skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s very disingenuous for privacy advocates to imply that the Canadian government created new surveillance powers during the pandemic.

These mobile network tracking datasets have been commercially available long beforehand. The public health agency simply put them to use to get accurate measurements of how much lockdown restrictions were actually translating into reduced movement.

Public health agencies have long been entrusted with handling personal information that is much more sensitive than movement data, so if these privacy advocates want to be taken seriously, they should do some genuine research on how this data gets used instead of simply suggesting that the public health agency must be distrusted by default.
I’m surprised at the amount of comments greatly downplaying the likelihood of AGI in the coming decades or saying that is impossible.

The rate of progress is AI technologies seems absolutely incredible to me. Sure, there is tons of hype and noise to weed through. And much of the technology and research hasn’t yet found commercial applications. But the progress in recent decades is objectively incredible.

We are reaching a point where all games are basically falling to AI. Go, no-limit hold ‘em (poker), StarCraft, Dota, and so on.

In other domains, we have GPT-3 and AlphaFold. And I’m sure there are many developments I’m not aware of.

From what I can tell, GPT-3 is mainly significant for challenging that notion that increased scale can’t be the primary factor in a significant AI developments. The jury is still out, but
my understanding is that it demonstrated that modest tweaks to existing algorithms with a massive increase in model size can result large performance improvements. GPT-3 had quite limited “memory”, which is one of the reasons it struggled with coherency. How would a model 10x - 100x larger than GPT-3 with a significantly enhanced memory perform? What if it was trained to predict the next frame in video in addition to the next sequence of text blobs?

No one knows how close we are. It will likely happen quickly without many people knowing it is coming soon. It will seem “impossible” to most even as the last few pieces are falling in place. Major technological paradigm shifts usually happen unexpectedly, as history shows us.

I’m rambling a bit (If I had more time / skill I would have written a shorter comment ;). Suffice to say I’m surprised by the number of confident proclamations against AGI. Our brains are amazing. But they aren’t magic.
I enjoyed the Cracked article from way, way back when. (#5 at [1]).

> Eventually the rivets shot out of the tank, unleashing a 15-foot tall tidal wave that covered Boston, providing residents with a valuable look at what a melted Stay-Puft would have really done to New York at the end of Ghostbusters.

[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_141_6-natural-disasters-that...
The first person I ever saw laid out on the ground during a fire had been sleeping in an apartment building which had only one exit, at one end of the building. The fire-escape stairs on the other end was missing, and the door bolted so it would not open.

The fire was raging near the only stairway. It was the only access firemen had. The young kid was dead.

"Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason" is a complete idiot.
If a simulated brain would be even remotely comparable to a human brain in terms of computation it would be immediately the smartest thing on the planet simply by virtue of having immediate or near immediate access to all recorded knowledge.

But we might not need to simulate anything..

In the end it’s quite possible that AGI would end up being brains in vats with some machine brain interface for IO.

I literally might be more cost effective to do it this way.

And this is what people that dismiss AGI often miss. They assume the advancement would only come from one place and that programming would be the only way to solve the problem.

Analogue computers are making a comeback in many areas, and an analogue computer for an AGI might just be a bunch of brain tissue rather than some neuromorphic chips or some other nonsense.

If we get to a point in which we can clone meat for food and organs for transplant making a brain isn’t out of the realm of possibility if we can get BMIs working then a lot of the problems might be solved by just leveraging existing solutions already.
Given a 40 hour workweek constraint, the opportunity cost might be negative. I'm sure DoorDash has Design/Product/Research departments who would get more out of doing this anyway.
When I was in school in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of stigma around ADD/ADHD. Kids taking ritalin were ostracized for it. It was common for parents to refuse the possibility and instead punish their children. A lot of kids grew up and went on to adulthood on hard mode thinking they were just bad at life, never realizing there was a diagnosis and _treatment_ they'd been denied.
Oh, for sure. And for day to day, treatment helps, but long-term I either am into it or not.
Or, perhaps more likely, sowing the seeds for humanities demise by enabling the existence of YouTube/TikTok et al.
I've seen this happen to people and I'm guessing they're running into bugs. I have multiple open projects at once and it works amazingly well with rather huge projects. It's smarter than any IDE I used.

The one problem is that the UI is a bit out of date because of Swing. Fleet is solving that problem.
Exactly this. I had the misfortune of experiencing TSA security recently and it's still 99% bullshit security theatre from the 9/11 era. Covid stuff was just a sideshow.
There’s no such thing and that’s the problem. It’s like saying there’s a perfect tool. Sometimes I need a hammer, sometimes a saw, sometimes a screwdriver.
Rare pink handfish spotted for first time in 22 years, off coast of Tasmania
That building complex at 10:50 is huge.
This kind of brings the question should this kind of visa scheme exist in the first place during Covid. From my very limited knowledge, these are just pledges, not actual investments. Given a) NZ tiny market, b) high corporate tax rate, and c) isolation as an Oceania island (shipping), would it make sense to invest in NZ right now? My bet is that they expect Covid to end in the next 1-2 years and all these rich people will leave. These new residents are simply taking advantage of this visa scheme and not actually long term residents. That’s just my 2 cents and I may be wrong.
A he that was a they before it was cool.
I wrote plugins for most IDEs including JetBrains. If you hold the EDT they block your plugin. There's no way a core plugin allows that. I'm guessing this is some other bug, did you file an issue with your logs?

Did you ask in their developer slack group?

They are VERY responsive.
The Star – Arthur C. Clarke (1967) [pdf]
> there isn't an aspect of computing that hasn't been improved by F(L)OSS

Mmmm.. I'd have to disagree, based on my professional experience. FLOSS hasn't really improved business software. User interfaces, Groupware, Enterprise software, Tax software, Government software, Industrial software, Telecom, POS, EHR, etc. It's hardly ever written as FLOSS because it takes a lot of time and effort, and devs don't find it rewarding to write that stuff in their free time (most OSS is written because the developer just needed that code). When there is a FLOSS solution, it's not an improvement over the proprietary alternative.

Even in "IT", there is a huge dearth of quality FLOSS used to build... anything. There's lots of one-off projects that are good for one thing or another, but very few large robust solutions, and components never seem to mix together unless they have "custom integrations" to tie them to other systems. Microsoft will forever be the king of Enterprise software integration and business productivity tools, and each industry has its own "business software" titan. SaaS and PaaS are also more closed-source than open.

When there is some FLOSS that does something difficult like video rendering, or running distributed applications, the entire industry uses it. But for the bulk of the business world's needs, often the only solutions are proprietary.
This kind of nationalism is way more "religious" than wanting to wear a headscarf. Between one person who wants to dress in a certain way and another person who wants to control how a large number of other people dress because they perceive it as a threat to their ideology, who is more extreme?
It's not hard. It's often impossible. Even when it's boring but super, super important. And even worse, they KNOW it's super, super important but their brain CAN'T DO IT. Even when it sometimes causes severe problems or issues for them - until it hits panic mode, then the adrenaline can make it possible. But often that is too late.
> It is critical to expose workers to the problems that their customers experience, but if this is the only way to do it, then you have multiple failures in how your organization is structured.

Maybe, but direct feedback is incredibly insightful and worth it's weight in gold when time to market and product market fit are critical to the operation's survival: startup v Corp World.

> But the number of product managers that take this part of the job seriously is abysmally...

It really is, stepping into the Corp World starting from a bootstrapping co-founder position) was a total culture shock!

Moreover, the lack of clarity and vision is toxic to a Team's overall productivity, coupled with the fact that the they are likely the one with the most TC it's hard to rationalize the drudgery that it becomes--it's less optimization of stand out core functionality, and more adding needless features and bug testing busy work to suit a PM's 'roadmap to success' they think will lead to the next rung on the corporate ladder.

I can't think of a worst way top operate, actually.
Why is it always the responsibility of everyone except the people running the business to come up with a business model for them?
Last I checked, demanding didn't do jack. Not unless it has leverage.
Making someone with ADHD inhabit an open plan office is cruel and unusual punishment. Hell, it is so for any knowledge work without ADHD. That has been known ever since the Peopleware book came out so many years ago. Let these folks work at home.
You will LOVE Fleet. It looks like VSCode, loads faster than it... Yet you can activate "smart mode" which is the full power of IntelliJ. Pretty cool. Still early so a lot of things aren't there yet but I think it will be a huge deal.
one possible answer: the people in government tasked with minding such things believe (I think correctly) that the [fill in the blank]/industrial complexes at the heart of their operations are about as close to AGI as we're likely to get for some time, barring unforeseen advances

in other words the AGI that matters in the near term has humans at the core of the loop
These are mentioned piecemeal in other comments, but this refers to four other similar incidents, all with varying levels of goofy horror:

- Dublin whiskey fire
- Great Molasses Flood
- Honolulu molasses spill
- Pepsi Fruit Juice Flood
Yes it is a good deal. This is manufactured outrage.
Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter – PNAS
So the funny thing is, when I saw that problem description, my first thought was: "oh, that's what mkdir -p does; I wonder if it would be easier to just shell out to that than try and implement it yourself". I grant that that implementation is a massive SQL-injection-like vulnerability, but I'm still not 100% convinced that the basic impulse is wrong; I can easily imagine an alternate universe where the second half of this blog post is talking about how someone wrote it themselves and introduced some subtle bug that the coreutils folks fixed 20 years ago and everyone else has to painfully rediscover. I wonder if any of the major implementations are friendly to being used as a library? Obviously then you have to deal with licensing issues, which is a catch. Maybe fork+exec? I dunno, I'm just trying to feel out whether there's a middle ground between system() and rewriting functionality that someone else has written and that's been used by a billion other users for decades.
This isn’t what’s happening. Everyone trying to enter the country has to go through the MIQ system, regardless of whether they’re a citizen, have one of these visas, or any other type of visa.
One of the worst cases of ADHD I've personally seen was from someone from Bulgaria. I have neighbors who have it who are Russian.

The difference is, in those cultures you just 'try harder' or drink yourself into a stupor/early death if you can't fit in. The US at least gives folks options.
We actually had companies who were happy to use it to track/ticket complaints. For context, complaining on FB is really common here because it works, but it looks bad to have all these angry public complaints. You might want to look at that angle when pitching to banks - just screenshot complaints on social media, especially those that aren't tracked.

Though for us, it's was probably that it wasn't profitable enough and there's another angle that was a burning problem for them. Social media is a surprisingly good platform as reacts are a better gauge of emotion than upvotes.
Everyone forgets things, but amnesia is still a distinct condition. Everyone has times when they're less motivated, but it isn't depression. Everyone bleeds when cut, but that's not the same as hemophilia. Everyone has headaches, but that's not the same as being prone to migraines.

In all of these cases, the key practical difference is in the extent and impact of the issue. Is the trouble focusing on boring tasks something that's annoying but manageable, or does it get in the way of finishing school or holding down a job?

Physical issues often have a known mechanism that exacerbates the problem. We don't have a great understanding of mechanisms behind most mental health issues at the moment, so both diagnosis and treatment are based on symptoms. I understand there's research showing that ADHD is highly heritable and related to specific structural differences in the brain; I'm not sure how strong the evidence is, but it definitely points to some mechanism behind the condition.
I might not mind talking to computers if they could understand me and there was an easy to use list of words to use. I can't easily process the recordings telling me what to say for X; not sure why, but it's easier to push a number for a topic from a list; part of it is you can expect to interrupt the prompt by pushing buttons, but I don't expect to talk over a prompt (and if I do, I dunno if it will hear me anyway)
My understanding of these schemes is that they are generally designed for rich people who accumulated wealth in countries where they might like to have a backup option if their government gets in a particularly seize-y mood. (e.g. China or Russia)
It does the task properly and effectively just not most efficient. Unfortunately no other IDE comes close to it features/polish so we have to live with it inefficiencies.
A HN comment turned me onto this podcast several years ago and its one of the ones that has endured and is part of my regular rotation. The hosts present and comment on the coverage of various current events in the broadcast press. Because so much of current events is political, there are plenty of opportunities to quibble regarding opinion and some people get annoyed at their style that lampoons the morning zoo formay. But, I get value from their aggregation and analysis, since I don't own a TV and am kind of insulated from the day-to-day press narrative.

So as to not post again in the thread, Le Show by Harry Schearer is a political satire radio show from a man who used to voice a ton of characters for The Simpsons. Hes been doing his show for over 30 years and its still very entertaining. I have listened to it for the majority of my life, when it used to broadcast on the radio (it still does). Give it a listen!

https://www.wwno.org/show/le-show
I live in an apartment with 2 staircases, an elevator, and a fire escape. Several months ago, there was a fire in a first floor apartment that blocked me from using ALL of them, via either unbreathable smoke or flames. I ended up just hiding in my room until the fire department dealt with it. I'm not sure whether this argues for more staircases or fewer.

(In hindsight I did have other options, but this was my first fire and I didn't know what to do.)
That's the problem. Agencies use this vague, meaningless language when what you really need to understand the implications and scrutinize them are the sordid technical details.
Municipalities in USA are adopting code for residential new construction to require sprinklers. Big cost that most people won't do anything to stop it because it is only for really big houses (for now).
In fifteen years people will wonder why new housing is so expensive and every size house has sprinklers which the homeowner must hire someone to maintain. And pay for sprinkler inspection report prior to resale.

On a totally different note, I can't find any cheap or affordable new cars. Am looking for basic wheels without finicky gadgets like backup cameras and tire pressure monitors and lane departure warnings. Something simple and without high insurance costs to cover all those gadgets I don't need.

I wonder why things (house, car) seem unaffordable and contain gadgets which are difficult to fix and which increase insurance costs. What happened America?
Being on the 7th story is very different from being on the 2nd story. If the staircase was to catch fire right now it'd be like a 6 meter jump down the window, maybe less if I manage to lower myself by hanging off the edge. I can land on my legs and I'd risk breaking an ankle or something like that at worst, not ideal but I wouldn't burn to death.
Microsoft has blacklists the entirety of Digital Ocean and won't whitelist any IPs, even if it's a legit mail server. If I didn't know better, I would say that's anticompetitive behavior.
Eh, the topic is broad. The real question is: where does it make sense for society to put resources to prevent premature death?

One option is staircases (aimed at reducing mass casualty events in fires). There are other options to improve fire safety. There are other options to improve safety in other circumstances.

Perhaps with the costs of second staircases, there are things we could do to buildings for less money that would save more lives from fire. Should we do both? Just the cheaper one? Neither?

How do we decide which ones are justified for their cost, and which ones aren't? Who should bear these costs? What things should be grandfathered and have a slow transition towards higher safety? What things should be immediately improved?

The answer to the staircase question comes down to how we answer questions like this. And the fact that we may be tolerating much bigger risks is definitely an interesting point.
That settlement got thrown out the other day. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/16/1065047471/judge-rejects-purd...
The day Brezhnev died it was really cold in Vilnius. The school was out and we went tobogganing.

I (b. 1973) lived in Vilnius from 1980 to 1986 and after I moved to the central Russia I noticed how much better it was in Lithuania. The food, the clothes, the people, everything had more color in it. I was really surprised how much poorer and bleaker the life was in RSFSR, at least in the part where I lived later.

Despite being a part of the USSR, Baltic republics felt more civilized and modern. Many tourists from the rest of the country enjoyed visiting to get the glimpses of the West.
It really hurts your credibility when you mix up distinct Soviet eras.

The Gulag system began to be dismantled immediately upon Stalin's death and was fully dismantled by 1960.
the way we currently live in urban areas doesn't work either when you account for climate change.
There are a couple of language features in Python that I thought were cool when I discovered them, but actually have never ever find a need for them in my code. The first is using an "else" clause in a "for" loop, and the second is returning a value from a generator. Curious whether anybody actually uses either of those.
Huh, interesting. I haven’t heard that theory before. I’ll think about that / try to read about it.
The programmers are in a position of power over the delivery drivers, through the power of their code.

Making the programmers do the delivery driving themselves can help them to identify with those over whom they exercise power.

Not really though because the cash stakes aren't real.
No I did not, and my doctor felt I was rather healthy.

Funny story though, I was rather heavy and a regular blood donor. One of the things they do here when you donate (or used to) was test your cholesterol level and report it back to you in the mail. Mine was always in the "good" range. So I got a call one day from the hospital where I normally donate (it is a research hospital) asking if I would be interested in taking part in a study and I agreed. When I went in for the interview it turns out they were looking for fat people with low cholesterol. They paid me $50 to participate which consisted of a blood test and a notebook. They asked me to write down everything I ate for a week, then came back, got another blood test and another notebook. They looked at what I wrote in the first notebook, asked me to add a couple of things which were different vegetables as I recall. Then sent me on my way for another week. End of the week turn in my second notebook and collect my $50.

The first question from the grad student who collected my first notebook was, "Did you really drink this much soda this week?", answer yes. Second time I turned in my notebook he looked at me and said "You drink this much EVERY week?" and I said "Yup, pretty much."

He was surprised I could sleep at night with that much caffeine but it wasn't a problem for me.
>> why should people feel happy about living under an oppressive system

Because its the only system they know, and they've been told forever its the best system there is.

For example;
There exists a system where basic health issues can bankrupt you, where the police are above the law, where citizens can, and do, buy machine guns, where the courts are setup to protect the rich and powerful, where politicians can lie without consequence, that separates immigrant children (babies) from parents (and then has no way to reunite them), that has jailed over 1% of its population. Where people get no paid sick or holiday leave.

Why would people feel happy about living under this oppressive system?

Now you probably had some strong reactions to the question. And therein lies your answer. People everywhere, regardless of the system, believe what they are taught to belive, and they are taught that their existing way is the best.
I don't see why using a combination of risk of fleeing and risk of reoffending to decide on release would be out of line.

I don't think much of appealing to definitions, which it sounds like you are doing - this is what bail is, so this is what bail is.

However, if the DA has less control over the decision, that doesn't seem obviously bad to me? And making bad decisions doesn't seem like it's inherent in the reforms?
I know the shell injection thing is bad, but would it be so bad to spawn a /bin/mkdir subprocess without a shell?
Something with not entirely the same effect happens in the US but not often to rich white men.
I love these so much. The attention to the detail. Digging in as deep as possible - but making the content accessible. Fantastic stuff. Evokes a lot of "Captain Dissillusion" vibes to me (which is a really, really good thing).
They do it for free...
And there are a ton of other variables. Construction materials, fire response, suppression and alarm systems, the purpose of the building, etc.