MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by card_zero | 2025-11-02 03:04:58+00:00
Yeah, it's the natural empathy myth. Somebody totally would kill somebody else for some reason. It's not inherent to being human that you're unable to be steely-hearted and carry out a range of actions we might classify as "mean" - and those mean actions can have reasons behind them.

So, OK, abdication of responsibility to a collective is a thing. Just following orders. So what? Not relevant to AGI.

Oh wait, this is about "superintelligence", whatever that is. All bets are off, then.
by dreamlayers | 2025-11-02 03:05:13+00:00
Maybe motivation needs to be considered separately from intelligence. Pure intelligence is more like a tool. Something needs to motivate use of that tool toward a specific purpose. In humans, motivation seems related to emotions. I'm not sure what would motivate an artificial intelligence.

Right now the biggest risk isn't what artificial intelligence might do on its own, but how humans may use it as a tool.
by rafabulsing | 2025-11-02 03:05:55+00:00
> You're going to have to deliberately train it to lie, to be greedy, to hide things from us, to look for ways to amass power without attracting attention.

No, that's the problem. You don't have to deliberately train that in.

Pretty much any goal that you train the AI to achieve, once it gets smart enough, it will recognize that lying, hiding information, manipulating and being deceptive are all very useful instruments for achieving that goal.

So you don't need to tell it that: if it's intelligent, it's going to reach that conclusion by itself. No one tells children that they should lie either, and they all seem to discover that strategy sooner or later.

So you are right that you have to deliberately train it away from using those strategies, by being truthful, empathetic, honest, etc. The issue is that those are ill defined goals. Philosophers have being arguing about what's true and what's good since philosophy first was a thing. Since we can barely find those answers to ourselves, it's a hard chance that we'll be able to perfectly impart them onto AIs. And when you have some supremely intelligent agent acting on the world, even a small misalignment may end up in catastrophe.
by bigiain | 2025-11-02 03:06:45+00:00
Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?

If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.

They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.

In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.

Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.

Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.

(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
by icehawk | 2025-11-02 03:07:30+00:00
Sure! They can volunteer:

- Their skills.

- Their time.

- The required materials to properly perform the surgery.

They can't volunteer:

- The support staff around them required to do surgery.

- The space to do the surgery.

Surgery isn't a one-man show.

What did you mean by "Surely they could volunteer to do some charity surgery in their own time. They aren't slaves?"
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-02 03:08:35+00:00
Many people have romantic notions about the country. Reality is there are “good” areas and bad. Lots of helplessness and poverty, shitty agricultural and industrial operators destroying the environment.

The beautiful areas are breathtaking if you can afford to live there.

I experienced both. I grew up in a beautiful pastoral landscape with prosperous dairy operations and a mix of tourism and small business. Small scale dairy farming is dead, and that death caused a chain reaction. My old home is a rural ghetto at this point. Distribution centers are the big thing that was supposed to save the day, but they have high turnover and generate truck traffic and other issues.
by mindslight | 2025-11-02 03:08:42+00:00
Playing edgelord isn't going to save you. A difference in scale is a difference in degree. When law enforcement overran their mandate, we had a shot at identifying their victims, saying their names, demanding justice, and possibly righting some wrongs in the the smallest step. When deputized white supremacist militias mass disappear people without any sort of legal process or documentation besides incrementing a counter for their bonus from King Krasnov, we likely won't even know all of their names.
by inkyoto | 2025-11-02 03:09:27+00:00
I would argue that corporate actors (a state, an army or a corporation) are not true superorganisms but are semi-autonomous, field-embedded systems that can exhibit super-organism properties, with their autonomy being conditional, relational and bounded by the institutional logics and resource structures of their respective organisational fields. As the history of humanity has shown multiple times, such semi-autonomous with super-organism properties have a finite lifespan and are incapable of evolving their own – or on their own – qualitatively new or distinct, form of intelligence.

The principal deficiency in our discourse surrounding AGI lies in the profoundly myopic lens through which we insist upon defining it – that of human cognition. Such anthropocentric conceit renders our conceptual framework not only narrow but perilously misleading. We have, at best, a rudimentary grasp of non-human intelligences – biological or otherwise. The cognitive architectures of dolphins, cephalopods, corvids, and eusocial insects remain only partially deciphered, their faculties alien yet tantalisingly proximate. If we falter even in parsing the intelligences that share our biosphere, then our posturing over extra-terrestrial or synthetic cognition becomes little more than speculative hubris.

Should we entertain the hypothesis that intelligence – in forms unshackled from terrestrial evolution – has emerged elsewhere in the cosmos, the most sober assertion we can offer is this: such intelligence would not be us. Any attempt to project shared moral axioms, epistemologies or even perceptual priors is little more than a comforting delusion. Indeed, hard core science fiction – that last refuge of disciplined imagination – has long explored the unnerving proposition of encountering a cognitive order so radically alien that mutual comprehension would be impossible, and moral compatibility laughable.

One must then ponder – if the only mirror we possess is a cracked one, what image of intelligence do we truly see reflected in the machine? A familiar ghost, or merely our ignorance, automated?
by neonsunset | 2025-11-02 03:09:34+00:00
Thank you for the article. I noticed the statement

> A second drawback is that async/await has a performance cost. CPU-bound code written with async/await will simply never be as fast or as memory-efficient as the equivalent synchronous code.

If you are interested, .NET is actively improving at this and .NET 11 will ship with "Runtime Async" which replaces explicitly generated state machines with runtime suspension mechanism. It's not """zero-cost""" for now (for example it can block object escape analysis), and the async calling convention is different to sync, but the cost is massively reduced, the calls can be inlined, optimized away, devirtualized and more in the same way standard sync calls can. There will be few drawbacks to using async at that point, save for the syntax noise and poor default habit in .NET to append Async suffix to such methods. In your own code you can write it tersely however.

As for Rust, it also can optimize it quite well, the "call-level overhead" is much less of a problem there, although I have not studied compiler output for async Rust in detail so hopefully someone with more familiarity can weight in.
by chipotle_coyote | 2025-11-02 03:09:58+00:00
Sort of side question, but why do you set the command key to be Emacs' meta key? I've sort of waffled on that myself -- the plus to doing it is that it matches Windows (which I am in too much of the time) and Linux, but the minus is that it not only breaks 20+ years of muscle memory I have with MacOS, it collides with a few other global hotkeys. (Recent collisions I've noticed are Alfred's clipboard manager, which defaults to Shift-Command-\ (M-|, shell-command-on-region), and the system-level screenshot hotkey on Shift-Command-5 (M-%, query-replace).
by brucehoult | 2025-11-02 03:11:52+00:00
I guess some people can frown on anything.

I 99% of the time use emacs in a terminal. 90% of the time over ssh or in a non-GUI VM/docker etc.

I usually install emacs-nox to speed up the install.

Vanilla emacs is fine. Maximum I scp my .emacs file from another machine, but there's actually very little in it. Mostly it's disabling the menu bar, tool bar, and scroll bars.

Usually all I'll do is adjust things such as indenting and other code formatting things to match the codebase I'm working on -- which varies from project to project anyway, and you need to do with any editor to avoid making a mess.

I do have one little elisp function that tries to find and open the header file for the C file I'm currently in, or the c, cc, cpp, c++ file for the header file I'm in.

I'll reproduce that below, if anyone cares. Please don't laugh too much at my elisp -- I probably wrote that in the 90s.

;;;;;;;;;;;; Automatic switching between source and header files ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (defvar c++-source-extension-list '("c" "cc" "C" "cpp" "c++" "pcc" "pc")) (defvar c++-header-extension-list '("h" "hh" "H" "hpp")) (defvar c++-header-ext-regexp "\\.\\(hpp\\|h\\|\hh\\|H\\)$") (defvar c++-source-ext-regexp "\\.\\(cpp\\|c\\|\cc\\|C\\|pcc\\|pc\\)$") (defun toggle-source-header() "Switches to the source buffer if currently in the header buffer and vice versa." (interactive) (let* ((buf (current-buffer)) (name (file-name-nondirectory (buffer-file-name))) (check (lambda (regexp extns) (let ((offs (string-match regexp name))) (if offs (let ((file (substring name 0 offs))) (loop for ext in extns for test-file = (concat file "." ext) do (if (file-exists-p test-file) (return (find-file test-file)))))))))) (or (funcall check c++-header-ext-regexp c++-source-extension-list) (funcall check c++-source-ext-regexp c++-header-extension-list)))) (global-set-key [?\C-c ?`] 'toggle-source-header)
by nilirl | 2025-11-02 03:13:06+00:00
This was weak.

The author's main counter-argument: We have control in the development and progress of AI; we shouldn't rule out positive outcomes.

The author's ending argument: We're going to build it anyway, so some of us should try and build it to be good.

The argument in this post was a) not very clear, b) not greatly supported and c) a little unfocused.

Would it persuade someone whose mind is made up that AGI will destroy our world? I think not.
by georgemcbay | 2025-11-02 03:16:59+00:00
> That's much more likely flash degradation than actual fragmentation. Did you use cheap tablets with eMMC storage?

My understanding of the parent reply's situation is that this was happening on the tablets of their users, so it kinda doesn't matter that it can be avoided by not using cheap tablets.

Most apps aren't in a position to tell their users that they are on their own when they run into what feels like an unreasonable app slowdown because they didn't buy a good enough device to run it on, especially when they've previously experienced it running just fine.

If all their apps feel like crap on that tablet, sure, that might fly... but if its only your app (or only a small set of apps that use SQLite in the same way the OP's company did) that feels like crap after a while, that's effectively a you problem (to solve) even if its not really a you problem.

In any case, its an interesting data point and could be very useful information to others who run into similar issues.
by Animats | 2025-11-02 03:17:10+00:00
> I would argue that corporate actors (a state, an army or a corporation) are not true superorganisms but are semi-autonomous, field-embedded systems that can exhibit super-organism properties, with their autonomy being conditional, relational and bounded by the institutional logics and resource structures of their respective organisational fields.

Lotsa big words there.

Really, though, we're probably going to have AI-like things that run substantial parts of for-profit corporations. As soon as AI-like things are better at this than humans, capitalism will force them to be in charge. Companies that don't do this lose.

There's a school of thought, going back to Milton Friedman, that corporations have no responsibilities to society.[1] Their goal is to optimize for shareholder value. We can expect to see AI-like things which align with that value system.

And that's how AI will take over. Shareholder value!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
by avtar | 2025-11-02 03:17:43+00:00
> as far as I can tell, no operating system does this in a way that really works besides OSX

AFAIK this is an easy setting in desktop environments such as Cosmic, Gnome, and KDE. But I've been using keyd on Linux distros for a while:

https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd#quickstart

Using the config in the above example results in Caps Lock acting as Esc if used on its own or as Ctrl if it's held down.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-02 03:18:04+00:00
I take it you've never actually interfaced directly with hardware?

Interrupts are at the most basic level an electrical signal to the CPU to tell it to load a new address into the next instruction pointer after pushing the current one and possibly some other registers onto the stack. That means you don't actually know when they will happen and they are transparent to the point that those two instructions that you put right after one another are possibly detoured to do an unknown amount of work in some other place.

Any kind of side effect from that detour (time spent, changes made to the state of the machine) has the potential to screw up the previously deterministic path that you were on.

To make matters worse, there are interrupts that can interrupt the detour in turn. There are ways in which you can tell the CPU 'not now' and there are ways in which those can be overridden. If you are lucky you can uniquely identify the device that caused the interrupt to be triggered. But this isn't always the case and given the sensitivity of the inputs involved it isn't rare at all that your interrupt will trigger without any ground to do so. If that happens and the ISR is not written with that particular idea in mind you may end up with a system in an undefined state.

Interrupts are a very practical mechanism. But they're also a nightmare to deal with in the otherwise orderly affairs of computing and troubleshooting interrupt related issues can eat up days, weeks or even months if you are really unlucky.
by wopwops | 2025-11-02 03:18:16+00:00
Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output?

---

Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity):

Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray (black and white with four levels of gray), which dramatically decreases the file size. The black-and-white dithered images are then recolored via the browser’s CSS, which adds no extra data load.

This approach makes images roughly ten times less resource-intensive than full-color high-resolution images, which supports the magazine’s goal of having a low-energy, solar-powered website. However, some images, such as graphs or those with crucial color information, may become less clear under dithering, so the website offers the option to turn off dithering for individual images to reveal the original, heavier images. This balances energy efficiency with the need for clarity when visual information depends on color or detail.

Thus, the dithered image feature is both an energy-saving measure and a distinct stylistic choice that aligns with the philosophy of reducing the environmental impact of web usage while maintaining visual storytelling appeal.
by retrac | 2025-11-02 03:19:33+00:00
> more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML

There's dozens of us! Hundreds maybe! It's not abandoned. It's more like with Lisp where the language is complete. Almost perfect as-is. Nothing left to take away and nothing left to add. Except Unicode and record update syntax.

The deciding factor for my personal projects was that SML is the exact same language it was 30 years ago. And it will be in 30 years. Though if you stick to Haskell 98/2010 it is similarly stable.

Speaking of SML and functional languages in the browser, MLton has a WASM target now: http://mlton.org/RunningOnWASI
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-02 03:20:08+00:00
Stop conflating violence with terms that have their own words, it’s not helpful.

No amount of coercive control will nail you to a cross, or shoot you in the neck in front of your wife and a park full of students, because it disagrees with what you say.

Intimidation by making or implying threats of violence isn’t violence.

The reader assuming aggression in blunt words isn’t violence. Not using someone’s preferred pronouns is not violence.

Violence is violence.

People who want to conflate violence with non-violence want to impose their will on others. It’s a personality trait that lends itself to tyranny. You can’t legislate undesirable behaviour out of existence, but you can lock up those you disagree with, and you will enjoy it. You will say things like “ah well, we got what he deserved”.

Punishing people for things like coercive control does nothing to prevent the harm occurring in the first place, and threats of legal consequences rarely do much, if anything, to deter the unwanted activity.

We’re going to have to be more skilful in our thinking if we want people to Be Good and Live Right. I’m sure I’ve read and listen to people who had something more intelligent to say about how we are to live, but we keep fucking nailing them to crosses or shooting them in the fucking neck.
by rafabulsing | 2025-11-02 03:21:19+00:00
If you want a first principles approach, I recommend Rob Miles' videos on YouTube. He has been featured many times in the Computerphile channel, and has a channel of his own as well.

Most of the videos take a form of:

1. Presenting a possible problem that AIs might have (say, lying during training, or trying to stop you from changing their code) 2. Explaining why it's logical to expect those problems to arise naturally, without a malicious actor explicitly trying to get the AI to act badly 3. Going through the proposed safety measures we've come up so far that could mitigate that problem 4. Showing the problems with each of those measures, and why they are wholly or at least partially ineffective

I find he's very good a presenting this in an approachable and intuitive way. He seldom makes direct those bombastic "everyone will die" claims, and instead focuses on just showing how hard it is to make an AI actually aligned with what you want it to do, and how hard it can be to fix that once it is sufficiently intelligent and out in the world.
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-11-02 03:21:34+00:00
> I'm a big fan of minimal-emacs [1] a compact init.el and early-init.el that configures vanilla emacs into a good, default state. From there I would pick and choose which packages I'm interested by going through the Systemcrafters's community

+1

I found the best way to approach Emacs was to start with an empty init.el and then just start using it. Every time something annoyed me or I thought “there should be a package to do X”, I stopped what I was doing and went hunting…

By doing it this way, you’re actually using it from the start and get to slowly taylor it to your personal needs.

Also, I am not yet an Elisper, and so for the macros I’ve wanted to write, ChatGPT has been really helpful.
by theendisney | 2025-11-02 03:21:56+00:00
You need to do more unserious experments. This one is perhaps the best stupid idea ive seen.

Maybe the browser should learn to talk back.

You could store the pages in the database and periodically generate a new version based on the current set of pages and the share of traffic they enjoy. You would get something that evolves and stabilizes in some niche. Have an innitial prompt like; "dinosaurs!" Then sit back and see the magic unfold.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-02 03:23:28+00:00
Sorry, this is completely incorrect. All of those - lying, amassing power, hiding motives - are instrumental goals which arise in the process of pursuing any goal that has any possibility of resistance from humans.

This is like arguing that a shepherd who wants to raise some sheep would also have to, independently of the desire to protect his herd, be born with an ingrained desire to build fences and kill wolves, otherwise he'd simply watch while they eat his flock.

That's just not the case; "get rid of the wolves" is an instrumental sub-goal that the shepherd acquires in the process of attempting to succeed and shepherding. And quietly amassing power is something that an AI bent on paperclipping would do to succeed at paperclipping, especially once it noticed that humans don't all love paperclips as much as it does.
by nradov | 2025-11-02 03:23:40+00:00
You heard wrong. While at one point the AMA lobbied Congress to restrict residency slots, they reversed position some years back. However Congress has still refused to increase Medicare funding for residency programs. This is essentially a form of care rationing imposed through supply shortages.

https://savegme.org/

There is no "doctor's guild". No one is required to join the AMA to practice medicine, nor are they involved in medical school accreditation.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-02 03:24:07+00:00
Yea, this is the bigger problem: 3rd party software developers drop support for "too old" operating systems WAY too early. Especially on mobile. Some developers only support one major previous version, which is insane.

So, Apple leaves old hardware high and dry by not supporting them with operating systems, and 3P software leaves users high and dry by dropping support for operating systems. It's like they are working together to create e-waste.