadda yadda. Better yet, admit that natural language isn't a good fit for this sort of thing, give it a code snippet that does the exact thing you want, and while you're waiting for its response, ponder why you're bothering with this LLM thing anyways.
by Tagbert | 2025-10-15 16:48:34+00:00
26.0 is very much a dot-zero release. It is missing a lot of optimizations and there are some open bugs like memory leaks. Initial reports on 26.1 show a lot of improvement in those. The 3rd beta of 26.1 just came out yesterday. They will probably launch this new version with improved optimizations by end of October.
by imglorp | 2025-10-15 16:48:39+00:00
I think there is, definitely, and that will be a solid route out of this supply chain debacle we find ourselves in.

It will have to involve identity (public key), reputation (white list?), and signing their commits and releases (private key). All the various package managers will need to be validating this stuff before installing anything.

Then your attestation can be a manifest "here is everything that went into my product, and all of those components are also okay.

See SLSA/SBOM -> https://slsa.dev
by bluGill | 2025-10-15 16:49:04+00:00
Ads have been around for a long time. If your great-...-grandpa bought a newspaper ad in 1820 he would have been looking to see if the ad worked (back then 90+% of people were farmers who didn't buy ads, but lets assume you had an ancestor then who was a shopkeeper and thus had potential value in ads). He probably didn't have have modern statistics, but he would pay attention to sales and try to figure out how much value the ad generated. (or he liked the guy who ran the newspaper and wanted to buy anyway...

If you are running ads you should be running statistics on them. You should know that you spent $X on ads, and got $Y on sales. This despite how messy the data is (Car manufactures want you to buy a new car every 3 years, so most ads are buy in the future not today - which makes getting answers hard). What matters isn't engagement, clicks, or any other data analysis can give you - they are (or trying to be) a proxy for what matters: how did advertisements affect sales. There are other ways to get that data, those ways have long been known. You shouldn't ignore them - if only to verify that that analysis is still working.
by hearsathought | 2025-10-15 16:49:32+00:00
> It's absolutely a meme stock. I own a Tesla (though given Musks's overt anti-democratic political actions it will be my last).

It's a meme stock because musk hurt your feelings? If you think the stock of company valued at $1.5 trillion is a "meme stock", it's because of your political agenda. Not reality.

> There is absolutely no justification for such a valuation.

There must be some justification. Otherwise it wouldn't be trading at $1.5 trillion.

> I want Tesla to be a good car company first.

Musk has been open about what tesla is. It surely isn't a "car company".

> And the CEO has gone out of his way to alienate and be hostile to his own customer base.

You are not his "customer base". The narcissism and sense of self-importance is off the charts.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-10-15 16:49:53+00:00
Maybe they just have a different set of values. These older generations you're talking about may have grown up watching ultra grainy, ultra low def, low production quality(relative to modern), black and white TV. Maybe they just learned to look past visual blips and focus on the story.

If I point out to my dad that the actors are in a slightly different position before and after a cut, I can imagine my dad saying "Okay. Who cares?"
by michelb | 2025-10-15 16:49:59+00:00
One of the problems is that I don’t notice a meaningful difference(that’s worth the money) between my M1 and my M4 workloads. (Dev/video). Obviously the rendering is faster but the OS isn’t. Tahoe makes my M2 feel like an intel mac.

Chip, memory and storage are really fast, but I’m fully convinced that the OS is crippling these machines.
by reactordev | 2025-10-15 16:50:21+00:00
This site is difficult to navigate with just a paging list of entries with no order. Is there a search feature? Anyway to find old games without having to scroll through each page or write a python scraper? I love the effort. We should absolutely preserve old software and try to keep it working through various means. I just have a really hard time finding what I’m looking for on this site.
by zulban | 2025-10-15 16:50:31+00:00
I run Linux and test my Windows releases on a VM. It works great.

Sure, I'm not doing performance benchmarking and it's just smoke tests and basic user stories, but that's all that 98% of indie developers do for cross platform support.

Apple has been intensely stupid as a platform to launch on, though I did do it eventually. I didn't like Apple before and now I like it even less.
by cmcaleer | 2025-10-15 16:50:40+00:00
It is frankly ridiculous how unintuitive it was to add an email account to Mail on iOS. This is possibly the most basic functionality I would expect an email client to have. One would expect that they go to their list of mailboxes and add a new account.

No. You exit the mail app -> Go to settings -> apps -> scroll through a massive list (that you usually just use for notification settings btw) to go to mail -> mail accounts -> add new account.

Just a simple six-step process after you’ve already hunted for it in the mail app.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-15 16:51:24+00:00
> During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone.

This is an operational choice. LLMs have state, and you never have to clear it. The problems come from the amount of state being extremely limited (in comparison to the other axes) and the degradation of quality as the state scales. Because of these reasons, people tend to clear the state of LLMs. That is not the same thing as not having state, even if the result looks similar.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-10-15 16:51:32+00:00
> Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and efficiency of their software.

Hardware has improved significantly, but it needs software to enable me to enjoy using it.

Apple is not the only major company that has completely abandoned the users.

The fastest CPUs and GPUs with the most RAM will not make me happier being targeted by commercial surveillance mechanisms, social-media applications, and hallucinating LLM systems.
by kelas | 2025-10-15 16:51:34+00:00
> I'd call that code obfuscation.

we call them "trains". since this one has a descriptive name, `avg a`, is not cryptic at all. just a bit fewer of absolutely meaningless parens and duplication.

but it doesn't end there:

1. imagine you wanted a moving average instead. i need to change one character in this train to get `mavg`. what would you need to do?

2. imagine you want to compute moving averages for each of 1000 arrays using both instruction-level parallelism and all available cores? while you'd be writing your unobfuscated code for that, i'd be done way before you're back from your lunch break. in two keystrokes.

once you'd be done with your solution, there would be no need to discuss productivity, or so i hope, but to discuss performance would be interesting.
by KronisLV | 2025-10-15 16:51:35+00:00
> pretty much all big LLM platforms are already augmented by RAG and memory systems

I think they're more focusing on the fact that training and inference are two fundamentally different processes, which is problematic on some level. Adding RAG and various memory addons on top of the already trained model is trying to work around that, but is not really the same to how humans or most other animals think and learn.

That's not to say that it'd be impossible to build something like that out of silicon, just that it'd take a different architecture and approach to the problem, something to avoid catastrophic forgetting and continuously train the network during its operation. Of course, that'd be harder to control and deploy for commercial applications, where you probably do want a more predictable model.
by woodrowbarlow | 2025-10-15 16:51:57+00:00
you're focusing on the "single window" part.

the revenue-driven decision was choosing to make the OS more like iOS, locked down with an app store, rather than macos, which allows third-party applications, browsing the filesystem, dropping into a terminal, etc. with built-in first-party support.

instead of making a computer in an AR form-factor, they made an iPad in an AR form-factor.
by guhcampos | 2025-10-15 16:51:58+00:00
I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very significant.

These are bot networks run by big firms just building reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge - usually political - campaign.

Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse against some political figure in some country and completely flip the democratic game.

It happened way too many times in the past decade.
by strbean | 2025-10-15 16:52:06+00:00
> * Why cannot I not punch in a password while Face ID is working? If I'm skiing, I know Face ID isn't gong to work, stop making me wait.

Funny, a similar thing has been driving me crazy on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop with fingerprint login. When unlocking, I can either enter a password or use fingerprint. On boot, I am not allowed to enter a password until I fail with fingerprint. If I use fingerprint to log in on boot, I have to enter my password anyways once logged in to unlock my keychain.

I should probably just figure out a way to disable fingerprint on boot and only use it for the lock screen.
by mediaman | 2025-10-15 16:52:10+00:00
That's already happening. It started happening when they incorporated reinforcement learning into the training process.

It's been some time since LLMs were purely stochastic average-token predictors; their later RL fine tuning stages make them quite goal-directed, and this is what has given some big leaps in verifiable domains like math and programming. It doesn't work that well with nonverifiable domains, though, since verifiability is what gives us the reward function.
by btilly | 2025-10-15 16:52:44+00:00
I agree that we should not dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence.

But the central argument of the article can be made without that point. Because the truth is that right now, LLMs are good enough to be a force multiplier for those who know how to use them. Which eventually becomes synonymous with "those who have power". This means that the power of AI will naturally get used to further the ends of corporations.

The potential problem there is that corporations are natural paperclip maximizers. They operate on a model of the world where "more of this results in more of that, which gets of more of the next thing, ..." And, somewhere down the chain, we wind up with money and resources that feed back into the start to create a self-sustaining, exponentially growing loop. (The underlying exponential nature of these loops has become a truism that people rely on in places as different as finance, and technology improvement curves.)

This naturally leads to exponential growth in resource consumption, waste, economic growth, wealth, and so on. In the USA this growth has averaged about 3-3.5% per year. With growth varying by area. Famously, growth rates tend to be much higher in tech. Likewise growth rates are higher in some areas than others. (The best known example is the technology curve described by Moore's law. Which has had a tremendous impact on our world.)

The problem is that we are undergoing exponential growth in a world with ultimately limited resources. Which means that the most innocuous things will eventually have a tremendous impact. The result isn't simply converting everything into a mountain of paperclips. We have mountains of many different things that we have produced, and multiple parallel environmental catastrophes from the associated waste.

Even with no agency, AI serves as a force multiplier for this underlying dynamic. But since AI is being inserted as a crucial step at so many places, AI is on a particularly steep growth curve. Estimates for total global electricity spent on AI are in the range 0.2-0.4%. That seems modest, but annual growth rates are projected as being in the range of 10-30%. (The estimates are far apart because a lot of the data is not public, and so has to be estimated.) This is a Moore's law level growth. We are likely to see the electricity consumption of AI grow past all other uses within our lifetimes. And that will happen even without the kind of sudden leaps in capability that machine learning regularly delivers.

I hope we humans like those paperclips. Humans, armed with AI, are going to make a lot of them. And they're not actually free.