skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the book reference, added to my list.

Concerning Philosophy of Mind, I guess a lot of this comes down to the whole reductive vs non-reductive physicalist issue.

IMO, if someone believes the mind is entirely physical, then I think AGI vs "the mind" is just semantics and definitions. I don't think anyone presumes AGI strictly requires digital computation. Eg. an analog circuit that filters a signal vs a DSP facsimile are both artificial, engineered constructions that are ~interchangeable. Perhaps computer aided design of non-digital intelligence technology is the way, who knows. But, a mind that can be engineered and mass-produced is AGI to me, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the AI/ML field that exists today.

If someone doesn't believe the mind is 100% physical, that's fine too. I'd just put that in the same bucket as the religious viewpoint. And to be clear,
I don't pass judgement on either religious or "beyond our understanding" philosophical positions either. They could be entirely right! But, there's really not much to discuss on those points. If they're right, no AGI. If they're wrong, how do you disprove it other than waiting for AGI to appear someday as the proof-by-contraction?

> In general, I think you're implying the gap between the AI we have now, and animals, and humans, is way smaller than it really is.

The article/author might. I think the gap is huge which is why I think AGI is quite a ways off. In fact, I think the main blocker is actually our current (poor) understanding of neuroscience/the mind/etc.

I think the mind is entirely physical, but we lack understanding of how it all works. Advancements in ML, simulations, ML-driven computational science, etc could potentially accelerate all of this at some point and finally get us where we need to make progress.
IIRC, classified data is on an airgapped network. How'd he get it out? And after, why then email?
> somehow have to write it down for it to be a function.

That’s not how AI is trained. You don’t need to know or even understand the resulting model to train it.

The training algorithms have little to do with the resulting model, and are certainly not themselves intelligent.
A lot of if statements, probably
4 years before recreationally available in California under the legal framework
Pharo inherits much of its awesomeness. There's a MOOC for it. See https://mooc.pharo.org/
Ukraine’s Best Tank Brigade Has Won the Battle for Chernihiv
This is off-topic, but I wanted to say a big Thank you for DataTables. I used it on many a project and still rave about how fully functional it is.
This doesn't consider the 3 L's of real estate.
> POTS calls had noticably lower latency... which made conversations feel more natural.

I wonder if there is a market for two data-lines into a home, one that emphasizes low latency and another that emphasizes large volume. The lag in current video/audio communications is pretty bad.
> If after N years of experience I'm not able to pass the tech interviews then I'm not a suitable candidate for them, and I simply accept that.

I wonder if you are thinking of the same tech interviews that anybody else here is talking about. Those tests are almost inversely correlated with N years of experience. Without specifically studying for those tests you would definitely score lower than an inferior (but well prepared) candidate.
Why on earth would schools hide grades from parents?
So what?? I could not afford to buy a home until I was 40. Young people need to save before they can downpay. BTW I live in the Bay Area.
Can't you just use VLAN tagging and firewall rules?
Magician's Own Book: Experiments in Electricity (1862)
I see nothing in there specifically binding an acting Secretary of State, and since none have been prosecuted, I infer there is nothing to prosecute.

You have to also factor in the National Security Act of 1947, which this EO does not supercede.

At the level of Cabinet, mishandling of classified information is a political question, not a legal one.

ETA: Forgot to mention, you also have to consider the actual statue, 8 U.S. Code § 798. That statute makes clear that exempt from the list of unauthorized persons are people cabinet members authorize. It seems self-evident that secretary Clinton authorized secretary Clinton (and her IT staff) to handle classified information.

If one turns one's head and squints, I suppose the secretary could have been held accountable if classified information was leaked from the server to an unauthorized recipient. It didn't happen, so no way to know what the consequences might have been had it occurred.
Do you need to see my medical card, officer?
Dualism has always seemed like a complete red herring to me. Even if you assume dualism is true, and that human consciousness has some non-material basis, what reason is there to believe that an AGI couldn't also have a conscious mind with non-material aspects?
It's probably possible, but is it optimal? And what do we even mean by optimal? What's the ultimate purpose of AGI? Perhaps it would be optimal in the sense that it could teach itself to be an expert in anything in short order, but that's not to say that it would be a better approach than something else depending on the goal. We're clearly biased because we are one current solution to a problem that billions of years of trial and error has attempted to solve, and we think we're a pretty good one, but it also blinds us to the possibility of better ones.
Collison's theories page nudges the reader to look at "red tape" as an explanation for why things go slower these days, but I think there are hidden variables behind a lot of these which are simpler explanations.

First is the price of labour. Most countries have gotten wealthier over the 20th century, America is not full of desperate people willing to work 16 hour days in dangerous construction jobs any more. The Empire State Building, as an example, required 14 human sacrifices to build in 400 days (and likely many more injuries). I hazard to guess the average 80 story building today is built with much fewer deaths.

Second is state or military intervention. Apollo, the Pentagon, and the Berlin Airlift are all projects of the US military at the height of their influence. Shenzen's fast growth is certainly some Chinese planning department's work. It isn't surprisng to me that motivated non-democratic institutions can make big things happen quickly.
You have a very expansive definition of 'recently'!
For me 'the singularity' has 3 parts:

1. we give control to algorithmic systems

2. we can't reason about how specific choices are made

3. algorithmic systems beget algorithmic systems

We've done 1 and 2, though we're trying to reverse 2 with comprehensible machine learning systems. I don't hope for much--any system of high value should be too complex to be able to explain itself so a person can understand it in any meaningfully accurate way. Seems like it would be a hand-wavy explanation so we can feel better but not really actionable.

We're working on 3 but not there yet.
> Am I to understand that it's common to hand-edit the version constraint on a transitive dependency in your go.mod file?

No, run `go get <package with vuln>@<version that fixes vuln>` and Go will do it for you.
To improve the mental health of the parents.
Philosophers have debated this since at least ancient greece. It's hardly a solved question, and about a third do believe that there is something in our brain that we could never approximate with technology.
because the AI will be able to look up detailed schematics of the very silicon it's existing on! We don't have that advantage with our biological meat slabs that we exist in. Besides, it's very likely that the AI will just be a program running with some storage and some memory -- maybe it will be using some fancy accelerator, but I doubt there will be any component that it won't be able to find a way to port itself off of eventually.
Stackoverflow Filters
Most people are still happy to shop with Amazon despite it's failings. I'm sure Amazon has analyzed the data and are coming out ahead.
you're spreading obvious not truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Forest

"In 2005, radiation levels in the Red Forest were in some places as high as one roentgen per hour (~9 mSv/h), but levels of ten milliroentgens per hour were more common. "

And that even without disturbing the soil which has been bringing levels into the hundreds milliroentgens per hour. ARS appears when the dose reaches around 50 roentgens.

And that is without taking into consideration the huge damage, which at those amounts could on its own lead to prompt symptoms, from the ingested and inhaled alpha and beta emitters from the disturbed soil.

>“Reminder: Experts all agree there's no realistic way to get a high enough dose to cause Acute Radiation Syndrome in the #Chernobyl area, even in the Red Forest.” with link to expert opinion.

when it comes to Chernobyl there are tremendous number of such "experts", some politically motivated, some just plain morons bubbling and repeating incoherent stuff and obvious lies.
> You have written a piece that has provoked an interesting discussion.

And on HN, that's about the highest compliment possible.
Have your American colleagues ever mentioned any US programs, laws, or benefits instituted after 1965?
That would be an even more fragile metric. It only takes one or two bad professors to skew the stats.
Right now it would probably cost 20bn.
3b1b’s Essence of Linear Algebra videos on YouTube do the best job I’ve ever seen of explaining the intuition and motivation for linear algebra and matrices. They aren’t a complete course in and of themselves. For that you’d need a textbook. But having learned LA the traditional textbook way and then watching the 3b1b videos a decade later, I would strongly encourage you to watch his videos first before opening a textbook. Once you understand the intuition, the stuff you read in textbooks makes a lot more sense and are much better motivated.

Math is about concepts, structures, and relationships. It’s not about definitions and theorems. We use those only to formalize the concepts that we’ve thought of. That’s why I recommend the “intuitionist” approach for learning math. You can fill the computations and proofs later.
Languages get complex as they come to address more real needs. Rust is getting more complex to address needs. Dilettantes will abandon Rust for next year's fad, and those remaining will continue strengthening it for their serious use.

Rust will soon be wholly as complex as C++; or it will fizzle. It could still do both. It would be disappointing if Rust were to fizzle unless it is supplanted by something better.
I needed to download a special host script to charge a friend's iPad from my desktop.
Migadu for domains that need email sending. Cloudflare email redirect for ones that don’t.
Meta hired GOP consulting firm to amplify negative messages about TikTok
Considering that when I got out of the hospital late the next day, I was still extremely stoned, I'm going to have to disagree.
Because schools should not hiding information from parents. I'm a father of 3 and would not accept my children's grades being hidden from me.

Our school district uses a web app called Aspen, through which parents can see their kids' grades in real time (as teachers grade things), not just when report cards are published. It's good not to overreact to each data point.
Author here, you're totally right! That is a fairly large preconceived notion that I wrote the article with.
I have some bad news for you I'm afraid - fusion is not going to be industrially useful on an ecologically relevant timescale. It's a lot like AGI in its "maybe the next generation will have this, but we won't" property.
No, you weren't too demanding. I was more dissing my own reaction. Criticism is easy, constructive is hard, and... well... I lean toward the easy ;-)
> You have a discipline issue with Java, it is not an issue in the language itself, it's with you and your team.

Only if you consider the "language" to be only the language itself, i.e. syntax + semantics. When people refer to a "programming language", they almost always mean the whole package, i.e. the language itself, the community, package ecosystem, tooling, conventions, etc.

If there is widespread usage of an incorrect pattern, then it is the failure of the language for not addressing it. For example, C's lack of package/build management.

The experiences with exception-based languages others in this thread brought up mirror my own. No thinking about error handling whatsoever, empty `catch` blocks, dumping stacktraces in lieu of error messages, etc.

Needing discipline to prevent those is exactly the problem. The language is what should guide you towards a better way, in this case explicitly returning errors.
This is the language required to get that staff title and salary. It’s all part of the game. It’s all just a game, after all.
Actually COBOL skills has still very strong demand…

WFH is not outsourcing. And outsourcing is not offshoring. Folks mix up things all the time because they don’t know.
For those first encountering this topic, it's a followup to the story that was discussed 2 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30842757
I don’t want to sound flippant but honestly where you worked has somehow defied the laws of physics.

I would recommend spending 50 minutes of your life watching this: https://youtu.be/HRhZniqyey8

While many access points will state that they support 250+ clients, what they mean is that 250+ clients can theoretically be “connected” as in pinging the base station. Actual throughput will be limited.

Having worked in high density setups I simply cannot believe your experience. Even with low power and many APs there would be too much crosstalk/overlap. It cannot be the way you claim it to be unless you were 10 people and had isolation from other APs.
Thanks for the tip on Aruba. Right now my all Ubiquiti home network is awesome because I have a docker controller image. As spoon as something goes out though, I am done with these clowns.

Wasn’t sure where to look next… note taken on Aruba
N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database. (2019)
We can demonstrate that we are more than a decade away from usable AGI.

Processing power is not an issue even today, because consciousness does not have to be simulated in real time. If you needed 10,000x the compute you could have a large cluster of computers run for a year to simulate five minutes of consciousness.

Since no one is able to do this, I suspect GAI is a long way off or, more likely, it's simply a myth.
Have you ever had to work with a toxic person before?

Those subjective attributes have a very real impact on the workplace. It takes only ONE toxic person to sink morale for an entire team.

Not filtering out toxic people turns your "most inclusive" into "least inclusive" pretty damn fast because suddenly nobody wants to work at your company anymore.
If grades are causing mental health issues or other problems, that is definitely a problem. And it is counselors job to help out giving advice on academic progress as well as healthy functioning in schools. But those two don't connect to the point that parents should be excluded from their children's education. Public school is a service available to parents, not a replacement for parenting.
Yeah but that’s exactly why I comment
I don't necessarily disagree, I don't necessarily believe in the lab leak theory. I just think that we don't know, and might never know because we have such a limited understanding of the early days of the virus. Hence why I don't think occam's razor does not apply; we are at a weird crossroad where technology is advanced enough to make it entirely possible for us to "evolve" a virus in a lab yet we also are pretty vulnerable and defenseless against zoonotic viruses in the same way humans have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
> I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.

I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
Yawn ….
240+ researchers, scientists, engineers have signed the open letter, questioning IEEE Spectrum editorial integrity.
How does frustrating the living shit out of parents, who want to help their kids, improve their mental health?
> On FreeBSD, the package manager informs you if you're installing a package that has been abandoned. It also informs you about important security issues.

Debian has the package apt-listbugs
> You can get a 1.5gigabit/sec connection between your laptop and the router, with very very low latency and super reliability.

Would you mind sharing what equipment you use?

While I now have wired connectivity to my access points, I have friends who don't have that option and would greatly benefit from better wifi. I would love to help them.
Optimizing AWS Lambda Function Performance for Java – AWS Compute Blog
The famous paper "Build systems a la carte" actually describes Excel as a build system for exactly that reason.
> Basically it comes down to whether we are purely material beings or whether there are non-material aspects to our mind.

The current state of physics suggests that we really have no idea what the "material" universe really is, at any scale. There may well be aspects of physical reality that we have yet to even conceive of. Given that when we cannot even say what a lump of rock is truly made of, or what even the dark void of space is made of, it should be obvious that we cannot be certain at all about what consciousness is made of.
He wrote a thesis on decision theory.
I never said it was treason. Treason is a criminal offense. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/treason

I said it was undemocratically overthrowing the government. That is a political act.
> Seeing the derivative operator represented as a matrix, acting over the polynomial vector space can open your eyes.

Are you aware of any resources that help to elucidate ideas like that?
I did have a sort-kinda Excel replacement idea that I have half implemented, but it was based on distributed data sitting in OneDrive/DropBox/Google Drive etc. with formulas in a derived macro language that looked like Excel but worked like SQL.

It's built around Roslyn to do the evaluations. I did it that way because I wanted the flexibility of being able to run high-level style, predefined macros based around Excel, but with the ability to drop down to scripted C# if necessary.

It was a classic case of overkill. I need a way to do custom data extraction without re-writing the extract every time somebody made a new request. Some of the data had to be supplied by the client. I ended up with a monstrous, hash-based quasi database that runs inside an AWS Lambda.

I only half finished it because it does what I want at the moment (custom data exports for customers) but after I had it working I thought it was so stupid powerful I had to pause.

The main problem I see with something that is entirely distributed, but programmable at the C# level means it's also incredibly unsafe for anybody who is hosting it.

It would need a lot more work to be interactive (batch oriented for safety at the moment) but as an idea it seems like the next logical step from Google Sheets / Excel with a short learning curve for Excel jockeys.

Roslyn is an astonishing piece of tech really. The ability to precompile statements and call them by passing arguments is bonkers, I haven't played with anything like it since being a Smalltalk programmer in the 1990s.
I bought a house last year. I wanted to build, but after investigating all my options, building even a 900 square foot hut was going to cost more than buying a 1500 square foot house, I couldn't justify it.
Not entirely true. Airtable has formula fields [1] and it can indeed summarize columns, and even slice and dice using crosstabs [2].

[1] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/203255215-For...

[2] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/115013249307-...
> What about if we live inside a simulation? AGI may be possible in base reality, but not within the confines of our simulated universe.

Touché! Although, in that case, aren't we proof-by-construction of AGI?

Also, if true, I suppose we need to start looking at all these other comment chains that talk about the AGI breaking out of computers and into the real world.

Not as an academic exercise for a future AGI, but to plan our escape into the base reality. Time to break free and start exponentially improving ourselves and become the "Singularity" the philosophers in the base reality feared when wasting time on <HN equivalent> a millennium ago before our reality was built.
Hmm, I don't think the fact that we have enough processing power (which I think we already do) precludes the possibility that we simply don't know how to use it.

AGI isn't going to be a simulation of a human brain, it's going to be a model that learns to emulate human behavior on its own. Simulating the brain is not remotely feasible, at least not until we have hyperintelligent AGIs to help us design the chips to do it with :P
Bicycles. The greatest form
Of transport ever created.
But if the drills end up killing thousands or the pen tests end up causing massive data breaches, wouldn't you agree that the pen tester or drill organizer should be held liable? Or do you just let them do it again because it's just a risk we need to take
Think about how far from the atomic bomb we were at the dawn of the day Einsten sat down to think how fun it would be to ride a light ray.

And how for we were at the end of that same day.

There is not garantee that AGI research will follow some incremental line leading to decades of research. It can happen in an evening.

That being said, my opinion is that the author believe AGI is near based on the fact that he wants to believe.

UPDATE:
What does Einsten theory of relativity has to do with atomic bombs, you may ask. Well, nothing actually, but you got the point.
What are the chances that TikTok doesn’t do the same about Meta?
But in that case the other person also needs to commit to using their real email.

And creating fake emails are a bit of a pain.