skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup, I agree. It's inevitable and it's scary but do keep in mind that there's no reason to believe it couldn't also be a positive thing. We have no idea what the long lasting impacts of AGI will be on our society, but we know that they will be massive. It might wipe us out, or it might aide us in building the perfect utopia.

While I am worried about it, I also recognize that worrying about it doesn't really do anyone any good -- the best thing I can do is to keep growing my skills as a tech person so that I can be as prepared as is reasonably possible when it eventually does arrive. Heck, maybe I can actually contribute to helping align it positively with humanity, I don't know. The point is that there's no point in stressing too much about it.
Much earlier than that; there were running mechanical fuel injection protoypes for gas engines before WW1 (diesel got FI quicker); mass-market mechanical fuel injection followed WWII-the Mercedes 300SL had FI in 1955.

Thing is, mechanical FI is almost as hard to tune for emissions and economy as carburetors, so electronic control is necessary.

Chrysler offered an EFI system based on the Bendix Electrojector in '58, but the tech was not fully baked, for one thing, the electronic controls were vacuum tubes in an enclosure in the dash; I think there may be one remaining operational '58 Imperial with that system still running....

Anyway, Bendix sold the patents for the Electrojector to Bosch, which a decade later had developed them into the J- and K- Jetronic transistorized throttle-body EFI systems so beloved by Porsche 914 enthusiasts.
... that's the always-given reason, so whats the supposed "unreal" reason?
I don't have a subscription but light has momentum w/o mass. Does this paper cite the work you mentioned in the article's header?
AGI is the flying car of our generation. Ask people a hundred years ago what technical advancement looked like, and everyone would immediately say "flying cars!" The concept dominated all pop culture and thought. It made perfect sense to everyone that that was the single obvious direction for all future tech to build towards.

Today we know that the idea is incredibly impractical or just downright impossible. Despite a ridiculous amount of technological advancements in so many other areas and despite so many prototypes and serious efforts, we are simply never going to commute to work in our own personal flying car.

Futurologists, thought leaders and sci-fi writers may dream of whatever technological future they want, but ask anyone working in the computer science and machine learning fields what they think of AGI and you'll get a much saner answer. It may happen sometime in the next hundred years, or it may not. It is very far from an inevitability the way things are going today.

Heck scientists today are more concerned about a technological plateau than a singularity. We are hitting real limits to what we can observe and theorize about our physical world.
(I'm pretty biased since I wrote a book on this, Effective Pandas.)

My take is that if you embrace the limitation of chaining in Pandas it will force you to write better (easier to read, debug, deploy, share, collaborate) code.

Also works for exploration, reports, stats, aggregations. (Many examples here https://store.metasnake.com/ )
Cargill is in the running for world's most evil corporation. Competition is stiff and enthusiastic.

Nestle? BASF/Monsanto? Exxon? CCP? Halliburton? We might not recognize the name of the leader.
1) If that is your mindset, you will likely not contribute anyway.

2) Noone cares if you use my open source project.
I haven’t tested this enough to know if it’s a real hidden feature, or just me placebo-effecting myself, but I swear it takes way less time to wake up my TV (Samsung) if I press the little TV button on the ATV remote 5x really fast.

Like if I press it once, the ATV wakes up and usually the TV does, but often showing the wrong source. 5x fast consistently wakes the TV to the right input.
Exploring the world of declarative programming with Prolog and Python
Check out Skytable - https://skytable.io/

Pros: Extremely fast. https://github.com/ohsayan/sky-benches

Cons: Still early in development, not a ton of features.
I can't even understand why people think AGI is even remotely practically possible, let alone theoretically.

Even the most monstrous, amazing, 3000-CPU AI's are unimpressive and can barely do narrow functions.

I remember when computers started to beat humans at chess - a long time ago.

It was neat, but not a big deal.

Now we can beat humans at 'Go'?

Seriously? It's only 'impressive' to computer scientists.

Imagine that we just stopped calling things 'AI' and literally picked some other, more mundane term, which I suggest should be 'Adaptive Algorithms'.

If we called it 'AA' - I'm doubtful we'd even be having this conversation about 'intelligence'.
Walmart Node.js Memory Leak
I think the Chinese room experiment is pretty effective, but a person might say the room is conscious and one might not. We all agree that, if we had a Chinese room in front of us, the only real way to tell would be a Turing style test.
Crypto California
(Author here)

> There's no actual new theory here, just the same ideas Kurzweil said in the late 90s re-hashed.

I have no idea who Kurzweil is. These ideas may not be unique but I have arrived at them at least somewhat independently.

> It's pure conjecture when AGI will actually happen. GPT-3 and Transformers are impressive but still many orders of magnitude away from human performance.
By now, we have lots of examples of technological problems where the last 1% is orders of magnitude harder than the first 99%.

There are also many examples of technological problems that we have gotten many orders of magnitude better at in the past 20 years. You're right, there's no telling for sure when any of this will happen. That's why I qualified my article with a little "this is all speculation" disclaimer in the introduction. These are simply my best guesses.
This doesn’t demonstrate anything in the time dimension. It’s simply saying we don’t know how to do it now, which everybody agrees on.

I agree when you say we have the processing power already. GPT-3 contains way more information than a individual human brain can possibly experience (show me a human who has read Commmon Crawl like a book).

The biggest issue currently is the data inefficiency of Transformers. But we don’t know when the big new thing that comes after Transformers will be invented, and we don’t know if it will be enough for AGI or not.
I don't feel that Python is out of reach for most who are using Excel with vlookups. I do feel that most Pandas code is poorly written and thus not at all compelling to replace Excel.

(My background is that I teach Python and Data Science to large corps.)
>Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS.

Lets not exaggerate :) ECU reads a bunch of sensors, does some mild compute, uses that to do a table lookup, interpolates and slaps the result into actuators. 8bit 10MHz is enough to accomplish this task.
You can argue that spreadsheet formulas in cells are also a type of programming, including all the hierarchy you mentioned. Only in this case the hierarchy is not just the functions nested in each other, but also the cells calculating data based on other calculations in other cells.

And while I see the OP explanation on how cells are a great way to arrange data, I would argue that the existing way of programming in Excel is pretty horrible.

Anyone who have ever tried doing something slightly complex with Excel functions soon realized that it is pretty impossible to do certain things without a lot of "magic" involved. Which is why MS added the whole VBScript thing, and even Google Sheets have their JS App Script (or whatever it is called) to provide additional options to program based on data beyond the basic formulas.

It would be great to see more visual programming languages tested in an Excel like data entry environment. Some of the PLC [1] languages come to mind, or even languages like MIT Scratch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller#...
> This is because consciousness is a fundamentally unfalsifiable thing

The real unanswerable question is not "can I prove another entity is conscious", it is "does this other entity believe that it is conscious", because that is the actual test of consciousness.
It's frustrating, because there is no possible objective proof of the answer, but to me that's also the point, because consciousness is a subjective thing.
All high-performance database engines do full kernel bypass -- Linux has standard APIs for this. Databases designed this way are much higher performance, which is people do it. It may not be obvious what this has to do with Rust.

The downside of kernel bypass is that the kernel is no longer transparently hiding the relationship between storage, memory, and related low-level hardware mechanics. A consequence of this is that the mutability and lifetime of most objects cannot be evaluated at compile-time, which Rust relies on for its safety model. The hardware can hold mutable references to memory that are not represented in software and which don't understand your object model. How do you manage lifetimes when references to objects are not visible in the code? When an object does not have a fixed address? And so on. This is not trivial even in C++ but the language does allow you to write transparent abstractions that hide this behind something that behaves like a reference without complaining.

There are proven models that guarantee safety under these constraints, widely used in database engines. Instead of ownership semantics, they are based on dynamic scheduling semantics. The execution scheduler can dynamically detect unsafe (or other) situations and rewrite the execution schedule to guarantee safety and forward progress without violating other invariants. This is why, as a simple example, some databases never seem to produce deadlocks -- deadlock situations still occur but they are dynamically detected before they occur and are resolved transparently by editing the lock and execution graph.

Some major classes of database architecture optimization don't work in garbage collected languages. For this reason, you never see state-of-the-art database engines written in e.g. Java.
Do you mean it's a long term goal in terms of ability or in terms of policy? Cause as far as I know there's been at least one experiment doing this already, all the way back in 2001:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11483281/
Pedantry of the day: Apollo was the US government, but NASA never was and still is not military.

Otherwise, spot on.
The 911 call, "I think I had an allergic reaction, my breathing is so slow I'm going to pass out and suffocate!" While loudly hyperventilating into the phone.
I suspect the primary purpose of the word "may" in that sentence is that you can choose to disable checking the hash against the Certificate Transparency style https://sum.golang.org. In other words, you can opt out. If you do, you fall back to your local go.sum file, which is more-or-less a "TOFU" security model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use

More on sum.golang.org:
https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/25530-s...
> She used her personal email for official communication quite a bit. This is illegal from a public records point of view

Yes, this is not permitted, even if in practice it's not a grave crime (because if it is a grave crime you'd have to lock up 95% of government employees). At least in Dept of State it looks like the IT staff retain emails as records. In the Navy even that doesn't happen, and Navy workers are expected to instead manually export all emails that might be "records" into a whole separate system.

> A review of emails found classified information there.

This is true, but I would like to note that any agency can classify information, whether you knew it was classified or not, and this covered much (I won't claim all) of Clinton's activity.

E.g. a Washington Post article gets sent to her about outcry in Pakistan due to a U.S. drone strike in the area. Huge diplomatic incident. "How should we handle this boss?".

The problem is that the drone strike came from a covert activity run by a different agency. Since it's covert, it's also classified. Now Clinton is "engaged in classified correspondence". It doesn't help that it's already in the public sphere and that she is literally talking about this issue with Pakistani diplomats who are definitely not cleared to receive U.S. classified info.

Nope, in the same way government workers were told to be careful not to comment on news media about Snowden leaks, Clinton is technically guilty of sharing classified info over unclassified (and personal!) email.

I don't know whether the present case is like Clinton's (i.e. mixed in with what you might call innocuous) or actual witting sharing of classified info. I'd probably still bet on the latter.
> Futurologists, thought leaders and sci-fi writers may dream of whatever technological future they want, but ask anyone working in the computer science and machine learning fields what they think of AGI and you'll get a much saner answer.

Author here. I do work in machine learning, my day job is as a machine learning engineer in a medical lab. There's far from any consensus in the field as to when or if AGI will happen. Some, like me, think it is inevitable and coming very, very soon. Others don't think it's possible at all.
> Something about these articles reads so self congratulatory and aggrandizing...

That's a requirement for staff engineering. This is how you graduate to staff. If you don't understand, there's a couple of books you can buy and educate yourself. Also there's a staff engineering podcast where staff engineers are invited to talk staff engineering and how to staff engineer effectively.

See my previous comment about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30049319
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That looks really nice. Is it capable of doing DDL operations?
No, but Apollo was part of a competition with a nuclear enemy that got to space first.
Are we talking capable or the very top? It's going to be a small minority of that top cohort where Bay Area COL is an issue.
You sure can. And as a result you will get...

> a separate isolated network
Apollo 8 wasn't the first Apollo mission. The number may be a clue!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Personally, I haven't (I hope that doesn't mean I'm the toxic person).

I think those people are rare enough that they can be filtered out at the very end of the process when there is already objective evidence that the candidate is competent. In many workplaces, I think they may even be best filtered out in a paied trial period with some kind of commitment to hire them unless there is a problem. That way the decision can also be made by the people who will work most closely with the candidate.

I'm against the idea of testing for cultural fit because I think that leads to less diversity (including less diversity of thought and opinion) which I believe is harmful for teams. I think we work best together with people who are different from us, as long as we are still nice and respectful to each other.
I mean, roughly, there's no such thing as an ideal free market, and in all real markets all the ways in which it's not an ideal free market are being exploited by people to collect the margin. The concept of an ideal free market is promulgated by the same people who are making money off those margins.

As far as what you can do about it, you could start with preventing those people from interacting with markets. I leave the mechanism as an exercise for the reader.
Sure, obviously you can't defy physics just by getting smarter.

My parsing of the singularity is the point at which the speed of improvement exceeds our ability to understand it. "Predictability" is the usual term, but I think it introduces more problems than it solves.

The reality is that we humans have a finite rate for internalizing and utilizing knowledge. The singularity "happens" on the day artificial intelligence begins generating (and subsequently using) new knowledge faster than our human limit.
On a side tangent, wasn't Egypt the bread basket of rome? What happened there? Did the Nile dry up?
You started:

> I have no direct experience with classified information process in US government.

You then have an edit where you make a broad claim about the power of the president to declassify documents.

However, the article you linked doesn't make any claim about limits on the Office of the President to declassify documents. It only describes the standard process Trump was following to declassify those documents.

You should take some time to look into this issue more deeply, as there is a lot written about the power of the president to declassify documents. (Unless of course you are attempting to anger the internet into revealing its answers by making bold assertions, in which case well played, my friend :)
Many topics so let’s break them one by one.

“ I see nothing in there specifically binding an acting Secretary of State, …”

Section 3.1 from EO 13526 describes the rules for declassification for US government. There are no exclusions for Cabinet or Secretary of State (notice that NDI has a subsection in the EO to cover expanded authority to declassify the information).

“… and since none have been prosecuted”

This is going back to “other people did it” argument.

“You have to also factor in the National Security Act of 1947”

I can’t find anything specific for this discussion. Which section are you referring to?

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

This is not the law. EO 13526 doesn’t make exceptions for Cabinet. It might be current political practice but I hope you agree this is not the right way to have high placed government official above the law (to be clear, I have no problem if the law or EO are changed to say that Cabinet or Secretary of State can declassify anything).

“… secretary Clinton authorized secretary Clinton (and her IT staff)“

Could you please provide a pointer for such an authorization? I am sure there is a form one needs to fill in. BTW, I haven’t seen the argument yet that server in the basement was authorized to handle classified information. I would love to see the form that explains why it is not a problem. Should be a fun read.

“… I suppose the secretary could have been held accountable if classified information was leaked from the server“

Notice that NSA employee was charged with retention of NDI in addition to sharing it with unauthorized recipient. The “leaking” of information to unauthorized party is not required for the prosecution.
I think you read the comment backwards.
So we need a peer review for peer-reviewed reviews.
Well after 12 years of using ruby and bundler and maintaining a bundler-ish depsolver at work, and playing around a bit with cargo, I can say that it is becoming clearer as to why I don't grok go modules at all.

The lack of a depsolver is a curious choice...

I don't think my example was remotely "broken" at all, that's just another day doing software development.
AGI will make many things possible that we’re not possible before. It will invent new things that wildly alter the reality of the world. The point is that you cannot predict what will happen; a million things could happen. But the good outcomes can be counted on one hand. The probability that we get a good outcome is one in millions, probably less. Obviously that is an incredibly stupid thing to do!
Maybe someone high up in Ubiquiti got their ego bruised and the action is internal bully appeasement, not actually intended to succeed.
I think it's an exaggeration to say that design flaws in JavaScript are "horrible" and that they have caused billions of hours of work. Of course there are warts in the language (e.g. everything gets cast to a string) but similar design issues have plagued other languages as well. It's not like JavaScript is unique in providing footguns.

And the language is operating in a different context than most other languages (prioritizing not breaking at all costs), so it is really hard to fix defects. That context would have been impossible to foresee.
It’s a little more than “letter of the law” when he’s using a personal email address for NSA work, and also sending anything classified outside of official channels. He definitely knew better.
We’d like to see you make a rational, purely logic-based, and objective line of argumentation to justify why you like lemon cake instead of chocolate cake.
Sure but that would lead to a low confidence estimate given the war has just started, it's not clear whether the ports will be captured, it's not clear whether the sowing season will be disrupted, and it's not clear whether Russia will engage in protectionism of wheat. A shortage of more than 3% is possible. The tweet should have highlighted that uncertainty instead of presenting the 0.9% figure as a near fact. They smuggled in the word "estimate" somewhere but they obscured the uncertainty.
Claim made not in evidence. Legally frozen were the recipient accounts. Yes, contributors could have had their accounts frozen, but no evidence that the government ordered such an action on any donor.
I really don't think TENEX could support volumetric displays. Neither the operating system on which the Internet was built, nor the trashcan company.

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

https://www.amazon.com/Tenex-Durable-7-Gallon-Polyethylene-W...
I mean, human intelligence is just one big "adaptive algorithm" too, it's just ours took billions of years to train and used natural selection as a loss function. I don't see any fundamental reason why we couldn't do the same with a machine.
The sooner they leave the less it costs.
> Basically what I'm trying to say is how can anyone who believes the brain is purely physical (not spiritual), believe that we just simply cannot achieve human-level intelligence by machine (no matter how complex the machine gets).

Obviously the brain is physical. But is consciousness? Is consciousness a thing in a physical sense, or an "experience", or something like a collection of powers and abilities? The two poles in the argument aren't between physical machine or religious spiritualism. There are other options, alternative positions that don't rely on Cartesian demons at the wheel, or souls, or even an inside-mental vs. outside-body distinction.

One thing my initial comment was pointing out was that the argument in favour of AGI, and which you're presenting, relies on an assumption: that computational intelligence, what you might describe as the intelligence of machines, is the same as the intelligence of humans. But that is just an assumption when you get down to it based on a particular kind of model of human intelligence. There are certain logical consequences of that assumption, and I've just pointed some out as probable roadblocks to getting to AGI from there. Many of those alternative positions, a lot from philosophy of mind, have raised those exact critical arguments.