MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzledonker | 2025-11-02 02:12:36+00:00
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.

If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.

Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.

Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.

AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.

A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.

Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.

I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.

If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.

When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.

The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-11-02 02:13:24+00:00
Ok, fair critique.

EXCEPT…

What did you have for AI three years ago? Jack fucking shit is what.

Why is “wow that’s cool, I wonder what it’ll turn into” a forbidden phrase, but “there are clearly no experts on this topic but let me take a crack at it!!” important for everyone to comment on?

One word: Standby. Maybe that’s two words.
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-02 02:13:45+00:00
The author destroys own argument by calling them "minds". What like human mind?

You can't "just" align a person. You know that quiet guy next door, so nice great at math, and then he shoots up a school.

If we solved this we would not have psychos and hitlers.

if you have any suspicion that anything like that can become some sort of mega powerful thing that none of us can understand... you have gotta be crazy to not do whatever it takes to nope the hell out of that timeline
by hedora | 2025-11-02 02:13:56+00:00
I don’t understand the problem they are trying to solve, and this article is long, so apologies if they actually get around to explaining.

I have a credit card, and an agent. I want a pizza.

These credentials do what, exactly? Prevent the pizza place from taking my money? Allow me to order anonymously so they don’t know where to deliver it?

Also, they are security professionals, so when they say anonymous, they don’t mean pseudonymous, so my agent can produce an unlimited number of identities, right? How do they keep the website from correlating time and IP addresses to link my anonymous requests to a pseudonym?

My cynical take is that the pizzeria has to pay cloudflare a few pennies to process the transaction. What am I missing?
by woodruffw | 2025-11-02 02:14:00+00:00
I don't have strong opinions in either direction about Zig. But there's clear empirical evidence that Rust has a successful C interop story[1][2][3].

And note: browsers are the pathological case, in terms of build system integrations, global state assumptions, C++, etc.

(Your other complaints have a place, and don't seem unreasonable to me. But they're empirically not impediments to Rust's interop story.)

[1]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

[2]: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/build/buildsystem/ru...

[3]: https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-nginx-compatibility...
by meowface | 2025-11-02 02:14:19+00:00
I don't think the person you were replying to was necessarily strongly implying that many or perhaps most Americans wouldn't become permanently unemployed or unemployable.

Hamstringing productivity and technology because of possible job loss - even loss of nearly all jobs, yes - just is not a sensible move. Moves certainly need to be made, but the best action is definitely not deindustrialization and degrowth and luddism. The dock worker unions demanding a ban on port automation is a microcosm of how we will slowly decay as a country.

Even the smart communists understand this. The goal should be wellbeing and prosperity and lack of scarcity for all. The end goal is not "ensure everyone can do these painstaking jobs which non-humans can do exponentially better and faster and cheaper". This is an artificial goal because of vague worries about "purpose". Yes, people need purpose, but placing objects onto locations or pressing buttons on a screen is not the pinnacle of what it means to be a sentient entity.
by advael | 2025-11-02 02:15:02+00:00
For all the advancement in machine learning that's happened in just the decade I've been doing it, this whole AGI debate's been remarkably stagnant, with the same factions making essentially the same handwavey arguments. "Superintelligence is inherently impossible to predict and control and might act like a corporation and therefore kill us all". "No, intelligence could correlate with value systems we find familiar and palatable and therefore it'll turn out great"

Meanwhile people keep predicting this thing they clearly haven't had a meaningfully novel thought about since the early 2000s and that's generous given how much of those ideas are essentially distillations of 20th century sci-fi. What I've learned is that everyone thinking about this idea sucks at predicting the future and that I'm bored of hearing the pseudointellectual exercise that is debating sci-fi outcomes instead of doing the actual work of building useful tools or ethical policy. I'm sure many of the people involved do some of those things, but what gets aired out in public sounds like an incredibly repetitive argument about fanfiction
by ddingus | 2025-11-02 02:15:59+00:00
I am speculating here.

The reason for it being a two level device at present is likely due to it being mostly research and not so much engineering.

They say their next chip will deliver grey scale and many more signal points.

My guess on color is one or more of the following is true:

[0]The color info is normally sent via the color sensitive cells now damaged and we have yet to understand how that signal enters the nerves we can send a signal to.

[1]It may be that we need a far smaller, more precise signal point to achieve color. Current tech stimulates many nerve endings. This was the basis for my interpolation comment above. Basically, each pixel stimulates an area of the damaged retina which contains a great many possible signal points if it were possible to stimulate them individually. Because so many are stimulated all at once, the subject perceives white phosphines rather than colored ones.

An analogy would be the colors on a CRT. A broadband beam would light them all up, yielding monochrome vision. A narrow beam can light up a few or just one, yielding color.

One thing I just realized writing this is our blue sensor cells are scattered about, not well clustered like the green and red ones are.

Maybe current users see a bit of color at the very extent of the artificial visual field due to a failure to hit the necessary blue cells...

[2] It may be some sort of pulse is needed to encode colors. And perhaps the current signaling is continuous.

Hopefully, we get an answer from the team.
by lurking_swe | 2025-11-02 02:16:50+00:00
Single family homes have more sqft, so of course there is a higher price ceiling! That’s…very intuitive. There’s also less of them, because they take up so much space, so…doesn’t surprise me that they would be more at a “premium”. Assuming it’s in a desirable location.

One more thing to consider - no U.S. city has “excellent” infrastructure so it’s difficult to know what the demand would be like if that kind of city existed in the US. NYC doesn’t count, the subway is good by US standards but it’s junk compared to asia standards. Slow, loud, disgusting, lots of delays and maintenance on weekends.

For example how much would a nice apartment in manhattan be worth if i could easily hop on a bullet train and be in the Hamptons on Long Island within 50 minutes? Or in Mystic Connecticut within 45 minutes?? Suddenly commuting from the suburbs daily, so i can relax in nature on the weekends loses its appeal. Just one example.

With that said it’s good the market offers different housing “products” based on personal preference or life-stage (young, kids, older, etc)
by Ylpertnodi | 2025-11-02 02:16:54+00:00
>Securing the cockpit doors on planes is a good idea though.

Unless your pilot is having a particularly bad day.

I did recently see a video of a pilot that proposed to his girlfriend as she boarded his plane.

I bet all the passengers were thinking "Please, please say 'yes'", and were overly-happy both for the newly-engaged couple, and more for themselves that she did.

No, I don't have an answer to the door problem.
by pdntspa | 2025-11-02 02:16:59+00:00
People are too harsh on this. It's not hard to install a version manager and set your primary python to that. Which is just good hygiene.

My understanding of the reasoning is that python-based system packages having dependencies managed through pip/whatever present a system stability risk. So they chose this more conservative route, as is their MO.

Honestly if there is one distribution to expect those kinds of shennanigans on it would be Debian. I don't know how anybody chooses to use that distro without adding a bunch of APT sources and a language version manager.
by roughly | 2025-11-02 02:18:00+00:00
I’m more optimistic about the possibility of beneficial AGI in general than most folks, I think, but something that caught me in the article was the recourse to mammalian sociality to (effectively) advocate for compassion as an emergent quality of intelligence.

A known phenomenon among sociologists is that, while people may be compassionate, when you collect them into a superorganism like a corporation, army, or nation, they will by and large behave and make decisions according to the moral and ideological landscape that superorganism finds itself in. Nobody rational would kill another person for no reason, but a soldier will bomb a village for the sake of their nation’s geostrategic position. Nobody would throw someone out of their home or deny another person lifesaving medicine, but as a bank officer or an insurance agent, they make a living doing these things and sleep untroubled at night. A CEO will lay off 30,000 people - an entire small city cast off into an uncaring market - with all the introspection of a Mongol chieftain subjugating a city (and probably less emotion). Humans may be compassionate, but employees, soldiers, and politicians are not, even though at a glance they’re made of the same stuff.

That’s all to say that to just wave generally in the direction of mammalian compassion and say “of course a superintelligence will be compassionate” is to abdicate our responsibility for raising our cognitive children in an environment that rewards the morals we want them to have, which is emphatically not what we’re currently doing for the collective intelligences we’ve already created.
by 1659447091 | 2025-11-02 02:18:36+00:00
> If you lived in an area with many restaurants offering the same favorite-cuisine/foods, and you were picking one to eat at indefinitely and exclusively… how would you choose?

[edit] I missed the indefinitely, read as definitely - so if you mean only one of them forever. The one I liked best, which really isnt far off from how I do thing now. I use to drive past multiple starbucks to go to the one I enjoyed most. It's not like they had better coffee than the others, I simply knew I liked going to that one the most.

I get this may sound trite, but by knowing myself. I've made it priority to know my mind (and feelings/emotions as best I can) and work on figuring out what is mine and what was given to me or told is suppose to be mine. From food to politics to values, I still find things ingrained that are not me. It's like keeping a workout/exercise routine and not get lazy with it.

How to choose? I will have already put them in order and know what foods I like where, then when asked the question I will know what I want to eat and the places to satisfy that -- from there its about other things too, do we have time to drive the the farthest one that I want? no? okay this other one is closer and it has this other thing I want so we go there. One has a long wait and we are both actually hungry? I hear there is one like it and my date is also adventurous so it'll be fun to try a new place together.

Honestly it's about knowing yourself, what your priorities are and what can be worked around. It's so much easier when you have a solid grasp on "knowing yourself". I know if this swank restaurant is going to take 30min drive and another 1.5 hour wait and I'm hungry, it doesn't matter how impressive the place is because I will be at my least impressive. If the date really wants to go there, I will have a snack before-hand so I wont be a stubborn-hangry-asshat (because I know I will be and instead of fighting it, own and manage it so everyone has a good time)
by snozolli | 2025-11-02 02:19:41+00:00
The only reason there would be madness, filth and ugliness in a rural area is if you left it there, because you are the only one living on your property.

Use of sulfur by farmers causes asthma: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5783654/

Stockyards smell awful.

My childhood friend's grandfather owned a silage plant. Ever smelled silage?

The local pig farm has created the worst smell I've ever directly experienced, and it's been a problem since the 90s.

These are just a few examples of filth and ugliness. As for madness, meth use and inattentive, drunk, or road-raging pickup truck drives with provide you that.
by TheColorYellow | 2025-11-02 02:20:29+00:00
Although this is clearly the equivalent of Cloudflare propaganda, they are trying to address the issue of connecting a user and an agent in a way that respects the users privacy.

They effectively use credentials and cryptography to link the two together in a zero-knowledge type of way. Real issue, although no one is clearly dying for this yet.

Real solution too, but blind credentials and Chaumian signing is equally naive to think it addresses the root issue. Something like Apple will step in to cast a liability shield over all parties and just continue to trap users into the Apple data ecosystem.

The right way to do this is to give the user sovereignty over their identity and usage such that platforms cater to users rather than the middle-men in-between. Harder than what Cloudflare probably wants to truly solve for.

Still, cool article even if a bit lengthy.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-02 02:20:57+00:00
Well the essential system Python should be in /usr/sbin and read-only (insofar Python allows that with its __pycache__ spam).

The fact that users have to keep up with multiple PEPs, error messages, --single-version-externally-managed, --break-system-packages, config files everywhere, stealth packages in .local and uv to paper over all of this shows that Python packaging is completely broken.
by roughly | 2025-11-02 02:21:48+00:00
> it may be better to have a ruling class of corporations and elites.

Given that the outcome of that so far has been to deprioritize education so heavily in the US that one becomes skeptical that the people are smart enough to control their own destiny anymore while simultaneously shoving the planet towards environmental calamity, I’m not sure doubling down on the strategy is the best bet.
by jay_kyburz | 2025-11-02 02:22:40+00:00
In my mind, as a causal observer, AGI will be like Nukes. Very powerful technology with the power kill us all, and small group of people will have their fingers on the buttons.

Also like nukes, unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag and because there are people like Putin the world, we _need_ to have friendly AGI to defend hostile AGI.

I understand why we can't just pretend its not happening.

I think the idea that an AGI will "run amok" and destroy humans because we are in its way is is really unlikely and underestimates us. Why would anybody give so much agency to an AI with no power to just pull the plug. And even then, they are probably only going to have the resources of one nation.

I'm far more worried about Trump and Putin getting into a nuclear pissing match. Then global warming resulting in crop failure and famine.
by nine_zeros | 2025-11-02 02:24:25+00:00
> For example, Massachusetts rates are way up because New England politicians have spent more than a decade fighting natural gas infrastructure, especially pipelines that would bring cheap North American gas vs. LNG that is in short supply post-Russia/Ukraine war.

This problem is unrelated to datacenters. The datacenter boom has created demand in markets outside New England, which is seeping into New England. It only got compounded by lack of natural gas.

> At the same time, MA politicians created the “Mass Save” program that’s effectively a giant boondoggle where utility ratepayers are subsidizing fly-by-night “energy efficiency” contractors who have no incentive to be efficient at all.

Mass save is actually a great program. Mass houses are old, creaky, and lacking insulation. Mass save let these things be upgraded at a lower price burden to the masses. If you are talking about heat pumps, heat pumps can have backup furnaces - you could use natural gas if you wanted. The idea behind a heat pump was to have it work with solar, wind, and other low cost energy sources.

Then trump came in and shot all these other sources at gunpoint. And you are seeing it in your bills.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-02 02:24:28+00:00
I think the secret is "clearly better than anyone I've got".

If I have nobody, and you introduce me to someone, then it's simple. They're absolutely worth pursuing.

If I have one or two "maybes", and you introduce me to someone, it's easy for them to be clearly better than anyone I've got, and therefore clearly "the one", at least the one to pursue right now.

But if you give me one hundred, then there probably isn't one of them that is clearly better than all the others. Hence, analysis paralysis.
by oddmade | 2025-11-02 02:26:02+00:00
Face rec can be problematic if used with bad imagery and without proper oversight - agree.

Like all powerful tools it has to be used responsibly.

My point is merely that we are all tracked by other means that affect our life in much deeper and profound ways.

..like for example purchase history, cell phone location, internet use etc bought and sold by private corporations, with little to no oversight.
by jitl | 2025-11-02 02:26:09+00:00
I think a neat route would be to use this as an authoring plugin in VS Code, like prettier: write Duper (or JSON5, or whatever), and then downlevel it to regular json automatically when pressing cmd-s. You wouldn't get to keep your comments (or they could be transformed to { "//": "comment text" }).

Outside of that, it's tough to compete with JSON in the "human readable unschematized serialization format" market, especially targetting JavaScript:

Use in the browser requires some degree of bundle size increase, since the parser code needs to be loaded before your format can be used. WebAssembly libraries are usually quite large compared to a pure-JS implementation. According to [bundlejs](https://bundlejs.com/?q=%40duper-js%2Fwasm&treeshake=%5B*%5D), @duper-js/wasm weighs in at about 488 kB uncompressed, 159 kB gzip.

Use in any JavaScript runtime means you're competing against the runtime's native `JSON.parse` and `JSON.stringify`. In v8, these are very quick and have runtime-level tricks to go faster, for example see [v8's recent post on making JSON.stringify 2x faster](https://v8.dev/blog/json-stringify) when serializing plain objects with no funny business .toJSON methods, replacer, or indent formatting.

Besides those points, my major complaint about JSON is how expensive it is to encode binary data for transmission; in JSON I usually do base64, with your format it's transformed to escape characters that are less efficient than base64, right? \xNN is base16 with 2 extra bytes wasted on the \ and x, or \uNNNN which is base 10 with 2 extra bytes. Is there a way you can fit binary with no expensive encode/decode step into the format?

So, for me this seems suitable as a config file format: there you get good benefit from comments, identifiers, easier string authoring. Not sure I need the binary raw string thingy in config files that much, but I guess it doesn't hurt.
by never_inline | 2025-11-02 02:26:18+00:00
The kind of cope certain people come up with to justify the faults (and lack of basic living standards) of a civilization are insane.

India is not a "karma" society, India is a 'jugaad' society where everyone does just enough to get by. The lack of civilizational will power to fix things which slightly harm the entrenched elite is very well known. (case in point - the recent stray dogs issue where the life of common man was put in danger because some rich animal welfare aunties protested against it).

Thankfully Indian gen Z at least accepts these problems. Look at the memes on the gen Z spaces. Internet has let them know that living standards can be much better and other countries have risen from similar poverty levels. So there's some hope.

You can't keep doing this 'india is not for beginners' forever.
by simonw | 2025-11-02 02:27:09+00:00
> Finally, we keep this file synced with an AGENTS.md file to maintain compatibility with other AI IDEs that our engineers might be using.

I researched this the other day, the recommended (by Anthropic) way to do this is to have a CLAUDE.md with a single line in it:

@AGENTS.md

Then keep your actual content in the other file: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/claude-code-on-t...
by advael | 2025-11-02 02:27:31+00:00
With all due respect, "wow this is cool, I wonder what it'll turn into" is basically the mandatory baseline stance to take. I'm lucky that's where I'm still basically at, because anyone in a technical position who shows even mild reticence beyond that is likely to be unable to hold a job in the face of their bosses' frothing enthusiastic optimism about these technologies