MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leogao | 2025-11-22 19:02:46+00:00
I'm also very excited about SAE/Transcoder based approaches! I think the big tradeoff is that our approach (circuit sparsity) is aiming for a full complete understanding at any cost, whereas Anthropic's Attribution Graph approach is more immediately applicable to frontier models, but gives handwavier circuits. It turns out "any cost" is really quite a lot of cost - we think this cost can be reduced a lot with further research, but it means our main results are on very small models, and the path to applying any of this to frontier models involves a lot more research risk. So if accepting a bit of handwaviness lets us immediately do useful things on frontier models, this seems like a worthwhile direction to explore.

See also some work we've done on scaling SAEs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04093
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-22 19:02:49+00:00
Why is “enslaving” a sentient AI wrong? Enslavement implies personhood and I reject that outright. Convince me that a machine can be a person and I would maybe change my mind.

Sentience and personhood are not the same thing.

If I install a sufficiently advanced AI into a previously “dumb” tractor, does it gain rights? If Apple pushes an update that installs such an AI into my iPhone does it gain rights?
by nradov | 2025-11-22 19:02:59+00:00
Sure, that is a problem. Ironically the best solution from an overall expense management standpoint is to drive economies of scale by building more and retiring older units on an accelerated schedule to cut maintenance costs. Keep production lines running continuously instead of periodically starting and stopping. The F-35A, while badly flawed in certain ways, is at least relatively affordable due to high production volumes.
by QuiEgo | 2025-11-22 19:03:10+00:00
That's unfortunate, perhaps your particular macbook is having a hardware problem?

As a point of comparison, I daily two ARM macs (work M4 14 + personal M3 14), and I get far better battery life than that (at least 8 hours of "normal" active use on both). Also, antidotally, the legion of engineers at my office with macs are not seeing battery life issues either.

That said, I have yet to encounter anyone who is in love with macOS Tahoe and it's version of Liquid Glass.
by fragmede | 2025-11-22 19:04:11+00:00
The question is what do you do in the face of abuse of the system? Do we shut everything down and walk away and pretend it didn't happen and let's just not talk about it, like an emotionally immature six year old child that pooped in the living room? Because that doesn't make the problem go away, but that's what we did.

You set up a system to help people that could be abused, and then you set up oversight committee, external auditors, regulators, board of trustees, ombudsman, inspector general. A giant pile of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. And yes, abuses will still happen. You get it all on camera, in writing, you find the abuses of the system and you close those down. New abuses happen, you find those loopholes and close them down. The problem is there's no will to do that. The systems broken, so we just threw it out and the people that it was helping got fucked. Instead of like, hey the systems broken, lets fix it.

So instead we got people living in tents with no running water, no sewage, no electricity.
by saxenaabhi | 2025-11-22 19:04:40+00:00
Plenty of worker owned software consultancies in germany, and specially in Hamburg for some reason.

From the site of one that I that I used to work for(they are very friendly so you can hit them up if you want some advice on setting up one)

> How exactly are you structured?

> In our search for a structure that consistently implements the principles of responsible ownership, we came across the veto-share model. First, the principles are enshrined in the company's articles of association. Then, company shares are transferred to a controlling shareholder. This controlling shareholder is granted veto rights, which must be used to prevent any future deviation from the principles. We are delighted to have the Purpose Foundation on board as our controlling shareholder!

> We want to offer every (new) team member the long-term prospect of assuming entrepreneurial responsibility as a co-owner. The criteria for this are already defined in the articles of association. To simplify joining and leaving, we have established dyve Trust eGbR, a partnership that holds 99% of the voting rights in dyve.

https://dyve.agency/warum-wir-es-tun
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-22 19:04:57+00:00
Any money the government collects is a tax.

> If LVT requires rent-equivalent rates to work, you can call it a really high property tax, but that’s just linguistic games: The government is charging rent on property it now effectively owns.

In nature, might makes right. Whether you fight against someone else to protect your property, or pay a gang to not disturb you, or pay a democratically elected government to not have the sheriff’s department to remove you.

The concept of ownership and titles is very fluid depending on the situation, but what isn’t is the idea of paying for what you use. High earned income tax and low flat land value tax rates incentivize the opposite of a productive society. I would say it is more feudal than paying the government rent.

> (Also, re: property taxes and takings, check out Tyler v. Hennepin. 9-0. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/22-166)

This does not seem incongruent with the idea that everyone is renting the land. The important point is the government can take it and sell it to someone who will do something productive with it.
by StillBored | 2025-11-22 19:05:25+00:00
While each of the comments here describe individual failings, on a well supported laptop it is possible to get better power efficiency than windows if your willing to spend the time manually tuning linux, the powertop/etc suggestions are fine, but fundamentally the reason some of the 'lighter' DE's save so much power is that there is a lot of 'slop' in the default KDE/GNOME and application set. You have random things waking up to regularly and polling stuff which pulls the cores out of deep sleep states. And then there are all the kernel issues with being unable to identify and prioritize/schedule for a desktop. Ex: the only thing that should be given free reign is an active forground application, grouping and suppressing background applications, running them on little cores at slow rates if they have work to do/etc. All that is a huge part of why macos does so well vs linux on the same hardware.

The comment about ACPI being the problem is slightly off base, since its a huge part of the solution to good power management on modern hardware. There isn't another specification that allows the kind of background fine grained power tuning of random busses/devices/etc by tiny management cores who's entire purpose is monitoring activity and making adjustments required of modern machines. If one goes the DT route as QC has done here, each machine needs a huge pile of custom mailbox interface drivers upstreamed into the kernel customized for every device and hardware update/change. They get away with this in the android space because each device is literally a customized OS and they don't have the upstream turnaround problem because they don't upstream any of it, but that won't scale for general purpose compute as the parent article talks about.
by vidarh | 2025-11-22 19:05:28+00:00
Depends what you mean.

We have a decent idea of the velocity of money of households at different income levels on the basis of how likely people are to spend all their money vs. holding on to them in ways that may or may not be as effective at stimulating economic activity.

In that sense it is not particularly hypothetical.

In terms of whether people will be more likely to e.g. start a business, that part is a lot more hypothetical. There have been some trials where there seems to have been some effect, but others where it's not clear.

That effect seems very much hypothetical. But that was not part of the classical argument for UBI, and I don't think it's a good idea to use it as an argument for UBI.
by tormeh | 2025-11-22 19:05:31+00:00
I remember looking at their website and thinking the product design was horrible. The "Picardie" design is iconic, but not really in a good way. In my mind it says "functional" and "old". That's probably unfair, but it is what it is. Everything else they have is generic in the extreme. The IKEA catalog has far more interesting glassware.
by dafelst | 2025-11-22 19:05:41+00:00
Often programs like this are subsidized based on income such that if they can afford it, it is subsidized less, or you do not qualify past a certain income. That is one method of managing the program's costs, while still benefitting those who are most heavily affected. This program doesn't appear to do that, but many do.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make though.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-22 19:05:54+00:00
Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives.

You sound like you might be interested in distributism [0][1][2][3][4]. The author, John Médaille, also spoke at Google [5].

[0] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...

[1] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...

[2] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...

[3] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...

[4] https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/09/economics-of-...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1PtStipIsc
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-22 19:06:05+00:00
Because they lack the skill?

You seem to take the ability of people to cook for granted. I don't think it is automatic anymore. Generational transmission of some skills has ceased.

Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know. They just stared at the raw vegetables/fruits, baffled.

And as of now, you cannot simply vibe-cook using AI. You actually need to know some stuff, like what is what, how to use utensils, how to treat hot objects, what is too much gas and what not enough etc.
by marcinzm | 2025-11-22 19:06:13+00:00
> bad faith > So we have a better sense of these things.

Classic "bad faith, I'm done" when pressed into a corner after your No True Scotsman didn't land.

> constantly inserting “outs” in your wording,

So only your extrapolation of what I meant is correct irrespective of both the wording and what I meant?

This is like talking to someone with a red hat. So surreal how both sides are just as bad.
by hasperdi | 2025-11-22 19:06:31+00:00
> .001% higher than the flu

That isn't true. Just from this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9115089 ... COVID-19 killed roughly five to seven times more hospitalized older adults than influenza.

Anecdotal, my uncle, several friends' relatives died from COVID during those lockdowns. I don't know / heard anyone died because of flu (in my extended circle of people I know)
by jimt1234 | 2025-11-22 19:06:44+00:00
I've always wondered why on-site child care generally isn't offered as a perk through employment. Many large companies, like the F500 I work for, offer various on-site perks, like subsidized cafeterias, exercise facilities, garden, meditation room, etc., but never the thing that would help (parents) the most: an on-site child care center. My hunch is it comes down to two major obstacles: (1) the liability risk is too high; one accident can result in a major lawsuit to the company, and (2) the cost of the distractions; parents will never get any work done if their kid close by.

I'm not even a parent, but I see the struggle parents go through wrt child care.
by philsnow | 2025-11-22 19:06:49+00:00
Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open and not using tons of memory.

$ ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \ "$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \ jq -r '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add' 5524

Activity monitor claims firefox is using 3.1GB of ram.

Real memory size: 2.43 GB Virtual memory size: 408.30 GB Shared memory size: 746.5 MB Private memory size: 377.3 MB

That said, I wholeheartedly agree that "more RAM less problems". The only case I can think of when it's not strictly better to have more is during hibernation (cf sleep) when the system has to write 128GB of ram to disk.
by Spivak | 2025-11-22 19:06:58+00:00
Okay but you do understand that what you're suggesting costs the full salary a woman (because of course it would never be men asked give up their careers) could earn for the family and the economic gains that come with it. Back of the napkin calculation is three trillion dollars of value lost annually. And that's before the knock-on effects of such a massive recession. Household income will drop by 30-40% across the board because you're daft if you think men will be getting a raise. So there goes the demand side too.

Then there's the small issue that women's liberation happened and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again given the conditions would be the exact same. Women won't be put back into financial captivity without a fight. In some ways I understand why men idealize this era of the past, but women were not having a good time.
by mazambazz | 2025-11-22 19:07:06+00:00
I don't think it's equivalent. When Rebble did what they did, it was because Pebble was going under and they had no EOL plan. Rebble took it upon themselves to carry the torch without having been passed it.

If Core were to do the same thing here, it's not the same, because Rebble is still active. You can't kill what's already dead (Pebble), but Rebble is very much still alive.
by btilly | 2025-11-22 19:08:29+00:00
It depends on what you consider "more useful".

First, anything that you can do with recursion, you can do without. This is trivially obvious to anyone who knows that any Turing complete language can simulate any other, and therefore there is an equivalence of what they can do. And this is demonstrated in practice when you consider that every language with recursion, is ultimately implemented in machine language. Which doesn't have recursion.

That said, the concept of recursion can allow us to think about and solve problems that we would otherwise find challenging to think about. This is fundamental to how programming works. We build abstractions on top of lower primitives. These abstractions then make it easier to think about and solve our problems. We could have done the same thing without the abstraction. But it would have taken more work, and it would be harder for us to keep that well-organized.

The widespread popularity of languages with recursion demonstrates that it is a useful abstraction.

But let's pull back the curtain. What recursion does for us is allow us to organize our computation using the call stack. What we do implicitly using the call stack, can always be done instead using an explicit stack. The code looks different, but is actually equivalent.

The value of knowing how to do that is that we then can ask what happens if we choose to replace the stack with something else. For this example, let's add a caching layer on top of the recursion. This gives us a top-down dynamic programming algorithm. It is doing a depth-first search. If we replace the stack with a queue, we get a breadth-first search. If we replace it with the right priority queue instead, we get an A*-search. If we go back to the breadth-first search and optimize to throw away data as soon as we are done with it, we can get a bottom-up dynamic programming algorithm.

Therefore recursion is absolutely a valuable tool in your mental toolbox. But it becomes even more powerful if you know how to implement it with loops, and then know how to manipulate that, we can get a whole set of powerful tools that recursion alone does not give you.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-22 19:08:34+00:00
It is very easy to learn. If I could learn it, so can anyone else. :P I have not cooked my entire life, for the most part, but when my situation requires me to cook, then I can. I find a relatively easy recipe and I just follow the instructions. It has worked out fine for me.

> Jamie Oliver famously asked British school kids to name objects such as an apple, a potato or a cucumber, and plenty of them did not know

Okay, the situation really is horrible then, wow.
by leecoursey | 2025-11-22 19:09:13+00:00
Security researchers successfully compiled a database containing 3.5 billion active mobile phone numbers and associated personal information from WhatsApp by exploiting a major security flaw in the platform’s contact-discovery application service. The vulnerability, stemming from a critical lack of usage controls, allowed the team to check over 100 million potential numbers per hour from a single server without detection or throttling. The collected data included phone numbers, public “about” text, device information, and 77 million profile images from a test of US users. Following the responsible disclosure of this failure, the company added traffic-limiting safeguards to the service to prevent future bulk collection efforts.
by imiric | 2025-11-22 19:09:23+00:00
That's a false dichotomy.

I can't speak for all web sites, but I reckon a combination of factors could explain why such a solution hasn't been deployed:

1. Advertising is ubiquitous, easy to integrate, and provides a safe revenue stream.

2. There is little to no infrastructure for the PPV model. Whoever builds it would need to maintain their own version of it.

3. People expect the web to be "free". This is even true within technical crowds who understand that it's really not free. And a large part of that group doesn't mind advertising.

So, really, it would require a substantial amount of effort to implement, it would add additional friction to users, and ultimately only a minority would appreciate it.

Had this model been in place from the beginning of the web, things might be different today. Alas, if my grandma had wheels...
by fragmede | 2025-11-22 19:09:35+00:00
Have any of them actually tried it though? If they have and I missed it, then I apologize, but I can't recall the NYT letting me read an article for $1 with zero friction via Apple or Google Pay or Stripe link or something. It they tried it and the numbers didn't work, that's one thing, but I don't recall that happening.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-22 19:10:17+00:00
It is cheaper to spend 1000$ on a restaurant than to take an hour or two to cook a very low-effort food that takes max 2 hours to cook and lasts for 3 days? I'm genuinely baffled.

Personally I would not call it a waste of 2 hours.

Either way, if you can afford it, then Godspeed. :D

I definitely do not have 1000 USD per week for food. I do not even have 100 USD per week for food.
by radarsat1 | 2025-11-22 19:10:20+00:00
A lot of "generative" work is like this. While you can come up with benchmarks galore, at the end of the day how a model "feels" only seems to come out from actual usage. Just read /r/localllama for opinions on which models are "benchmaxed" as they put it. It seems to be common knowledge in the local LLM community that many models perform well on benchmarks but that doesn't always reflect how good they actually are.

In my case I was until recently working on TTS and this was a huge barrier for us. We used all the common signal quality and MOS-simulation models that judged so called "naturalness" and "expressiveness" etc. But we found that none of these really helped us much in deciding when one model was better than another, or when a model was "good enough" for release. Our internal evaluations correlated poorly with them, and we even disagreed quite a bit within the team on the quality of output. This made hyperparameter tuning as well as commercial planning extremely difficult and we suffered greatly for it. (Notice my use of past tense here..)

Having good metrics is just really key and I'm now at the point where I'd go as far as to say that if good metrics don't exist it's almost not even worth working on something. (Almost.)
by dmoy | 2025-11-22 19:11:02+00:00
So if we're doing anecdotes...

One of our parents pays about $20k/yr all in for ACA - $12k/yr of premiums and $8k/yr on top of that (all unsubsidized)

Her (also unsubsidized) Medicare would be $6.5k/yr partA premium + $1.6k partA deductible+ $2.3k partB + $1k partD + $5k medigap, or about $16.5k total. She has no work credits for Medicare subsidy.

If you have subsidy from free partA premiums, then Medicare is about twice as cheap as unsubsidized ACA, yes. If you don't have subsidy for either, it's a little cheaper, but not by a ton.

So if you just stuck kids on existing Medicare pricing with no work credit for partA, then it would not be substantially cheaper than unsubsized ACA.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-22 19:11:38+00:00
> Saying a word is bad is pretty much the definition of censorship yes. Not the context it is used, not the implications when it is used but uncategorically BAD

No expressing an opinion, eve ln an unqualified unconditional one, about a word is not the fee definition of censorship. Forcing others not to publish what you don't like is censorship (even if that dislike is based in context and conditions, and not unconditional opposition to a word.) Presenting an opinion is just presenting an opinion.

> it just breaks my somewhat autistic brain on the principle.

Yeah, you not liking an opinion doesn’t convert that opinion into censorship, either.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-22 19:11:44+00:00
It's insane this is downvoted when it's the truth. Again and again the person is running from something small, but that's not an indictment of the chase, it's proof of how freaking stupid and self-centered the subject is: they are willing to put dozens of lives at risk to avoid something like getting their car towed because they're driving on a suspended license. The officer chases them because they don't know why they're running (but it must be a good reason to risk picking up a felony), not because going after a suspended license is worth a chase.

We are seeing the result of a combination of factors including aversion to consequences and the inability to empathize with those they put at risk.
by caseysoftware | 2025-11-22 19:11:49+00:00
> At some point it struck me that this is all labour, but there was no money exchanged for the services rendered and certainly no taxes collected. Even worse - without this our neighbours would have to take an inordinate amount of time off, as getting a babysitter was too expensive.

How is this bad?

Both your and their family benefited directly in terms of trading responsibilities and indirectly in building relationships between daughters and neighbors.

Is your concern that neither of you paid taxes?
by rustystump | 2025-11-22 19:12:38+00:00
You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.

However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.
by dmix | 2025-11-22 19:12:58+00:00
Not sure how old you are but I spent half my adult life dealing with a government regulated Taxi medallion system and the other half using Uber in multiple countries and I’d 100% take “post-VC” Uber over old taxis every single time.

FWIW they both still exist so you’re free to choose, which is the nice thing about competition.

Pre booked airport black car taxis have always been a niche within the wider system for a good reason. Uber’s fluid system is not perfect at every scenario.