skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tl;dr: Humans have souls which machines will never have. The core of the article is this quote "I will extend that further to claim that the only way to get a very human-like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet tissue. That also means that very big, complex artificial intelligences run on dry silicon will produce big, complex, unhuman-like minds." which is just the boring old argument against replicating human thinking.

Similarly, there is an extreme amount of pro-human arrogance in the article "At the core of the notion of a superhuman intelligence — particularly the view that this intelligence will keep improving itself — is the essential belief that intelligence has an infinite scale. I find no evidence for this.... So the question is, where is the limit of intelligence? We tend to believe that the limit is way beyond us, way “above” us, as we are “above” an ant. Setting aside the recurring problem of a single dimension, what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? Why can’t we be at the maximum?"

Humans are just a bunch of atoms that randomly learned to think over a few billion years. Given how fast we can improve tech via directed means, we should be able to replicate what nature has done in thousands, hundreds, or tens of years.
>Also, the idea that Bezos and people like him never sell stock is just completely wrong.

ProPublica did some pretty good investigating reporting showing that no, that idea is not "completely wrong".

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Snowcrash is becoming real
Spotify video leaves a lot to be desired as compared to youtube. They should stick to audio and improve on it. I dont understand, why do I need to go through ads for JR show even though I pay for spotify premium.

The best part of youtube is that one could search through and get excerpts of the video. I could easily find JRs tidbits without the need of going through the entire interview. I still see some of the older excerpts in youtube, but less so in spotify.
Well, I can almost guarantee that the first question that the defendant's counsel will ask in discovery is whether payment was accepted in connection with the photoshoot. The second question will be what the parent thought the payment was for.

A written agreement definitely helps to clarify the matter, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee a resolution.
The Coronavirus Could Get Worse
Why? This sort of organisation sounds like it has a pipeline to train employees from within. That seems better for overall employee morale than an employer not developing its own talent and headhunting externally for key skills you could just get in house from your own pool with better management and mentorship.
Irmin: A distributed database built on the same principles as Git
Antitrust is trending again, especially with tech, and the Visa/Mastercard duopoly has so far managed to escape the public's attention. Those two are no strangers to that world and that kind of publicity can actually hurt them long term.
For a country that has the industry to make such a pivot
what heavily investing in renewables would result in is not simply prestige but a source of national pride. The way the USSR approached this is vastly different from how technological progress was perceived in the US. In the Soviet union domestic industrial capacity was something highly regarded by the people in general even if we know on many levels theft and organizational inefficiency didn't make it an actual shining example.

Technological innovation was a national goal in the USSR. It is what won legitimacy as a world power. A country like China is similarly poised to make such a goal their focus. It can be spun positively in so many ways.

Off the cuff:

"Saveguarding our ancestor's land by building renewables"

"Using the intellectual might of our nation's engineers and scientists to stand above other nations"

etc

For all its baggage let patriotism be used to help the Earth which knows not of nations' borders.
what? most folks have looked at porn. most folks end up just alright.
It never ceases to amaze me that the little techno-fascists will instantly downvote something that goes against corporate or government narrative.
I haven’t ever had feedback about a company which I could both politely give and hadn’t already given directly to my manager (and other coworkers) before leaving the role. What does HR need to hear that’s both appropriate to say and not best told directly to the team?
Single play tape cassettes. Jeez, the sheer waste of that.
In fairness, I have difficulty finding a book where he discusses this but he has a good interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av96iIRa0f8
Do you use one of those apps that keeps your screen open? Caffeine.app and the like? Some of those used to be notorious for keeping the laptop awake when the lid was closed.
Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.

Doing sociology is hard and physics is, in some ways, absurdly easy. As a physicist, you can generate an endless supply of particles. They are all identical, and so behave in the same way. They do whatever they do, regardless of the experimenters' expectations, social pressures, or the like. The results can be slotted into a formal mathematical framework, which also helps you design better experiments. The work of these experiments is often difficult (e.g., holding a detector just about 0K), but the concepts are often relatively clear.

None of this is true in 'softer' sciences. Every person (or animal) is different and you often can't even test the same subject twice because the very act of doing so changes them. People often don't know what they want or why they do something. When they do know, they sometimes lie about it, for myriad reasons. This makes designing, analyzing, and interpreting experiments conceptually hard, even if the actual work is pretty easy.
Yeah, I got a 2009 MacBook Pro for free (or like $10 or something, I forget), and it's now running the latest FreeBSD. BSD, GNU/Linux and other open source OSes typically run great on MacBooks, and give them new life. Try it out!
It’s not fringe, it’s the legal bedrock of NZ’s constitution.

It’s not about separate, it’s about the crown entering into a legal treaty then dishonouring it because lol Great Britain.
I'm definitely coming at this from my own parent perspective and my some of feedback is probably more a reaction to the realities of classroom instruction than about Litnerd specifically.

I'm going to push on your deflection to legal obstacles to sharing footage though. Get parent permission and make a better example video! :)
This are beautiful.

I had a go at doing roughly the same thing a couple of years ago [0]. It was mostly straightforward, but the part I really struggled with were rendering the sea. The encoding of OSM coastline is quite quirky [1]. When the edge of the rendering intersects with the coastline it's very tricky to compute which side of a coastline is sea and which is land. As an example - how would you render this [2]?

I wasn't sure how I could solve this, so I wrote up a more abstract formulation of the problem here [3], and asked for help. I think the proposed solution make sense, but I think I would have to implement it by rendering individual pixels and wouldn't be able to lean on a higher level graphics library.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the author solved this problem.

[0] https://twitter.com/willsewell_/status/1172523752699113473

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dcoastline#...

[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/22.0330/88.8819

[3] https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/1104642/im-s...
I naively moved from New York to Silicon Valley when I was 52. Not saying there isn’t age discrimination in NYC, but here it’s a nightmare.

The drop in my interview track record since my 40s is stark. 2 years ago, after 6 months during which I failed to get 6 jobs for which I interviewed, I made it to the final round for a position at a startup and was subjected to the usual all-day grilling. The CEO was an older man and the hiring manager was in her late 40s, but all the other interviewers were in their early 20s. I left convinced I had nailed the interview and feeling optimistic. On the way home, the hiring manager, bless her soul, took the unusual step of calling to tell me the team had overruled her own enthusiasm for hiring me and she felt terrible about it. Without saying it in so many words, she made it plain it was because of my age.

The age discrimination here extends beyond getting hired. I’ve been subject to cruel jokes and shunning in the workplace that, were I in another disenfranchised group, would be labeled workplace harassment and likely subject to strong discouragement by management at the very least.

Some people in these comments ask the source of the age discrimination as if they are skeptical and astonished, Astonished!! such a thing could be going on. They look for a rational explanation. Here’s the explanation: we are tribal animals. From young people’s perspective, they are “Us” and we olds are “Them.”

Sometimes young people are conscious of their hostility toward us and sometimes not, but that’s it. It requires no explanation more than that.

It’s traumatic to be subjected to treatment like this, to the point I have stopped looking for a job. Humans are not built to tolerate constant social rejection, and it’s more important for me to be alive than to be wealthy. I’ve withdrawn from the tech world and started a business that will not make me and my family wealthy, but will support us, albeit with modest means.

I hate the fact that I have become a bitter old man at 57!! I hate that Silicon Valley has come to this!!

I’m working through my bitterness and will get over it someday. And I will have the good fortune to leave this dystopia.
Yup.

I've had a lot of luck putting Ubuntu on older Macbooks for quite a few years now. Works quite well.
This simple site is a far better demo and explanation of the extreme danger of Apple's proposal than any of the long articles written about it.

Thank you for caring enough to put this together and publish it.
Sorry, I should not have written my post in a way that insinuates you were advocating for that. It is interesting history. It does seem something is lost in translation for the poem.
Cost is a very rough indicator of footprint.

A modest e-book reader runs about $200. That's the cost of about 3 cases of 20# letter-sized paper (10 reams/case), or 15,000 sheets of paper.

At ~300 pages/book, that's about 50 books cost equivalent.

Note that printing output tends to run higher, at $0.01 -- $0.25 per page (higher for colour inkjet and laserjet).

Depending on ones reading patterns, the cost (and environmental impacts) of an ebook reader could well come out ahead. It's also generally easier to carry such a device than the equivalent number of printed books or documents.
That is generally my experience except when coding, I need the F keys for that.
Same, with roughly the same ridiculous quote. 2019 MBP touchbar died just a week out of warranty. Had it have completely died I would have been happier than the persistent flickering it now does. In spite of thousands of such reported problems, my understanding is that Apple refuses to acknowledge it as a defect.
With regard to sharing a video of example class couldn't you set one up with paid signed off kids - they do this on Colbert all the time so there must be somewhere you can get these kids who don't mind being on TV?
I know... I was just being fascetious - as he was just so unaware of how cringy he came across..
Bashly – Create beautiful bash scripts from simple YAML configuration
For our business, there isn't a difference in between $6 or $15k, but most businesses aren't spending more than $15k per desktop-side compute station even when we max out specs from our partner suppliers, because for that type of budget you can work with very large amounts of data that hit RAM limits on workstation motherboards, versus just large amounts of RAM on consumer motherboards.
Ugh. This is a pretty bad article. And don't get me wrong... I'm no "AI Alarmist." But to me, this article is equally as useless as the various pronouncements it seems to be trying to refute. There's a lot of verbiage here, but no cohesive, coherent argument to support the thesis that "Superhuman AI is just a myth" (which is to say, "Superhuman AI is not possible").

The reality is, there are a lot of unknowns in this space, and to dismiss the possibility of an "evil super-intelligence" out-of-hand is, IMO, every bit as silly as buying into the "OMG, AI is unleashing the demon" fear-mongering. I just think it's too early to know for sure the answers to some of these questions, like:

1. Is AGI possible at all (for whatever definition of "AGI" you want to use)?

2. If the answer to (1) is "yes", then what about ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) - is that possible?

3. If (1) and (2) are both "yes", then is it possible to create an ASI that will either be benevolent, or controllable, or both?

And so on... we just don't know yet. And that in and of itself arguably suggests the exercise of a certain measure of caution.
what about you hire people and stop focusing on age
and then yell at all the kids in the room

The idea of that is just so hilarious to me, but I totally get it. When you have groups of 20 somethings without any older leadership, they can obvious do really amazing things. But, sometimes you get a group of them that just have no clue about things they will learn in the coming decades. When I started in the 80's, there were older, more experienced people around. I felt it was my job to hoover up all the wisdom and knowledge they had. I watched Bill Joy and Sam Leffler pour over just acquired code from BBN. That code? TCP/IP that would be merged into Berkeley UNIX. There are so many times I peered over shoulders just to watch something I barely understood. I hope this sort of thing happens today. I just never read about it (and I might not be looking in the right places).
What would you say where the best papers in the field then and where did they fail?
Yeah, I have a 2013 MBP as well, and it has been problem-free. The battery still lasts hours! I think it's because I almost always used it plugged-in, so the battery has a very very low cycle count. I am SUPER impressed with how well the machine has lasted, considering my heavy usage of it!
I come from a place where specialists are hard to come by and when I finally got in to see someone about my condition she accused me of seeking pain killers (I was not, opioids are not going to help what is wrong with me) and then told me the symptom I was experiencing was my body "getting better". I went probably 4 years longer undiagnosed because of her. She eventually left the area and went to a teaching hospital to TEACH. When I told her what condition I believed I had, she literally laughed at my and ridiculed me for thinking I could self-diagnose. Meanwhile, I was diagnosed with this well after the damage was done and I experienced neck and lumbar fusion. Let's just there is a wide range of compentency in doctors, even specialists.
These videos have now be proved to directly inflict harm to some viewers in the form of being diagnostic with the wrong condition and being administrated the wrong drug. The argument could be the same for video triggering epileptic stroke, should they be allow on a video platform, accessible to children or monetized?
I would rather do everything on a remote server, really, with a different environment for each project.

But that starts breaking down when working on mobile or hardware projects.
Aaargh, it really feels like they're actively making their product worse lately
This is one of my concerns with what I've seen of the recent fetishizing of mental illness, it seems to many people I talk to or interact with, especially younger people, it is popular and cool to have some sort of mental illness, such as anxiety or depression, or something else.

Of course many of these indivudals are self diagnosed but that doesn't stop them from talking about it constantly and holding themselves up as a "suffering soul". Meanwhile those who legitimately struggle with issues like depression or anxiety now get either brushed off, or have people that "totally understand" when really they don't at all.
It doesn't make that clear at all, it's just an editorialisation.

The thrust of the paper, which is that behaviours seem to be on some level 'contagious' is an absolutely important issue.

If these can be contagious, imagine what other 'in the range of normative' types of behaviours are equally contagious?

Anyone who's around small children knows how immediately and intimately they observe and learn behaviour, it's definitely something we don't think of enough.

I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis in that attention-seeking is a fundamental driver for most, I think it is for a very large cohort and is a 'relevant factor' for further study. Though it's a tough one to decompose no doubt.
Vigorously. Stopping human activity is, as noted, insufficient, besides impossible. We need to wind down harmful activity, and drive beneficial activity to a fever pitch.
The bottleneck for intelligence is experience. Running on silicon doesn't allow an intelligence to engage with reality significantly faster than a human can. There are some benefits due to access to data and processing power, but the data isn't useful without the context of experience and all processing power can do it overfit model without experience.

Even if we put AI into an army of robots running around and experiencing things, there are still scaling limits to encoding and communicating knowledge and understanding. Human organizations are a great example of the scaling limits of intelligence.
Check out the books he's written: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/2476.Noam_Chomsky
Given your interest in hiring art and theatre professionals to support education I think you'll love The Diamond Age. It's so relevant to what you're doing I'd assumed you must have already read it!
Deflecting an Asteroid Before It Hits Earth May Take Multiple Bumps
I think the flexible preference is an acknowledgment of deep focused work needing to be preformed away from the office. The modern office is not meant for this type of work. Likewise an acknowledgment that some work is best done in person.
I think Posthog is more like an open source mixpanel -- you need event tracking on your website, and standard analysis of traffic, funnels, user segments etc.

Evidence is aimed at a longer tail of data analysis -- you have more idiosyncratic data landing in a data warehouse, and you need to turn it into custom reports, dashboards etc.
I see people say this but I can’t see that it it true. This current lockdown in New Zealand has 2011 and 2013 Macbook airs in daily use and they are working perfectly. There is an iPad 2 in daily use also.

Those devices have had hard lives.

I haven’t got any other electronics with anything approaching this longevity (unless you count espresso hardware). Presumably others are having a very different experience.
To the first half of your question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)

To the second half:

Dunno. Good question.
Indeed. But I had to take it back to Sweden somehow to get it repaired lol
Keep in mind that most trade work isn’t mentally stimulating. That may sound fine to you, but as someone who bounces back and forth between a job that is and isn’t - it can be rough in it’s own way.

It’s boring and you can practically feel your brain turn to slush.
Apple has a visceral dislike/distrust of the GPL, and goes to great lengths to avoid it - like authoring an entirely new compiler (clang) to replace the GPL-licensed gcc. This is also the reason why the version of bash bundled with Apple OSes is ancient.
> Incidentally most startups I've been part of, there were just a few guys doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting

Is there a way to identify that talent and pay them more?

Or find them and poach them?
The beer on tap exists up until the point that an HR person is hired. I've worked at a few companies that had kegs. Some seemed to make it a habit to drink and code late into the night, which I rarely did, but to me it at least signals that corporate BS hasn't infiltrated the company yet.
Gotcha. That one did do significantly better.

It's interesting to compare that machine to today's. 5.6lbs vs today's 16" at 4.3lbs. 2012 is 0.93" thick and today's is 0.64". I suppose, based on this datapoint, we can say there is something like a ~25% mechanical overhead for "repairability" then.

"MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2012 Repairability Score: 7 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)."

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Unibody+...
the most I manage for machines right now is:

1 work-provided laptop

1 personal laptop

1 gaming desktop

1 backup laptop (old, like 10 years old)

1 closet server desktop (also old, but runs terraria servers just fine)

On my desk, I use 2 HDMI switches and a USB 3.0 switch to use the same peripherals and monitors for both my work laptop and gaming desktop. At the end of the day, I just hit the buttons on the switches to toggle to my desktop.

I have a USB-C dock that the work laptop plugs into. If i ever want to do work for my side project, I can unplug my work-provided laptop and plug in my personal laptop, and have the same setup as before -- just with a different machine.
Yep, I'm typing this on a '15 macbook pro with PopOS on it.
Did you even read the lede?

> Spencer Elden, the man who was photographed as a baby on the album cover for Nirvana's Nevermind, is suing the band alleging sexual exploitation.

The article goes on:

> He also alleges the nude image constitutes child pornography.

> However, Elden's lawyer, Robert Y. Lewis, argues that the inclusion of the dollar bill (which was superimposed after the photograph was taken) makes the minor seem "like a sex worker".

It amazes me just how many HN users just say stuff without reading anything. The person being replied to also doesn't deserve the downvotes; it's an entirely valid point that the general population is likely to agree with. (not saying you downvoted in particular... I just find it baffling.)
> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

That's not the point. We can map any multi-dimensional form of intelligence into a single dimension with any suitable norm. It just matters that for any dimension we can quantify intelligence in the sense that something more intelligent is imaginable.

> Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

That does not matter at all. Then a superhuman intelligence is not "general", so what? It's still wastly more capable then any human.

> Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

But what is the cost constraints? Human brains are constrained by mechanical considerations. How efficient could a computerized AI become?

> Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Again, what's the argument? The number of atoms in the universe is not infinite, either (probably).

> Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

That's not the problem of the super AI.
If you make them guarantee it for three years (or perhaps five) you give them a stronger incentive to build it to last, and you can be sure it’s going to last that long. There’s a strong environmental (public good) aspect to this, so no, you should not be able to opt out.

I find it even more ridiculous that big items like fridges, ovens, and washing machines are also often only guaranteed one year. I think a ten year minimum would be reasonable for white goods.
It’s only a partial solution; you still need to limit the queries. Otherwise, just sample a large number of coordinates and average out the noise.
I'm actually becoming a fan of factory refurbished for these same reasons. I'd rather have something that's been shaken down, repaired for the problems that appeared, recertified, and shipped back out.