MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tikhonj | 2025-11-21 19:33:09+00:00
All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost. The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention. The dynamics are qualitatively different.

The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizza places are incentivized to make their pizza less healthy so that people come back more often"... which is exactly what happens!

So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come along and take the whole market? It's partly because restaurants aren't just in the business of selling (healthy) food: it's also about convenience and satisfaction and experience. More importantly, that just doesn't fit with how people largely make day-to-day decisions.

The same thing happens with dating apps. People get drawn in for all sorts of reasons that don't necessarily map to getting married, even if finding a long-term relationship is explicitly their goal. Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps.

The other problem is that making a really effective dating app is just hard. It's fundamentally difficult to help people find compatible partners, especially without in-person contact. That's compounded by cultural and demographic issues. It doesn't matter how well your app is designed when there's a massive imbalance in genders!
by lukan | 2025-11-21 19:33:34+00:00
"I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians."

Depends where you live I suppose. The baltic states are rightfully worried and take it a bit more serious.

And yes, russia on its own is not that dangerous to whole Europe. But russia in combination with north korean soldiers and supported by china .. and some european states that switch sides (Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, ..), that would be dangerous. Lot's of things can happen. Also the EU can transform into an evil empire if we don't watch out. So no, I am not too worried about immediate war, but the traction right now is bad.
by lock1 | 2025-11-21 19:33:37+00:00
I think it also depends on the community as well. Last time I touched Node.js and Javascript-related things, every time I tried to update something, it practically guaranteed something would explode for no reason.

While my recent legacy Java project migration from JDK 8 -> 21 & a ton of dependency upgrades has been a pretty smooth experience so far.
by twoodfin | 2025-11-21 19:33:51+00:00
How would you differentiate that argument from similar arguments about other observable phenomena? As in…

No one has ever seen or otherwise directly experienced the inside of a star, nor is likely to be able to do so in the foreseeable future. To be a star is to emit a certain spectrum of electromagnetic energy, interact gravitationally with the local space-time continuum according to Einstein’s laws, etc.

It’s impossible to conceive of an object that does these things that wouldn’t be a star, so even if it turns out (as we’ll never be able to know) that Gliese 65 is actually a hollow sphere inhabited by dwarven space wizards producing the same observable effects, it’s still categorically a star.

(Sorry, miss my philosophy classes dearly!)
by kylecazar | 2025-11-21 19:34:31+00:00
I'm trying to understand your position...

It's my belief that I can tell that a table isn't conscious. Conscious things have the ability to feel like the thing that they are, and all evidence points to subjective experience occurring in organic life only. I can imagine a table feeling like something, but I can also imagine a pink flying elephant -- it just doesn't correspond to reality.

Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it?
by Groxx | 2025-11-21 19:34:42+00:00
so to paraphrase:

> GO: windows has become terrible for developers and this AI focus makes it worse

> PD: we listen to feedback, people want reliability etc. we care deeply about developers. we know we have to improve on [things which you didn't bring up at all]. we will continue improving.

... I honestly don't think I need to explain why they got ratio'd.
by svieira | 2025-11-21 19:34:50+00:00
> Morality is a feeling

It isn't. Otherwise, the Nazis were moral. As were the Jews. But in that case, all moral truth is relative, which means absolute moral truth doesn't exist. Which means that "moral" is a synonym for "feeling" or "taste". Which it is not.

> My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality.

It is how you and I experience reality and we exist in reality, so I'm not sure how it could be anything other than congruent with reality.

> Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else.

It would be an interesting and rather useless definition of "conscious" that didn't allow for expressions of consciousness. Expression isn't required for consciousness, but many conscious observers can be in turn observed in action and their consciousness observed. Which maybe is what you are saying, just from the perspective that "sometimes you can't observe evidence for the consciousness of another"?
by measurablefunc | 2025-11-21 19:34:56+00:00
Complexity of a single neuron is out of reach for all of the world's super computers. So we have to conclude that if the authors believe in a computational/functionalist instantiation of consciousness or self-awareness then they must also believe that the complexity of neurons is not necessary & is in fact some kind of accident that could be greatly simplified but still be capable of carrying out the functions in the relational/functionalist structure of conscious phenomenology. Hence, the digital neuron & unjustified belief that a properly designed boolean circuit & setting of inputs will instantiate conscious experience.

I have yet to see any coherent account of consciousness that manages to explain away the obvious obstructions & close the gap between lifeless boolean circuits & the resulting intentional subjectivity. There is something fundamentally irreducible about what is meant by conscious self-awareness that can not be explained in terms of any sequence of arithmetic/boolean operations which is what all functionalist specifications ultimately come down to, it's all just arithmetic & all one needs to do is figure out the right sequence of operations.
by clausecker | 2025-11-21 19:35:29+00:00
ARM already has most stuff required for this on board. Two proprietary extensions are used by Rosetta: one emulates the parity (rarely used) and half-carry (obsolete) flags, which can also be emulated conventionally. The other implementa TSO memory ordering, which can either be ignored or implemented with explicit barriers; some other chips apparently have a similar setting.

The other stuff is all present in ARMv8.5 I think.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-21 19:35:31+00:00
I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.

I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-21 19:36:27+00:00
No problem stands alone in a vacuum, and nothing at this point has “one easy fix”. These articles that try to paint higher wages or corporate consolidation as the sole reason for complex and nuanced issues aren’t just toxic to discourse around addressing these problems, they also collectively dumb down people into the debate equivalent of sports teams with no room for other positions.

The entire piece reads as a sympathy puff article to paint McDonalds in a “woe is us, our business dictates we raise prices to only serve the wealthy” posture, which is insincere at best, and almost certainly shit journalism.
by capyba | 2025-11-21 19:36:54+00:00
Yea, I think this is a bit half-baked. Either the journalist doesn’t know how diabetes is treated with insulin therapy, or it’s meant for people with T2D who are only on a basal dose (unsure how common that is).

There are ‘classic’ insulins like intermediate/regular that act over longer duration and are meant to be taken once a few times a day. Though they’ve generally been phased out with the rapid+long acting approach because that matches insulin needs of the body better.
by EPWN3D | 2025-11-21 19:37:02+00:00
> Firstly, if someone on their own has a seizure or an accident with no-one with them "in a late night busy bar environment, it's an absolute nightmare for us to deal with".

How many seizures does this guy deal with?

Also why are his bartenders incapable of cutting off people who are too drunk? I don't know about the UK, but most/all US states require bartenders to not serve someone who is visibly intoxicated.
by shadowpho | 2025-11-21 19:37:10+00:00
>Anyone setting cut-off at 3.6V either is using it in some insanely industrial, ludicrous application where you need to handle cases like multiple years in storage... or doesn't know how to properly design their protection circuitry.

It really depends on application, battery size and leakage. In consumer world of electronics for example there’s an often requirement to make sure device turns on after being on a shelf for 1/2 - 2 years.

Then when you do the math it ends up needing to set the limit to 3-3.6v.

>The margin is already there at 3.0V. You can still recharge batteries discharged below 3.0V. It just becomes dicey below ~2.5V.

The margin isn’t big enough for some products. Furthermore some of the more leading edge batteries (in terms of energy density) have higher leakage which requires having more margin.
by patall | 2025-11-21 19:37:13+00:00
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.

But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
by colonial | 2025-11-21 19:37:13+00:00
> Are there other good ways of doing it?

I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour.

See https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/ - it also wasn't too hard for me to whip up a Nix Flake with the same toolchain, if that's your jam.
by buran77 | 2025-11-21 19:37:24+00:00
> if you turn those into "specialty" coffees and upsize them, and then add ~10% sales tax

Right off the bat, it's McDonalds, there are no "specialty" coffees. And the sales tax is irrelevant, what matters is what comes out of the pocket.

$20 for McD-quality coffees and soda is insanely expensive. It puts it above places like Starbucks which makes no sense because there's a Starbucks literally 50m/150ft away from that very same McD.

Pictures of the menu at the closest McDonald’s to MacArthur Park show the coffees at ~$4 and sodas at ~$2-3 all large, which is a more realistic number but still only around half the quoted amount.
by mrlambchop | 2025-11-21 19:37:26+00:00
(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)

That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.

Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...

Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
by cptskippy | 2025-11-21 19:37:34+00:00
> But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment.

Well you can use PlatformIO/VSCode and the ESP-IDF.

If you're ok with the Arduino 2 framework, then you can use PlatformIO as well. Unfortunately Arduino 3 support isn't there yet so a lot of libraries like HomeSpan won't work on PlatformIO at the moment.

https://github.com/platformio/platform-espressif32/issues/12...
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-21 19:37:47+00:00
Some people behave as if there's something mysterious going on in LLMs, and that somehow, we must bracket our knowledge to create this artificial sense of mystery, like some kind of subconscious yearning for transcendence that's been perverted . "Ooo, what if this particular set of chess piece moves makes the board conscious??" That's what the "computational" view amounts to, and the best part of it is that it has all the depth of a high college student's ramblings about the multiverses that might occupy the atoms of his fingers. No real justification, no coherent or intelligible case made, just a big "what if" that also flies in the face of all that we know. And we're supposed to take it seriously, just like that.

"[S]uper-abysmal-double-low quality" indeed.

One objection I have to the initial framing of the problem concerns this characterization:

"Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure."

To begin with, by what right can we say that "physical" is synonymous with possessing "substance or structure"? For that, you would have to know:

1. what "physical" means and be able to distinguish it from the "non-physical" (this is where people either quickly realize they're relying on vague intuitions about what is physical or engaging in circular reasoning a la "physical is whatever physics tells us");

2. that there is nothing non-physical that has substance and structure.

In an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (which are much more defensible than materialism or panpsychism or any other Cartesian metaphysics and its derivatives), not only is the distinction between the material and immaterial understood, you can also have immaterial beings with substance and structure called "subsistent forms" or pure intellects (and these aren't God, who is self-subsisting being).

According to such a metaphysics, you can have material and immaterial consciousness. Compare this with Descartes and his denial of the consciousness of non-human animals. This Cartesian legacy is very much implicated in the quagmire of problems that these stances in the philosophy of mind can be bogged down in.
by alganet | 2025-11-21 19:37:56+00:00
It's funny because I'm evaluating LLMs for just this specific case (covering tests) right now, and it does that a lot.

I say "we need 100% coverage on that critical file". It runs for a while, tries to cover it, fails, then stops and say "Success! We covered 60% of the file (the rest is too hard). I added a comment.". 60% was the previous coverage before the LLM ran.
by pm215 | 2025-11-21 19:38:00+00:00
If you think Arm is a "nice RISC encoding" then I think you've mostly been looking at the older integer bits of it :-) As you get into FP and SIMD there are just a lot more useful operations that need to fit into the strictly limited encoding space, and new features that need to be tucked into previously unused corners of the space, and it all gets noticeably less regular (e.g. "these two bits encode the operand size which is 0b00/0b01/0b10 for 8/16/32 bits, but 64 bit operands aren't supported and 0b11 means it's part of an entirely different set of instructions").
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-21 19:38:05+00:00
Ice skating varies. The skates for someone into it range from $500-$1500. Those typically last several years unless you're skating like 4 hours a day and doing tons of jumps. It costs $20 to sharpen skates and that needs to happen every few weeks for competitive skaters I think. I like mine slightly dull and usually go a few months at a time. Lessons are like $200+ per month for group or $40+/hour for private. Travel + recitals + outfits + music, would be another thing too, but we don't do the competitive stuff. As a result, I pay a lot more for hockey for my kid. I could see figure skating being a little more expensive overall if we were competitive and did more private lessons. They're both super expensive in general though.
by andrewla | 2025-11-21 19:38:30+00:00
I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale.

That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI.

Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2".

> The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race.

Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights.

Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system.

All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.
by layer8 | 2025-11-21 19:38:55+00:00
The thing is that when you say “that capability”, I don’t quite know what you mean. The fact that we perceive inner processings of our mind isn’t any more surprising than that we perceive the outer world, or that a debugger is able to introspect its own program state. Continuous introspection has led me to realize that “qualia”, or “what it’s like to be X”, emotions and feelings, are just perceptions of inner phenomena, and that when you pay close attention, there is nothing more to that perception than its informational content.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-21 19:39:15+00:00
>Then OCR'ing the camera roll on your phone would be illegal. Every photo is stamped with time and location, and your camera roll is a database.

>That's why it actually is hard.

Actually, it's not. It's the same idea as having a journalist (or a private investigator or a law "enforcement" agent) surveil a location and take photos of those who come and go on public streets to/from a particular location.

It's not the same thing if you put up automated cameras to identify everyone who goes anywhere for no reason, then create a database that allows folks (especially the government, but folks like Flock as well) to track anyone for any (or no) reason wherever they go.

That's a difference in kind not one of degree.
by andai | 2025-11-21 19:39:16+00:00
>The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe.

I'm not sure what relevance that has to consciousness?

I mean you can imagine a consciousness where, you're just watching TV. (If we imagine that the video models are conscious their experience is probably a bit like that!)

If the signal wasn't coherent it would just be snow, static, TV noise. (Or in the case of a neural network probably something bizarre like DeepDream.) But there would still be a signal.
by dleary | 2025-11-21 19:39:19+00:00
> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."
by fodkodrasz | 2025-11-21 19:40:28+00:00
Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.

The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.

I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.

I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)
by vannevar | 2025-11-21 19:40:29+00:00
I'm sure there are bad regulations. But the reason that there is reliance on simple one-size-fits-all rules is that we are unwilling to pay the cost of investigating each special case and having someone make an expert judgment.

Taking the trucking case as an example, it's certainly reasonable to require proof that the proposed technology solution doesn't actually make the problem worse in practice. While most people are honest, there are dishonest businesses that would claim environmental benefits for their product that simply don't exist (see the case of VW and their "clean diesel" fraud). So the regulation is a good one. The author's complaint is that it took too long and cost too much to provide the proof. Maybe he's right, but maybe he's not. Maybe he was satisfied by less evidence than the government, because he had a financial interest in believing in the technology. Just saying it was all unnecessary doesn't make it so.
by quantummagic | 2025-11-21 19:40:52+00:00
You're probably right, both the left and right seem determined to plunge us into an authoritarian and economically stratified society. But I can't help but go back to my earlier point, unlike all the other tech that was hyped to the stratosphere, the LLM tech has been a huge plus for me personally. I just like it, and that isn't part of the propaganda "machine".