skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In moments of peace and plenty when your neighbor is largely right or wrong about matters of trivial import like which version of god to bow before and what sports team to root for it is easy to let your neighbor be wrong.

When both have very strong opinions about matters of vital import both sides have strong motivation to mind their neighbors business. I think that is trivially justifiable on many issues.
Just in case anyone who isn't from the PNW is wondering at the energy and number of replies OP has gotten about this:

Water quality and the salmon-centered river/stream ecosystem is, like, the local environmental thing everyone gets slammed with in school. Your biology class has you go look for arthropods. Your chemistry class has you go test for pH and dissolved oxygen and fertilizer contamination. Way more species (including plants) rely on the salmon than you'd guess but oh boy do you learn about it in a PNW school system.

And on the other side, the history of the dams is the history of the growth of the Northwest -- "your power is turning our darkness to dawn, so roll on, Columbia, roll on" is in the Washington state folk song and it's not even an aberration re: the region's folk songs / culture. ("Skagit Valley, Skagit Valley, / They would turn you to a mud pond / To run the Coca Cola coolers in Seattle, U.S.A.")

I just thought this would be interesting to contribute because I've found people from other regions sometimes have an ambient awareness more on the level of "Um, I guess there are fish in the water? And runoff seems bad?" and that just isn't possible for locals here, so that's why it's all somewhat heightened.
Between self-doers and people that just give their forms to their accountant lie Turbo-tax customers, at the knowledge minimum.
I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle's lectures on the philosophy of mind [1]. He taught a course at UC Berkeley on the subject for many years, and one of the years was recorded and uploaded to Youtube.

He walks through the history of the subject from Descartes onward and spends a lot of time about how philosophers got very excited during the 1960s and 70s as computer science was just taking off because it seemed that at long last we had a new way to explain consciousness. This idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer and consciousness is just doing a certain kind of computation. If we wrote the right program and ran it on a sufficiently powerful computer, we could make other kind of computers conscious as well.

But Searle is most famous for the Chinese Room thought experiment which is (in my opinion) a fairly decisive counterargument against this position. That, along with the What Mary Knew thought experiment and Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat together made the "consciousness is computation" position increasingly untenable.

It took about 40 years, but by the time these lectures were recorded it seems that the tide has really turned among philosophers of mind (Searle has his own biases but he tries to be impartial in explaining all sides). At least among philosophers who specialize in the subject it's hard to find many who seriously believe that a GPU running Resnet is conscious.

Obviously there's a whole semester's worth of material in those lectures and the arguments can't really be summed up in an HN comment, but anyone who is interested in thinking about these questions should really give the whole course a listen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko
For hackaday links almost always

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

applies.

Also, this is a dupe, since the original had already been submitted (by the author in this case): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128379
I would say the Democrats were making it up if the USA were the only country experiencing this pandemic. Unfortunately, I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus and it would disappear two weeks after Biden was elected.
Is there a good virtualbox/vm of these yet?
> The government here (Spain) knows the money I make just as any government knows about its citizens.

The problem the IRS is trying to solve is collecting taxes on money they don't know about. For example, if you sell illegal drugs, you should be paying tax on that income. But obviously you don't report to the government the amount of illegal drugs you sell. So they can't just send you a bill for your taxes.

It is odd that every American has to suffer for this obscure corner case, but they probably lose a lot of revenue if they stop taxing drug dealers, so here we are.
From your original post:

> wholesale theft of art assets

Curious what you think the difference is?

Music, sounds, and other art assets are trivially copied but you don't seem to be OK with that.

What's different to you about the specific combination of numbers that makes Mario's movement fun vs. the specific combination of 3 notes and rhythm that makes the bassline from Psycho Killer catchy?
AFAIK Navalny is pretty irrelevant in Russia itself, he's much bigger in the West.

Also I don't think that unrest in Kazakhstan was anti-Russian, the old dictator was actually moving away from the Russian sphere of influence.
In the USA the government also knows the money you make. They have all the data they need to be able to generate a pre-filled draft, and taxpayers could use that as a starting point and modify it if they needed to take a large tax credit for installing solar panels, or some other such thing which the government doesn't necessarily know about.

But it's against the law. The law specifically prohibits the tax agency (IRS) from providing pre-filled tax forms for taxpayers. Why? Who knows... I can't read the minds of Senate and House members! But I'd very confidently place a bet that it's entirely because of careful lobbying by the two companies (Intuit and H&R Block) who make large amounts of money off the current system.

References:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22596072/irs-turbota...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you...
I Switched to Lite After Using Visual Studio Code for 3 Years (2021)
Tesla software updates allow quick fixes – and taking risks
So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns question - let me try to answer that specific question:

For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn't return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.

The simple answer for why the tax firms didn't work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.

The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.

The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).

TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI/UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI/UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.

And that's the ultimate answer to the OP's question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it's certainly not the most expensive either - and if you're looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it's hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).
Remember there are boomers still paying other boomers 100-1000s of dollars to prepare their taxes for them. That and regulatory capture.
Learning from failure can be a luxury. Poor people can't afford to fail, and rich people can fail constantly, and still succeed. Nobody ends up learning anything.
They lost our business about five years ago because of them
I wonder if there are other interesting things going on with a desire for safety. The language used of "hurt" and "healing" in some of the press conferences and the lawsuit makes it seem like the feelings police are in charge in Canada and they're going to make sure you're happy:
https://youtu.be/wZK5ixf4o7Q?t=699

In this interview with a resident of the downtown area who seems to have had to initiate legal injunctions while the police and apparently all the city authorities did nothing I am torn between sympathy for someone being inconvenienced and a sneaking feeling that an unpleasant situation is being exaggerated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G86OL0YyHw

I was watching those after listening to the excellent Bungacast which tries to dissect the recent use of "trauma studies" to understand the evolution of the neo-liberal state under its most recent pressures https://bungacast.com/2021/12/14/231-new-class-analysis-ft-c...

Canada does not seem as though its ready to deal very minor, low-level political dissent and is incompetently defaulting to maximum authoritarianism.

Latest news seems to be that a woman was trampled and seriously injured by a police horse.
I respect your opinion, but couldn't disagree more. I hope the printed book never goes away.
For hackaday links almost always

> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

applies.

Also, this is a dupe, since the original had already been submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28614840
IIT is a nice intuition pump, but it's missing essential parts. Consciousness should be related to survival, replication of information and its own energy costs. It's not just some integrated information for no purpose at all. The purpose is survival if it is conscious.

If you add that to IIT, then you suddenly get a new filter for what could be conscious - something that competes for information replication, not just something with high IIT score.
The last time I used it, I don't recall seeing the "DNA" nonsense, or being able to get a list of characteristics that they used to build a station around... It's possible that the interface simply changed and I didn't look hard enough for it though.
> In late January, Dyba, working on contract with a tech company on the West Coast, sent out a mass blast on LinkedIn...

Well that doesn't help. Too many lazy recruiters just sending messages using keyword searches.
> If there's a deep conspiracy where these companies are lying about what they are doing, that would be news worthy of course. But, I suspect that most of these companies are simply getting very good at managing absurdly high degrees of energy and water efficiency and cost.

Believing in a deep conspiracy is probably violating Occam's razor, but I think believing in companies getting very good at gaming metrics and regulators not finding it in their interest to look too closely at positive results on metrics doesn't require too much conspiratorial thinking—everyone's happy in the short term.
Verbosity is not substance.

‘If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself’
That was my point.

They know the money you make, they can make it free and easy but they don't want to cut the middleman.
Things You Never Knew About the Myers-Briggs Test
+1 for Permutation City. Greg Egan is great.

I suspect that people who like Permutation City may also like Glasshouse by Charles Stross.
Replace the minimum wage with an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.
It has the benefits of getting people enough money to live without significantly distorting the labor market. And it's more politically expedient than guaranteed minimum income.
I interviewed Pablo, the founder of this project, for my podcast - he's a super interesting guy and I'm going to plug the link!

https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/
By all means, regale away!
That's the problem. The neural net can't reflect on itself because it doesn't have a body and an environment to act in. It should be able to experience consequences of previous actions to close the loop on itself.
The question devolves on that big "IF".

Russia will NOT invade unless it is forced to. Even the Ukrainians have said that there are no indications of that.

An invasion is costly. Follow the money. What does it profit Russia to invade a piss-pot, bankrupt country like Ukraine that would be a constant drain on Russian coffers? Apart from the constant insurgent shit like happened to the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Land? Russia has more land area and fewer people to work it than most. Extra land would be like a hole in the head for Russians.

Resources? What resources does Ukraine have that Russia doesn't already have more of?

Prestige? What prestige does anybody get from getting a ruin that costs more that it would give back? That's like spending up big on a derelict house in Detroit and expecting to make a profit on flipping it.
I would hope most people regard consciousness as something which can beg compassion, tolerance or compromise for other consciousnesses sakes. Common creatures we know express suffering and to be amused or unaffected by suffering of others is most widely considered as pathological or psychotic. Without consciousness there is no suffering, no cause for compassion etc. Something may be incredibly complex, suggesting it has value in a world - perhaps to other creatures or the world itself somehow. But being a complex thing does not suggest that it can suffer or enjoy experiences. An idea that an experiential importance of things simply accompanies sufficient complexity seems 'pie in the sand'
About that quote where someone did not feel they had enough energy in the tank, the hiring process is energy intensive. I wouldn't want to go through it unless I was really considering to leave already.
I was talking about walking - for biking, I was taught to ride with traffic.
As far as I'm aware, Navalny succeeded in a loophole that didn't caught the eye of the government with 'Smart Voting'. Which made him "internal enemy #1" at the time, as it wasn't a vote "for a particular political party", but against the current one.

https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-regional-elections-br...

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-09-14/explai... (first google result i could find) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Voting

Concerning Kazakhstan, I didn't say the unrest was anti-Russian, though I see why it could be misinterpreted. I think Russia jumped in to affirm that it's useful to have them as an 'ally'. At least that was my gist of it. But I didn't follow that in detail.

https://www.economist.com/asia/kazakhstans-president-vows-to...

Edit: Fixed an error about Smart Voting.
Drastic had its own, recently open-sourced, reimplementation of the BIOS which claimed to be clean-room.
> I don't necessarily think removing the dams would improve anything for anyone at this point

It's early days yet, but at least on the Elwha some of the signs are very promising: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-el...
The self fulfilling prophecy aspect of speculative trading is often one of the first thing a trader notices.

Now I really wonder if that's not a necessity of semi chaotic systems. A predictable game has no gain to offer, a fully chaotic game is unplayable.. the players will settle on a few emergent patterns to create a form of ladder.
Again, this is kind of a mind virus, a "scissor statement" in Scott Alexander's words [0]. People have strong opinions on this, even if they have no idea on actual important open questions in AI/deep learning/ML etc. (or even just how the state of the art works). I'm not claiming that Sutskever has no deep knowledge, I know who he is! My point is that these conversations are just like the "what color is this dress?" and "is a hotdog a sandwich?" viral topics, where everyone feels addressed and think the "other side" is obviously wrong.

Now this consciousness "debate" is all over my Twitter feed and most of it is low-effort memes, half-baked thoughts, etc. Well, that's Twitter for ya, anyway... Maybe I should have said "don't read Twitter". But actually sometimes people link to interesting new papers and projects, or open positions, informative stuff. But there is a lot of circular, self-referential circlejerking.

Nobody knows what's consciousness, and most people who talk about it are either pushing buttons of the AI Twitter hivemind or have nothing more important to discuss.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
> Furthermore, nobody has come up with any conclusive evidence that the statement is incorrect

What would such evidence even look like?
One other addition I'd put on this list is Milton Glaser's talk "What I have learned", delivered on November 11, 2001, in London. Copies of it are floating around.
Right, I have a low probability belief that a random human won’t have a brain in their head.

But in principle, I could open someone’s skull and look for a brain. How would I examine another human body for consciousness?
Is he the guy who is responsible for distributing the bitcoin?

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=2022-02-14-2
I wonder how much lower it would be if data centers strictly ran on ARM cpus. Sure there are plenty other components and factors that come into play but it would be interesting to look at such a graph nonetheless.
those who used credit karma previously for taxes will this year be prompted to use cash app

it's free, yeah
The best thing if you want to do something nefarious is to join a state actor.

Anything else and either your crimes are small enough or you won't have protection.
In the late 90s I remember being advised to always use an anonymous handle by my older privacy and security conscious friends. I don't think that Raymond's advice was widely accepted.
Based on the uniforms mentioned, this was written between 2008-2011. There's some other clues as well, CD players, PS3, etc.

Although, I wouldn't doubt that it's "current".
> in a limited fashion.

With the proviso that everything human is subject to limitation, I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept. An only marginally curtailed tribalism doesn’t resemble English Common Law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention etc, even in their imperfect implementations. We can do better and sure as heck don’t need to backslide.
Sounds an awful lot like privacy:

1. the state of being apart from other people or concealed from their view; solitude; seclusion

2. the state of being free from unwanted or undue intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs; freedom to be let alone

I don't draw a distinction between "your house" and "your data." Whatever your rational for having those barriers - that's your decision, right? Just because other people enjoy living on communes doesn't make it any less absurd for a country to outlaw locks on doors (or e2e chat apps...). Taken even further, people tend to do horrific things (sexual &/or domestic abuse) behind locked doors. But plenty of other people, like you & me, tend to sleep better behind them.
Almost every post here explicitly distinguishes "Artificial
Intelligence" from machine learning and advanced statistics, or at
least avoids clumsily confusing the puff of marketing with what we
really do as computer scientists. We all know better here, right?

So why don't we robustly challenge it?

As with the word "hacker" - which we've somewhat reclaimed - the fact
that a misuse has entered common circulation is not sufficient reason
to shrug and accept.

Next time a marketing, media or recruitment type uses the words
"AI". please take a moment and a little courage to politely correct
them.

If "AI" stays in Hollywood where it belongs it'll help ensure these
emotive brouhahas are less common and we can get on with creating
actual social value from code.
Christian Democracy
Was it Fred Brooks or John Mashey who said we should classify CPUs by register size (so the 68000 is a 32-bit CPU on the grounds IIRC that, to software, the 16-bit ALU and data bus are implementation details)?
IME Discord anonymity is more like ‘your friends know it’s you, but strangers can’t find out your real identity’. But I agree, they could do with a profile switcher.
Covid isn't "a flu" and 1% mortality rate combined with very high permissibility in a disease that hospitalizes more like 10% of naive hosts and often keeps people in the hospital for weeks or even months is on net potentially disastrous because it had the potential to trivially overwhelm our health care resources leaving us with a mortality rate that would have included many of the 9% who would survive with hospitalization but not without.

This is why people especially in 2020 were freaking out. Not JUST the 3M we projected we might lose letting it run through us but the effect if it were to crash our health care system.

Please don't make throwaways to post covid misinformation here that you wouldn't post on your main account.
the cynic in me thinks:
You mean walled gardens of monopolies governed by AI get it wrong? No!

These companies have like 0.002% good jobs filled by good programmers who launch products that are usually copies off whatever the community has worked out already is a good idea. Kinda like the car companies, and big movie companies who all seem to be creating a *flix oreitated studio now. These products get "innovated" out (of usually some small startup they can easily swallow) to be refined and honed by an army of low skilled workers who churn it out. Your monolopies protect your own incompetence.

Sure there are exceptions to the rule; but i can also imagine the talent who built these tools is long gone and they are being used by a bunch of comparative armatures who the company is more then happy to let fumble with because monopoly.
You can't but that doesn't change the mechanism of arriving at beliefs. You yourself can also never physically check say Plato's skull either but I doubt that deters you from thinking he had a brain.
Of course they do.
On top of being OSS and easier to inspect and analyse, Linux is less likely to be a target, there is no online account connected to your system account

Living in the rainforest is an extra step to get outside of spying jurisdictions.
As long as something doesn't eat you.