MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lukifer | 2025-11-21 21:58:02+00:00
If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.

A simpler animal could have a purely physiological, non-subjective experience of pain or fear: predator chasing === heart rate goes up and run run run, without "experiencing" fear.

For a social species, it may be the case that subjectivity carries a cooperative advantage: that if I can experience pain, fear, love, etc, it makes the signaling of my peers all the more salient, inspiring me to act and cooperate more effectively, than if those same signals were merely mechanistic, or "+/- X utility points" in my neural net. (Or perhaps rather than tribal peers, it emerges first from nurturing in K-selected species: that an infant than can experience hunger commands more nurturing, and a mother that can empathize via her own subjectivity offers more nurturing, in a reinforcing feedback loop.)

Some overlap with Trivers' "Folly of Fools": if we fool ourselves, we can more effectively fool others. Perhaps sufficiently advanced self-deception is indistinguishable from "consciousness"? :)
by throwaway894345 | 2025-11-21 21:58:04+00:00
> All for... an occasional convenience far outweighed by the overall drag of using it

If you have any long-running operation that could be interrupted mid-run by any network fluke (or the termination of the VM running your program, or your program being OOMed, or some issue with some third party service that your app talks to, etc), and you don’t want to restart the whole thing from scratch, you could benefit from these systems. The alternative is having engineers manually try to repair the state and restart execution in just the right place and that scales very badly.

I have an application that needs to stand up a bunch of cloud infrastructure (a “workspace” in which users can do research) on the press of a button, and I want to make sure that the right infrastructure exists even if some deployment attempt is interrupted or if the upstream definition of a workspace changes. Every month there are dozens of network flukes or 5XX errors from remote endpoints that would otherwise leave these workspaces in a broken state and in need of manual repair. Instead, the system heals itself whenever the fault clears and I basically never have to look at the system (I periodically check the error logs, however, to confirm that the system is actually recovering from faults—I worry that the system has caught fire and there’s actually some bug in the alerting system that is keeping things quiet).
by pyuser583 | 2025-11-21 21:58:20+00:00
I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.

The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.

Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.

Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.

I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.

I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.

Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.

I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.

We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
AI Bubble – how it all ends
by AJTSheppard | 2025-11-21 21:59:21+00:00
Here's how the AI bubble will end:

ONE. Everyone will know it's coming but no one will see it coming.

TWO. All the participants with something to lose will act surprised. Especially those that have behaved badly.

THREE. The US government will invoke "national security" to bail out everyone involved. After all, we can't let China win. That stands to reason. And, surely, AI is too big to fail. Or, at the very least, too big to be allowed to negatively impact the stock portfolios of senators and congressmen.

FOUR. Because of THREE, all the key players will become fabulously wealthy.

FIVE. The hunt for those responsible will begin.

SIX. Somewhat akin to blaming the driver of the last truck to cross over a crumbling bridge that subsequently collapsed, the junior technician that was the last to plug an Nvidia GPU card into an AI server center rack, and an 81 year old lady, whose sole distinction is to have entered the last AI prompt (seeking to comparison shop for baked beans), will be located and arrested.

SEVEN. Both will be blamed and vilified as the culprits responsible for popping the AI bubble. And both, after a short show trial, in which the guilty will testify against the innocent, will get "the chair". And good thing too! They deserve what's coming to them.
by brettcvz | 2025-11-21 21:59:48+00:00
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.

Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
by charcircuit | 2025-11-21 21:59:58+00:00
I don't think this very practical or relevant here, but I expect Google to have a higher percentage. Valve employees are focused on Valve's proprietary software: Steam, SteamVR, their games, etc. Valve more often pays contractorsto work on open source software than work on it themselves.

My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open source while having share holders. My claim that Google does more is auxiliary to it.
by BobbyJo | 2025-11-21 22:00:50+00:00
> My question here is... why do people do bad things to the Sims? If people accepted solipsism ("only I am conscious"), would they start treating other people as badly as they do in The Sims? Is that what we're already doing with AIs?

A simple answer is consequences. How you treat sims won't affect how you are treated, by other people or the legal system.
by Yoric | 2025-11-21 22:01:21+00:00
I think that it's actually the opposite.

I haven't followed in the recent past, but a few years ago, if my memory serves, Netanyahu was largely funded by a group of US Evangelists.

It's not Israel or Zionism controlling the US. It's some subset of US Evangelists using Israel as a puppet for whatever eschatological purpose they have in mind.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-11-21 22:01:22+00:00
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."

I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.

"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."

Although I have only one child (in 4th grade), I think about schools a lot, too.

"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."

This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k. Here is a breakdown by grade level of the number of parochial schools in SF that serve that grade level, and the median tuition among those schools for that grade:

# Median sticker price Pre-K 7 $16,610 K 29 $11,530 1 29 $11,530 2 29 $11,175 3 29 $11,175 4 29 $11,175 5 29 $11,175 6 30 $11,519 7 30 $11,519 8 30 $11,519 9 4 $31,725 10 4 $31,725 11 4 $31,725 12 4 $31,725 "Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."

This 'usually start in the $40k range' is also false. For each of the grades K-5, 33-39% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k. For each of the grades 6-8, 30% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k.

"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"

Non-parochial private schools don't typically price based on cost. The schools that have high demand (due to parents and student population) can charge more. So they don't need to manage their costs tightly. And they can spend lots of money on marketing.

Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.

"because their goal is a good education"

Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.
by _james | 2025-11-21 22:01:23+00:00
The official Nintendo 3DS and Wii U SDKs both provided an Electron-like framework that allowed games to be written with web technologies. I seem to recall that it was discontinued at some point before the Switch? The Switch does have a WebKit browser applet that games can call to display web-based content, but it's pretty limited since JIT is disabled like you say. I've only ever seen it used for e-manuals.
by int_19h | 2025-11-21 22:01:31+00:00
Sure, at the end of the day it selects the most probable token - but it has to compute the token probabilities first, and that's the part where it's hard to see how it could possibly produce a meaningful log like this without some form of reasoning (and a world model to base that reasoning on).

So, no, this doesn't actually answer the question in a meaningful way.
by breve | 2025-11-21 22:01:38+00:00
Because they're using a video format which demands licencing fees from multiple organisations (Via-LA, Access Advance, Velos Media, Technicolor). They demand payment.

Patent pools consist of a bunch of lawyers seeking to parasitically extract revenue from implementers of the format. They don't do anything else.

They're all going to hike the licencing fees to maximum they can get away with. They will approach businesses and say, "That's a nice codec you've got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it."

To HP's and Dell's utter astonishment, they have discovered that when you lie down with dogs you get fleas.

What HP and Dell should do instead is focus on royalty-free video formats like VP9, AV1, and the future AV2 and join the Alliance for Open Media: https://aomedia.org/about/members/
by munk-a | 2025-11-21 22:01:40+00:00
As someone working in a field that has used NLP for quite some time - yeah, I generally agree that those investments are worth their weight in gold... which is unfortunate because before ChatGPT came along they were viewed as niche unprofitable money-sinks. The astronomical investments we've seen lately have been in general models which can be leveraged to outperform some of our older models but had we wanted purely to improve those models there were much more efficient ways to do so.

Hopefully we can retain a lot of this value when the bubble bursts but I just haven't seen any really good success stories of converting these models into businesses. If you try and build as a middleman where you leverage a model to solve someone's problem they can always just go to the model runner and get the same results for cheaper - and the model runners seem (so far - this may change) to be unable to price model usage at a level that actually makes it sustainable.

Those older models running specialized tasks seem to be trucking along just fine for now - but I remain concerned that when the bubble bursts it's going to starve these necessary investments of capital.
by robrenaud | 2025-11-21 22:01:54+00:00
Benchmarks need to change.

There is a 4 choice choice question. Your best guess is the answer is B, at about 35% chance of being right. If you are graded on fraction of questions answered correctedly, the optimization pressure is simply to answer B.

If you could get half credit for answering "I don't know", we'd have a lot more models saying that when they are not confident.
by Matticus_Rex | 2025-11-21 22:02:24+00:00
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.

And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
by ElCapitanMarkla | 2025-11-21 22:02:39+00:00
Yeah that part was amazing. It was 2006, I'd softmoded the Xbox with the Splinter Cell hack. I had 2MBs ADSL capped @ 10GB for international data but unlimited national. I was in a NZ only private tracker to take advantage of that and then the icing on the cake, streaming the multi volume rar files straight to the TV. It really was magic.
by pico303 | 2025-11-21 22:02:58+00:00
I agree. This "cooldown" approach seems antithetical to some basic tenants of security in the open source world, namely that more eyeballs makes for better code. If we all stop looking at or using the thing, are these security professionals really going to find the supply-chain problems for us in the thing, for free?

Instead of a period where you don't use the new version, shouldn't we instead be promoting a best practice of not just blindly using a package or library in production? This "cooldown" should be a period of use in dev or QA environments while we take the time to investigate the libraries we use and their dependencies. I know this can be difficult in many languages and package managers, given the plethora of libraries and dependencies (I'm looking at you in particular JavaScript). But "it's hard" shouldn't really be a good excuse for our best efforts to maintain secure and stable applications.
by swatcoder | 2025-11-21 22:03:17+00:00
Some of the healthiest, oldest, and most mutually respected unions are in the entertainment arts -- actors, musicians, writers, directors, etc. In these unions and in their negotiations, talent value is understood to sometimes be very singular; a particular education or apprenticeship process isn't deemed strictly necessary for talent to mature; and that work often comes in the form of a time-boxed project that might need many members for a while and then far less (or none) after it reaches some progress threshold, leading to cycles of on/off work.

What these unions achieve by forming solidarity between the most exceptional talent and more average working members is that they can establish baseline working conditions that are respectful and non-exploitative, a wage floor that allows occasional workers to earnestly commit to their trade even when confronted with intermittent downtime, internally managed group benefit programs that free producers from needing to administer and offer them and give members stability in participation, etc

A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union. And by the accounts of both talent and producers, at basically all levels, these unions fundamentally provide a clear benefit to the market. Tension and bluster flare up during frustrating negotiations, but almost nobody with experience in these industries wants to get rid of these unions. Not even the producers.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-21 22:04:09+00:00
> TWO. All the participants with something to lose will act surprised. Especially those that have behaved badly.

Investors and index funds are really the biggest examples of "bad behavior" to blame this on. And frankly, they're decently well-covered by preexisting datacenter demand, sans any federal bailout. It's not like Apple is shipping a TSMC product that obsoletes Nvidia's product line, nor AMD/Intel for that matter.

Not sure why the fed would invoke natural security to solve a problem the free market can correct. Hell, chances are the CIA needed a new tranche of GPUs for surveillance projects like SENTIENT anyways, I bet they would buy the GPUs at market-price if they haven't already.
by worik | 2025-11-21 22:04:23+00:00
> The value of modern AI seems very hig

Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated.

It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them.

If AI systems can be developed to be trust worthy enough to act on their own, none so far (?), then I can see where the value could acrue, but as things stand?
by gessha | 2025-11-21 22:04:33+00:00
When I mentioned Native American repression, I had the federal government breaking treaties in mind which falls under legal category but you’re right that the gov also did the genocide.

More generally, as a foreigner who now lives in the US, I held Americans to a higher standard than, say my own government or major other governments. Not anymore, I feel like there’s just different trade offs in living in different countries.
by mancerayder | 2025-11-21 22:04:35+00:00
I grew up in the 90's and remember being a computer nerd BEFORE the .com bubble, and starting my career precisely after it burst. Let me tell you one difference I personally am experiencing that differentiates the two. Note, this is a pro-'we're in a bubble' stance:

In the late 90's and early 2000's, businesses were SALIVATING to get online, individuals were finding new ways to benefit and profit from it, and massive investment was being made to facilitate what was inevitable: an interconnected network of everything. Do you remember faxing things ? Paper mail? People half in the know were pushing the Boomers and older Gen-X types to get on with it and modernize.

Now? Not only are people not CLAMORING for more AI, it's that The Powers that Be are forcing it down our throats. At work, we have mandatory AI training, we have people getting promoted for promoting extremely dubious AI solutions both internally and on our product. I log into ANY web site now, whether I'm shopping for a vacuum cleaner or logging into a vendor website, and I get AI shoved in my face, from from "assistant" I have to interact with before typing "agent" to new features I don't care about.

Is there some truth, some merit? Absolutely. But my red flag I'm trying to raise is this: never did it feel FORCED in the 90's, there was a salivation from individuals to get more online, and a reluctance from institutions like elementary and high schools to get with the program.

Now? Corporations large and small are shoving it down our throats. Why? Well, to justify the crazy spending.

I'm no prophet and the world (and economy) are fundamentally unpredictable. But I'll say this. I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and I've put in an order to buy a 5 digit dollar amount of puts on a big 'AI' type ETF, that'll expire in the Spring. It's already wobbling and if you can't beat them, profit off of them when they stumble.

There's absolutely something wrong in the current moment, even if AI is somehow the future. For one thing, the U.S. economy would probably be in a recession right now if it weren't for this insane AI spending. It's wobbled with the recent Nvidia earnings release, and I think it is going to dip (not crash, but start dipping) soon.

The author wrote:

"None of these companies has proven yet that AI is a good enough business to justify all this spending. But the first four are now each spending $70 billion to $100 billion a year to fund data centers and other capital intensive AI expenses. Oracle is spending roughly $20 billion a year. "

In my opinion it's a theoretical arms race 'just because my competitor might win', and not based on anything certain.
by keyshapegeo99 | 2025-11-21 22:04:40+00:00
Disagree, it's making a valid observation.

If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.

*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-21 22:04:44+00:00
> Of course this argument never uses the much more horrifying and abysmal firebombing of Tokyo,

For what it’s worth, I did try to limit my claims in this thread to the notion that maybe the firebombing of Tokyo was a crime against humanity, and avoid yet another pointless relitigation of the use nuclear weaponry.

I don’t know what to make of your whataboutism, however. Nobody here is arguing that the Tokyo tribunal should not have been held, as far as I can tell.
by nonameiguess | 2025-11-21 22:05:13+00:00
Arguably, it's exactly this mindset creating the problem. It's not the value of the technology that matters. It's the value of the companies. If one company was the only one that had a particular valuable technology, then that would matter, but otherwise 90% of them likely end up worthless even if the sector itself doesn't.

How that washes out on net we'll have to see. I'm not gonna pretend I know more than anyone else. Just keep in mind that a major difference between now and 2000 is companies stay private a lot longer. An IPO forces you to open the books and sustain public scrutiny of the broad investor class. A still-private startup only needs to convince one funder of their value. That inevitably leads to higher variance and a greater risk of failure. That doesn't mean the whole sector is necessarily a bubble, but if it is, it can be sustained a lot longer without us knowing. A small number of people with $50 billion they need to park somewhere and no other obvious options can keep shitty ideas afloat in a way that wouldn't be possible if they had to be subjected to broader exposure. We like to believe people with $50 billion can't be wrong, but the wisdom of crowds always beats the wisdom of individual genius.

Heck, AI itself taught us that same lesson!
by fabian2k | 2025-11-21 22:05:31+00:00
They're treating it as a "winner takes it all"-kind of business. And I'm not sure this is a reasonable bet.

The only way the massive planned investments make sense is if you think the winner can grab a very large piece of a huge pie. I've no idea how large the pie will be in the near future, but I'm even more skeptical that there will be a single winner.
by hintklb | 2025-11-21 22:05:34+00:00
Not that I agree or disagree with the underlying claim but a call to "credentialism" to dismiss someone's opinion is not as strong in 2025 as you think it is.

The last few years have been a proof that even the "experts" are following strong political or personal ideology.

Also we don't live in the 18th century anymore. A lot of knowledge (especially around medicine) is open to the world. People can read papers, understand research etc.