skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Finding 500 exact bytes

But they're not finding exact bytes, they're finding something that very vaguely looks like something very vague. It also helps a lot that it's a face and human brains are very good at identifying faces.

The number of 500 bytes that would "look like" waldo is a lot higher than 1.
Earendel: Hubble telescope's distant star discovery gets a Tolkien-inspired name
Would that actually work, though, or would it just cook itself?

I think the general question to ask is, for a given organism or machine, at what point does it stop being cost effective to make it smarter? Nature doesn't just keep human intelligence at the level it currently is, it's doing so for all other organisms. There seems to be tradeoffs. Which ones would apply to AI? And which ones are not currently relevant but will apply to future AI?

For example, AI has no physical predators currently, but you could imagine a future where they do, or where nanobots or special bacteria attack silicon. In such a future, it is possible that very intelligent AI would suddenly become uncompetitive, relative to dumber and leaner ones. Viable superintelligent AI might then turn out to be just as difficult or circumstantial to "evolve" as humans were.
When I take my cat to the vet I get upfront estimates.

When I take myself to the doctor no one can tell me how much anything costs.

Regardless of insurance status the vet gets paid the same amount.

My pets get better healthcare then I do and I pay less for it and they don’t have insurance. I’m relatively healthy, my cat has FIV. I have insurance my pets don’t.
Bank of America exec on return-to-office plan: ‘We’re a work-from-work company’
Blender's not really used at the high-end facilities... It doesn't really scale that well on large scenes, and only had a Python3 API - VFX studios have only really moved to Python 3 this year.
I'm not sure I want to be the last human working.
> A lot of people find it credible that a hugely complex fast computer system could be intelligent.

But not John Searle...so it seems clear that scale has nothing to do with the thought experiment. For Searle, a vast room or an army of people to carry out instructions make no difference.

> Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t

The people who read the thought experiment this way don't understand it. In the thought experiment neither the computer program (no matter how powerful the computer is) nor the man and the room understand Chinese.

> But the only difference between them is scale.

No, the point of putting a man in the room is that we all agree that a human is capable of understanding. From his vantage point in the room, he can see that the program works by executing instructions without any understanding. All the room does is demystify a hypothetical computer program that can pass a turing test.

Searle is not arguing that a machine with understanding/consciousness is impossible. He's arguing against behavioralism ("if it can pass a turing test it understands"). He take the psychological phenomenon of "understanding" (something we're all familiar with) seriously, he thinks it represents a real thing, and that a computer that can pass a turing test doesn't necessarily have it.
Samsung details how its TVs will become NFT gateways
Engineering Metrics: 12 Pitfalls
I'd prefer responsible or accountable for to blame, personally, but blame has a way of really getting you to zero in on the important-to-the-business aspect. The stuff people will be mad about if it fails!

So if you come up with an idea nobody else had thought of, and you convince the company to spend millions or more on it in engineer-time-dollars, and it ends up being a total waste: yeah, you might have some questions to answer. There's a difference between doing something nobody else thought of and doing the right thing nobody else thought of, and the more you're responsible for in a company, the more that falls on you if you either keep getting it wrong or get it wrong once in a sufficiently-spectacular fashion. (There are nuances here of course depending on how you sold it to people, just how much everyone was aware of the risk of failure, etc... but it's important to remember freedom to experiment and take risks is different than freedom to do whatever you want.)

(There are certainly places where cushy titles can be sinecures, but whether or not that's the case is going to vary greatly depending on the company and their positioning and needs.)
I think the idea of having a bot that does this is interesting, and worthy of discussion, with interesting arguments on both sides.

But what’s really incredible here is how poorly this bot was coded. I cannot imagine writing something this terribly implemented and obviously poorly tested and setting it loose via automated bot upon the world.
No it's not. Searle is explicitly not a dualist.
Can someone explain to me where the palette is defined? If it's not in the bytes of waldo.gif, is it provided by the website itself? If I save the gif file, I still see it as the same on my computer. Is it not true that the bytes of the gif actually 100% match the bytes of pi? Is there some extra metadata not included in the bytes of the file itself? If I were to send those bytes over the wire and save them to a file, would it look different?
For those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29056847
Other places where it is useless is when your neighbours move in bringing dodgy out-of-spec 5g and 2.4ghz wireless trash like baby monitors or "Security cams" that smash the entire spectrum.

I've had another neighbour buy a wireless landline from China that was because "sometimes the phone would crackle, and i hated that" meanwhile it would bring every 5ghz wifi network to its knees when she was taking a phone call.

So, there are other cases, maybe this is a bit more prevalent in countries closer to those with lax spectrum laws.
Sure - the article is written in the language and tone of a 9th grader. It’s a trite approach and although I get the mass appeal perhaps, it’s rather boring.
https://archive.ph/pmoOb
Maya (modelling,UVing,layout,anim,rigging), Houdini (everything these days, but simulation/layout strongly), Nuke (compositing), Katana (scene management and rendering/lighting), Mari (texture painting).

Most packages (other than things like ZBrush) have Linux versions. Some packages originally were Linux only (Mari - although it had a Mac version at Weta that was discontinued for a bit and then brought back to life in 2013) and Katana (now has a Windows version).

Most of the commercial production VFX/CG renderers (Renderman, Arnold, VRay) have linux versions, and some of the proprietary ones (Manuka, Hyperion - I think?) are Linux only (only need to be used by the studio themselves).
Meanwhile in Canada https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/24203995/81-st-johns-rd-t...
Browser engineers are expensive. And we need a lot of those. And before leaving their current well paying job, they need the insurance that a potential people-funded contract won't die off after 2 years.

Hard.
we've been unable to design human-powered systems that reliably value human well-being. hell, humans don't even reliably value human well-being. why do you think any agi or agi-based system we design might be different?

one would expect that initially, agi will simply act in the existing role we have already established for artificial persons - the corporation, notably uninterested in human well-being.
Largest Bay Area Employers
> I've done my best to explain it to you, literally multiple hours of my day writing these comments.

Not the op, but wanted to express appreciation here. I read all your comments and feel like I gained a lot of clarity and insight from them. Would love to read your blog if you had one.
I thought this was the second, not the third.
Those neurons firing while imagining are material, yes.
Luddites get panned today as just being reflexively anti-technology, but they were acting in their self-interest: they were the textile workers whose expertise and careers were threatened by machines. They lost their livelihoods.

It's possible there were alternative outcomes where everyone won. A more fair society could have found a way to make sure the replaced textile workers benefited from the machines that replaced them.

If we make machines that replace all of our economic roles, then it's possible we could make it so we benefit too, but with AGI it's not nearly enough to just choose to use it that way. AGI will not be aligned with our values if we don't make it that way. If we solve the alignment problem, then we would be able to make AGI that shares our values. AGI could solve our problems, or uplift us to its level, if we accomplish this. But this is not the default outcome if we don't solve the alignment problem.
All of the things you're asking for hold the whole process to a higher standard than the standard. That's kind of the point of the disagreement in the electorate: some people think there's a rigid framework of rules, the rest understand this was a Cold War infrastructure designed around the ability to wage clandestine warfare (and the President, and his advisors, are the final arbiters on whether it's working).

... it's not designed to tie the hands of the President or his advisors on the question of how to preserve state secrets.
Quantifying individual engineer output - lines of code, etc - has many well-known problems.

Quantifying impact of mentorship, technical leadership, management inherits all those problems and then adds new confounding factors in on top of it!

Quantifying business metrics changing is usually going to be misleading at best short of for, say, a CTO, and even then it's gonna also depend on product, sales, marketing, etc.
I'd love to see this done right, The only company I've seen go close was using ubiquity hardware and they had custom engineering work done to make it work well.

I'd -read- the shit out of the book if someone wrote it.
For those who aren't Tolkien readers, Eärendil the Mariner is the name of one of the heroes, who saves the world and and flies off to become a star in the sky. More here: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/E%C3%A4rendil
This all sounds very vague and soft. You either have a clear vision for what you want to do, and how to pay the bills and an exit plan or no amount of wishful thinking will remotely recreate your income.

Escaping, really escaping requires learning survival skills such as how to sell, design activations and projects that customers can be sold on, paying your own money to hire designers, developers, etc.

I wished to escape for years. Then I stopped wishing and started trying to claw my way out. And failed. For years. Then I started building a side project and learned how to sell, hire, present, project manage.

I had to do all that by working twice as hard or more. I recommend closely studying Alan Weiss for the mindset you need to have.

And now I’m almost out but not quite.

The gap in skills is tremendous. You simply cannot learn the key skills you need while working at these companies. Their employement agreements specifically prevent you from developing them.

I recommend organizing something small that forces or requires you to sell, hire a designer, programmer. The goal is not to quit, just a sandbox. Something outside of work, something fun, something you can make a little money on. Do a little three month project that actually requires you to get money from customers.

You will learn more in three months that can enable you to escape than you will learn staying at faaang another five years.

I recently did such a small project, and in three months I have learned almost everything I need to know to run my own business. I did it on the side in a low key way, but it taught me survival skills. Now I’m actively planning my exit.
As we observed in the past four years, the rule of law includes the idea that the guy in the big chair in the Executive has broad, sweeping pardon powers. Including, possibly, an untested authority to self-pardon for criminal activity.

That is rule of law. It's possible for the law itself to be bad, of course.
You're absolutely right. Here's one high-profile example:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/feds-say-bounty-hunter-matthew...
Just implement a carbon tax and stop moralising about energy users, but instead stop subsidising free riding polluters.
> you should get a wired router

What's the difference?
Sadly, the "common sense" solution would be a single email provider -- something provided by the federal government. Alas, sense isn't common in the US: it's up to every state (and, it would appear, county, city, university, etc) to decide.
Evergreen Marine? Isn't this the same company that ran aground in the suez canal? What gives? How would they not prevent this from happening so close to that last huge nightmare, and bottleneck in global shipping?
Forest Management Handbook for Small-Parcel Landowners Released
I do wonder how "normal" human genitalia is compared to the vast majority of the animal kingdom. Though is that simply anthrocentric?
What if we actually generate some form of intelligence, but can't figure out how to motivate it to solve our problems? I mean, we already have intelligent life, but a very small percentage of intelligent biomass can solve important problems, or wants to. Like, great, we created a real-life intelligent tamagotchi, but literally all it wants to do is play go.
Like most things, it depends... and you get what you pay for. If you have an enterprise grade or "prosumer" level access point (Ubiquiti, for example), wifi is solid. If you're using a garbage router/wifi combo, like the ones provided by most ISPs, you're definitely going to have issues.
do you argue against seat belts and epi pens the same way?
I agree and I think we will get there. I see CI/CD as one of several “micro-categories” that no longer makes sense standalone, and will gradually merge into a single mega-category.

Those include, off the top of my head: continuous integration, continuous deployment , configuration management, infrastructure management, PaaS, IT automation.
It's a visual trainwreck on firefox, with elements being blocked by interstitials in the first load that have their dismissal button shifted into a weird and hard to find place. Once that was cleared up it was pretty readable.
You could check out the LCD screens used by mSLA (Resin) 3D printers. They typically work by masking off UV light with an LCD
We'd better hope the first one is created by a reclusive mad scientist with a heart of gold, who forgave everyone who laughed at him.
I think you might have a small typo here:

> by choosing the lowest version specified in any package that depends on a given package

It picks the highest version specified in any of the requirements. (That's the minimal version that simultaneously satisfies each individual requirement, where each individual requirement is saying "I require vX.Y.Z or higher". So if A requires Foo v1.2.3 and B requires Foo v1.2.4, v1.2.4 is selected as the minimal version that satisfies both A and B, and that's true even if v1.2.5 exists).
We need some bookies in this thread. A lot of AGI skeptics could get very rich at the expense of those that are absolutely convinced that AGI/singularity is coming soon. I'm willing to put down 10k that "the singularity" (by some agreed upon definition) will not happen by 2050.
It's really nice that it works so well most of the time, but I tried fixing an annoyance with the wacom kernel driver once and I gave up because that driver is a mess internally.
Yes IDE integration are a great idea and we plan on building those too. What IDE would you personally want to integrate, and what actions would you want it to support?
The image appears to show spirals in the same direction, not "opposite".
With acknowledgement to the palette hack discussed in the other comments, I still think there's a ton of value in this.

So often, people observe patterns in nature that appear to be so unlikely as to be by design. I have family members that are superstitious: if a light flickers at the same time that they mention a recently deceased loved one, it must be "a sign". Similarly, they will point to some overwhelmingly unlikely occurrence in the news, and ask, "how do you explain that?" The answer is usually random chance (if not deceit). And this exercise is a good illustration of that.

"Waldo, in the digits of pi?!? What are the odds??" - To the outsider who is not scientifically minded, this just looks so coincidental as to be magic. But almost any pattern can be found in randomness. It's just that the size of the necessary search space explodes as the query becomes larger / more specific.

The average HN reader knows all this, but the Waldo story is still a cool way to describe it to other people.
I don't know any reference for this - it's something I worked out after hearing about Phistomefel's Theorem from a friend. The idea goes like this:

The standard Linear Programming relaxation of the constraint "the nine variables x_1, ..., x_9 are a permutation of 1, ..., 9" is defined in the following way. First we make real variables p_ij which we think of as representing the "probability" that x_i is equal to j. Each p_ij has to be between 0 and 1, of course, and they have to satisfy the following system of linear equations:

- for each i, the sum over j of p_ij is equal to 1 (since every x_i has to have some value), and

- for each j, the sum over i of p_ij is equal to 1 (since every value from 1, ..., 9 has to show up in the list of x_is somewhere).

The fact that this system of equations, together with the inequalities 0 <= p_ij <= 1, corresponds exactly to the "convex hull" of the constraint that the x_i are a permutation of 1, ..., 9 is a fairly famous early result from the theory of the Linear Programming relaxation of the bipartite matching problem.

To describe the full Linear Programming relaxation of Sudoku, instead of just having 9 variables x_i you have 81 variables x_ab, which leads to 729 real "probability" variables p_abj between 0 and 1, and for each row, column, and square of the Sudoku these probabilities have to satisfy the equations listed above (applied to the relevant variables). That gives you a system of 324 (slightly redundant) linear equations in 729 unknown real variables p_abj, each of which is constrained to be between 0 and 1 - a piece of cake for a computer.

For a human, you don't want to write down that entire system of equations - you want to use just a few of them to quickly figure out some piece of the puzzle. The technique of set equivalence theory does just this: instead of focusing on all of the probabilities p_abj, you just use the fact that the sum of the probabilities p_ab1 along every row/column is 1, and add/subtract the equations you get from some rows and columns to notice that the sum of the p_ab1s for the (ab)s corresponding to the corners is equal to the sum of the p_ab1s for the (ab)s corresponding to the ring around the center. Then you do the same for the 2s, and so on.
> Hi, the government is giving $5000 credits for people to add insulation, blah blah blah.

This is... occasionally a real thing. Drives me nuts that they choose to implement it this way though.
Yes, Dagger can be integrated in a devcontainers workflow. How much or how little is done by Dagger is up to you.
I bought one and for $35 I was not expecting top level security, thus its not pointed at anything important.
This sounds like more work for a worse result than fixing QEMU or Simics.
TreeSize is a good alternative to WizTree now that it also has MFT scanning. It's a bit slower than WizTree but has more relaxed licensing/pricing.
It is selfish, and I would say that is ok. Yes, it might be more altruistic to help someone you have literally no connection to, but perhaps it is more rewarding to help someone near you, who has suffered unfortunate loss or difficulty, achieve a life that is closer to being as fortunate as your own. It's a real understandable difference from helping someone in a different country and a different culture who you can't identify with and will never see.

And yes, it's a little selfish, and I think that's ok.
Wow, thank you for the thorough information!
Quick summary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#United_States

"Defamation law in the United States is much less plaintiff-friendly than its counterparts in European and the Commonwealth countries. A comprehensive discussion of what is and is not libel or slander under United States law is difficult, as the definition differs between different states and is further affected by federal law."

...but, there is such a thing as defamation/libel/slander in US law.
I think the problems above are mostly for new users. Those unfamiliar with their way. But... lots of this is solved via navigation apps and even proper signage.

On there other hand they have a maximum throughput and that can only be alleviated by an interchange --even modest ones.
There's no proof that humans have hit any such limits. But that's not how genes and evolution work. We got intelligent enough to adapt to the environment and conditions that were thrown at us to survive the ice age and through the many inter-tribal wars that have been fought since. But once a species hits a plateau in selection pressure there is little improvement, except via sexual competition.
If you can't afford the competitive price do you go bankrupt though?
Definitely mRNA advancements played a huge role, but it certainly sounds like coronavirus research played its part.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...
Why Mearsheimer’s Realist Take Is So Exasperating
To save folks some digging on what exactly this means—it's exactly what it sounds like: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/commit/e2fb87ec5d4e23...
I feel like it needs a different font.
Sure. P(lab leak origin | last bullet) = P(last bullet | lab leak) * P(lab leak) / P(last bullet). There isn't much evidence to constrain each term, and your post doesn't make any attempt to estimate them, but let's make some stuff up. The values change a lot if you take P(lab leak) to be any lab leak, or specifically a modified RaTG13 from WIV.

Let's go with the more specific scenario. Then P(last bullet | WIV lab leak scenario) becomes P(outbreak | WIV lab leak &c.) because we've conditioned on everything but the outbreak part. I'll guess this is 0.001, which is generous because it's very unlikely for a mere exposure to turn into a pandemic. Exposures to natural potentially pandemic viruses happen every day, most don't become a pandemic. P(WIV lab leak scenario) is difficult. There are a lot of different lab leak scenarios that could have happened instead, but we also don't care that much about trivial differences. Let's be really generous and say P(WIV lab leak scenario) = 0.25 because it's one of I think 4 plausible covid origin sites in Wuhan. Probably it should be lower because it's plausible that Wuhan was only the site of the first superspreader event, not the origin. And let's say P(outbreak) = 0.2 because we seem to get a potential pandemic every 5 years or so. Then P(WIV origin | outbreak) = 0.00125.

There are all sorts of problems with my analysis of course. Even if I haven't made any mistakes, the numbers I conjured up are entirely unconvincing. With only one datum, we have hardly any objective support for our probability estimates, and Bayesian analysis only gives a semblance of objectivity to our prior opinions.

Edit: I have no desire to support either side here, just to point out that probabilistic reasoning doesn't help much here. Whatever happened, happened, regardless of how (un)likely it was.
I found that fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Agreed on all counts.