skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the end of a day, if you ask for a nurse, should the model output a male or female by default? If the input text lacks context/nuance, then the model must have some bias to infer the user's intent. This holds true for any image it generates; not just the politically sensitive ones. For example, if I ask for a picture of a person, and don't get one with pink hair, is that a shortcoming of the model?

I'd say that bias is only an issue if it's unable to respond to additional nuance in the input text. For example, if I ask for a "male nurse" it should be able to generate the less likely combination. Same with other races, hair colors, etc... Trying to generate a model that's "free of correlative relationships" is impossible because the model would never have the infinitely pedantic input text to describe the exact output image.
Perhaps the confluence of NLP and something generative?
I really expect them to first make DALL-E and competing networks unfit for commercialization by providing the better choice for free, have stock companies cry in the corner, to just sunset the product a year or two down the road and we're left wandering what to do.
This you?

http://inflatedwingsails.com/en/concept/
“Posers” as the kids might say.

Y’all feel free to donate your millions to the government why wait for tax laws?
Fun fact: appspot.com was the second "private" suffix to be added to the Public Suffix List, after operaunite.com: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=593818
Suppose 10% of people have green skin. And 90% of those people have broccoli hair. White people don't have broccoli hair.

What percent of people should be rendered as white people with broccoli hair? What if you request green people. Or broccoli haired people. Or white broccoli haired people? Or broccoli haired nazis?

It gets hard with these conditional probabilities
It’s not, though. “Dilemma” implies only two possibilities, but “varying degrees” implies many. This argument is incoherent.

There were lots of alternate futures, ranging from “the whole world, everywhere, utterly locked down schools for the past 2+ years” to “the whole world, everywhere, utterly refused to lock down schools for the past 2+ years”, and everywhere in between in terms of which schools, which policies, when, and for how long.

We can definitely talk about what sets of choices would have had better outcomes.
This parent comment didn’t seem to be an obvious complimentary comment, like the one’s you’re referencing.
>If some particular demographic shows up in 51% of the data but 100% of the model's output shows that one demographic, that does seem like a statistics problem that the model could correct by just picking less likely "next token" predictions.

Yeah, but you get that same effect on every axis, not just the one you're trying to correct. You might get male nurses, but they have green hair and six fingers, because you're sampling from the tail on all axes.
You think there are homogenous gender stereotypes across the whole Western world? You say “woman” and someone will imagine a SAHM, while another person will imagine a you-go-girl CEO with tattoos and pink hair.

What they mean is people who think not like them.
I don't see this at all. Extremely few people actually make drastic changes.
My brother who survived through the dot com crash says that this is exactly what all of his engineer friends thought and then there was a complete hiring thaw for years and salaries got back to earth

There has been a lot of FOMO from businesses into tech after covid. But most of these tech undertakings haven’t really been fully implemented or had a chance to show their impact.

Its entirely possible that a lot of businesses will realize that their massive new tech teams didn’t really translate into a healthier bottomline. Perhaps they overhired, overengineered, or simply didn’t have the culture or expertise or even the need to go all-in on tech.
That might be useful in a civil case, but I don't see how it would apply to a criminal case. "If you do X, it is not considered fraud" isn't going to legally bind the criminal justice system in any way.
The bulk of the trained data is from western technology, images, books, television, movies, photography, media. That's where the very real and recognized biases come from. They're the result of a gap in data nothing more.

Look at how DALL-E 2 produces little bears rather than bear sized bears. Because its data doesn't have a lot of context for how large bears are. So you wind up having to say "very large bear" to DALL-E 2.

Are DALL-E 2 bears just a "natural consequence of natural differences"? Or is the model not reflective of reality?
> I don't see how they can exist without a judicial system.

Smart contracts don't have to exist outside the judicial system. Smart contracts are simply a way to automate transactions in a way that's efficient, transparent, and credibly neutral. Yes, we may still have to invoke courts for the 0.01% of transactions that are clear exploits. But the other 99.99% of the time, it's a much more efficient system than using written contracts to handle normal, everyday outcomes.

Even without blockchains or smart contracts, we already have automated systems that execute transactions based on algorithmic rules. If you blatantly exploit a vulnerability in those systems, then courts will generally punish you. That doesn't mean that automated systems are pointless, because 99.9% of the transactions aren't exploits. That's still a huge win, because it means we don't have to have our lawyers email redlines back and forth every time we want to trade an S&P index futures contract. (Near) fully automated transactions are 1) orders of magnitude more efficient, 2) expose general purpose composability where one automated system can be predictably inter-connected with another.

When you put an automated transaction system on-chain, you drastically increase the advantages of both, because you're embedded in an open application network with credible neutrality. A smart contract exchange like Uniswap can process about the same amount of volume as a centralized exchange like Coinbase, but the difference is that Uniswap only needs about 50 employees, whereas Coinbase needs 5000. That's primarily because Coinbase runs inside a silo'd network. That entails replicating many functions like user account management, that aren't necessary for an application like Uniswap that piggybacks off the credible neutrality of a decentralized consensus layer like Ethereum.
Love it. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
That was a political decision, not a military defeat. Politicians never allowed the military to attack the north. Instead, the military was given a purely defensive mission, which they performed successfully, until politicians ordered them to leave.
I love when I find new source material for /r/NCD in the wild.
Yes of course it does and Knuth is well aware (as am I to a lesser extent), but I’m just saying I don’t think it’s relevant to the point he’s making here.
So it applies to tens of thousands of people, not just the few brave enough to take up a stance.
> You can use nuclear or stored renewables to power a heat pump, which could heat homes for most of the German winter.

To even supply something close to a significant amount of homes with heat pumps would take decades. In decades, Germany will be run on renewables completely. Gas or Russia have nothing to do on this level of discussion.

> but the fact remains that 25% of all energy consumed in Germany comes from natural gas

If you just stupidly ignore what I write and repeat the same invalid argument over and over again, it won't become valid.

It is still that 10% which is relevant for the topic here and it can be done next year without having to run a single nuclear reactor a single day longer. This is what will actually happen.
Willpower, Human and Machine
I think you misread my comment. My point is that it isn't problem solving that leads to consciousness. It's social reasoning. It's theory of mind, applied to ourselves.

Children, mentally slow people, and drunks, are all still capable of social reasoning.
There are plenty of usecases for generating art/images where a latency of days or weeks would be competitive with the current state of the art.

For example, corporate graphics design, logos, brand photography, etc.

I really do think inference time is a red herring for the first generation of these models.

Sure, the more transformative use-cases like real-time content generation to replace movies/games, but there is a lot of value to be created prior to that point.
There's at least one open source community project/fork trying to build a Linux backend (via GtkSharp in this case): https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/maui-linux
@Google Brain Toronto Team: See what you get when you generate nurses with ncurses.
One additional thing to consider here is that (unfortunately) not only are interview processes not accommodating, but many work environments will be similarly unaccommodating. While many large corps have "Neurodiversity ERGs" and similar, they often just pay lip-service and don't truly have impact on the ways day-to-day colleague/cross-team interactions happen within those orgs.

Pay is important, and narrowing your requirements further doesn't seem helpful, but just something that is worth keeping in mind.

Thank you for writing this; it's an incredibly eloquently written piece, and these are the needs that need highlighting (over and over) if any of these challenges are to change. Have bookmarked for future sharing.
Because pretty much no machine in the universe used little-endian before Intel decided to save a cycle somewhere in the 8008 design, so there was no reason to have a way to refer to it. And even then, nobody paid much attention until IBM put an 8086 into the PC, rather than a Motorola 68X0, right about the time of the article you mention. It's been downhill ever since.
I wasn't aware that unborn children was a loaded term... It seems to me that they may be using that term to refer to "the entire gamut of zygote, embryo, fetus, etc.". I know, it's crazy we wrap up ideas like this into a pithy little phrase. It's almost as if the English language has short phrases that are useful to discuss things at a broader level. Crazy right?

> Is it really that impossible for the anti-choice movement to make a reasoned argument?

Well what is a reasoned argument? Google says that reason is "a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.". So it seems to me that if somebody offers any explanation, that fulfills a reasoned argument. But perhaps you mean well-reasoned. And that is a subjective argument contingent on what you mean by well.

> To cite legitimate science?

Yes you can argue pro life and cite legitimate science [1]. But like this article says, you'll probably pull out your prejudice and immediately dismiss any scientific evidence that supports pro life. In addition to that, science is funded by people with agendas. Like the article also says:

>> As often as not, scientists dive into the debate, taking funding from pro-life or pro-choice organizations or openly advancing an ideological position. This, too, has consequences: It casts doubt on the validity and integrity of any researcher in bioethics-related fields. “Anybody with money can get a scientist to say what they want them to say,” Largent says. “That’s not because scientists are whores. It’s because the world is a really complex place, and there are ways that you can craft a scientific investigation to lend credence to one side or another.”

So claiming illegitimate science is just a No True Scotsman's fallacy. A true scientist would never come to a pro life conclusion, therefore you must be a false scientist.

> that doesn't involve religion or tradition?

An atheist's point of view seems like it would not involve either religion or tradition [0].

[0]: https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/10/19/...

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/pro-lif...
Sorry to hear that, that was an unfortunate turn of events that was beyond your control..

> But bootstrapping isn't easy. Cold calling people isn't easy, getting out there and grinding away on a consistent basis isn't easy.

VC funded business have all these same challenges. On top of them you need to somehow find time to raise money and endure board pressures often conflicting with your vision as a founder. I have two bootstrapped business behind me, and in the middle of a third, and although I could use more funding, I am also concerned about taking it. I think I would be overwhelmed with the additional complexity (perhaps I am not one of those "infinite business capacity" founders).
Right! I even felt slightly guilty for posting it ... but I posted it anyway because it's useful.
Does anyone choose Redshift these days, asides from those completely tied into AWS? Feels like Redshift is playing catch up but moving so slow it will never catch up.

As another commenter noted, Redshift in my experience was an operational hassle.

Snowflake and BigQuery just work.

Why choose Redshift at this point?
AFAIK the legal system still applies to crypto; the recourse when somebody hacks your smart contract is the same as when somebody defrauds you; you sue. Except with smart contracts you have more traceability as to what happened.

And you don't need to make the smart contract explicitly subordinate to the law, they are as a matter of fact, because everything de facto is. This idea that code is law and crypto exists in a vacuum is complete delirium (although a popular one and sign that the scene has a lot of room to mature)
Indeed. As the saying goes, we are truly living in a post-truth world.
I think it sorta is, but those are specifically tests that monitor brain activity when someone is thinking about stuff. Autistic brains are like a bit less organized in where thoughts happen or something like that iirc
I’m chuckling imagining the board demos of the VR device considering Al Gore is on the board.
Chinese lacks tense, articles, plural form, and a lot of things that are taken for granted by speakers of Indo-European languages, yet it's fairly terse.

It turns out that you can infer a lot from context. "Cat catch three mouse yesterday" is completely understandable, even though it's been stripped of tense, articles and plural form.
Obviously you have a point about the different timescales, but the CDC lists 7−14 days as a typical incubation time and a fuller range of 5−21 days.
That's fairly long and nice for cases which are being successfully contact traced, but also generous room for sh*t to happen in cases where the trail is lost.

Monkeypox already has observed fomite transmission (i.e. via contaminated materials), but what's more: it is a poxvirus! It's next of kin of an pathogen known to display true airborne transmission.
Maybe for now it's not adept enough at infecting humans to manage on small amounts of the finest aerosols or dried out excretion smoke, but how long is that going to last if this (already atypical) strain can manage to build up variance infecting large numbers of people in densely populated areas?

HIV is not that difficult to control in theory. You just test everyone, recurringly, and have the infected individuals strictly adhere to measures to prevent spreading the contagion. Problem managed. As we know, in practice that's prohibitively difficult to bring about.

Several weeks to symptoms with ability to contaminate shared environments and potential to develop ability for mass transmissions could be a nasty thing to manage in practice too.

This is already on several continents and health authorities don't seem all that on top of what could well emerge over the next few weeks, as incubations time out. So I wouldn't be wildly surprised if we can look back in a month or so and say by late May it was already technically a pandemic. But let's hope, of course, that the transmissibility really is fairly low, that the current reach is a quirk of circumstances, and that all the outbreaks can still be contained.

Otherwise I guess it's time to urgently draw on prior research in vaccines for the second time in a small number of years.
> One complexity with that that comes to mind is how do you then track whether you've already bumped minor/major since last release and so don't need to again?

I wonder if it really matters that release version numbers only increment by one. If not, just bump anyway when appropriate change is made - no need to check.

In practice I think the problems would be
a) having to be very disciplined about this on every commit, rather than having a reminder to consider it as part of a release process, and
b) ordering version numbers from different branches when merging to mainline
I'd say you're right. Unfortunately many people are raised by bad parents. Should these researchers accept that their work may perpetuate stereotypes that harm those that most need help? I can see why they wouldn't want that.
The only reason these models work is that we don’t interfere with them like that.

Your description is closer to how the open source CLIP+GAN models did it - if you ask for “tree” it starts growing the picture towards treeness until it’s all averagely tree-y rather than being “a picture of a single tree”.

It would be nice if asking for N samples got a diversity of traits you didn’t explicitly ask for. OpenAI seems to solve this by not letting you see it generate humans at all…
Does it outperform DALL-E V2?
This comes down to the intent, doesn't it? It would be different if you had no sign but on the door that opened if someone pushed it because it was badly designed.

People on HN argue this with openly accessible APIs fairly regularly "ah but the machine let me do it, they must be OK with it" and I think that goes down badly in court.
Until this pans out in an actual court this is basically a strongly worded vaguely threatening letter from a lawyer. If they actually had him dead to rights they wouldn’t be posting their legal theory publicly and asking pretty please give it back or else these other people we’re not at all affiliated with and have no control over (but don’t pay attention to that fact) might put you in jail.
You mentioned that you had a decent amount of low-price plan signups - how much did you increase the prices that scared away your customers? Curious if you tried lowering prices again/used other discount pricing strategies.
Posting a few comparisons here.

https://twitter.com/joeyliaw/status/1528856081476116480?s=21...
I think we naturally want to share what we find beautiful as it is an expression of our joy as well as it enhances it. What we usually don't want to share is what we think will be profitable.
I agree. How cool would it be to get an 8 min version of your favorite song? Or an instant DnB remix? Or 10 more songs in the style of your favorite album?
In economics, at least, cheap money means loans with a low interest rate. I guess high valuations come with being able to borrow money for cheap.
Good, I love the heat. We had 115 degrees today and I couldn’t feel any better.

On a more somber and realistic note, this is going to cause riots and chaos, especially in developing countries.
Yeah, good point, it's not as simple as I thought.
Perhaps from the holy hand grenade of Antioch? Was there a rabbit nearby?
To be honest, I have no idea how to fix this. This was just an insider observation. Luckily, I am doing a PhD on systems software and I have a large support network of very smart people on the Internet in the form of contributors to large open source projects such as the Linux kernel, GCC and LLVM. My supervisor is the shallow-type of researcher, but because of my special circumstances, it's easier for me to overcome the issue. However, it may not be that easy for other people working on exotic topics such as Quantum Computing.
I'm fine with this sacrifice -- if someone downloads HEAD, they are not running a "version", so it would be misleading to have the source think it's at 1.0 or 1.1 if really it's at a commit between those two versions. I have my build scripts call the version "develop" or similar if this is the case.
Enjoying the serendipity of finding the right tool at the right time: https://twitter.com/xn/status/1528845032438083584
I think you're getting a bit too worked up over this, possibly due to past interactions with others.

It was my professional suggestion to separate the content to avoid that misinterpretation.

You can't control how you are perceived by others. You have to grow thicker skin. You can simply say "No I don't care about that, it's my passion and I will stand behind it.", instead of getting offended. As some on the right I have to constantly be interpreted as a racist or sexist, or any other ist. That's fine as I know those claims are false and I believe in my views.

More power to whatever you want to do, I'm a libertarian and I think people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they aren't infringing on other people's rights. But you don't get to control other's speech or how they think. You can certainly try to convince them though, which you've certainly made an effort to, I applaud that. I don't think the victim mentality or linking it to "phobias" is helpful though.
I believe DALLE and likely this model excluded images of people so it could not be misused
Very certainly not, since use is individual and thus a function of competence. So, adherence to meaning depends on the user. Conflict resolution?

And anyway - contextually -, the representational natures of "use" (instances) and that of "meaning" (definition) are completely different.
That's around 1/8th of the surface area of a 4K monitor so I hope a few other standard sizes will emerge
Web3 is not going to happen. The crypto economy is failing. The promise of crypto was (and still is among the devoted) to provide a viable alternative to government backed currency. At this time, crypto accounts for a fraction of a percent of global economy and is already plagued by so many technical issues to make it almost impossible to actually use for anything.

Also, I highly recommend the video on YT called Line Goes Up.
https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

I don't agree with the video author on 100% of things, but I do agree with a lot and he is very comprehensive.
I wouldn't describe this situation as "sad". Basically, this decision is based on a belief that tech companies should decide what our society should look like. I don't know what emotion that conjures up for you, but "sadness" isn't it for me.
> I also think that high functioning Autistic people, who absolutely lack the sort of social cognition you seem to think set people apart, also work against your claim.

High functioning autistic people don't absolutely lack social cognition, they just aren't as strong at it as neurotypical people. I believe this reinforces my point. We are so used to our fellow humans being incredibly good at intuitive social reasoning and theory of mind that even a relatively minor reduction in that capability is perceived as a deep flaw.

When someone has a shitty sense of direction or poor spatial reasoning, we don't think of them as having a mental disorder. But weaker social functioning seems more fundamental to personhood.
I watched an old guy die in a parking lot because of this. His hat blew off, he bent over to pick it up, and then fell forward onto his head. He died soon after. Now, he could have had some kind of other issues leading to this (he was elderly and had mobility issues). My wife parked while I ran over to render assistance, I called 911 while a military medic tried to revive him but it was too late.

So yeah, that can be enough (might have been a heart attack as a result of the shock, I am NOT a doctor, but he was gone by the time the ambulance arrived).

Also, one of the reasons street fighting is so dangerous has nothing to do with MMA dudes, it's when someone falls down and hits their head. This happens all the time. They sometimes die from the fall.
If you’re in Ontario the AODA would provide for reasonable accommodation like text during both interviewing and employment.

https://www.ontario.ca/page/about-accessibility-laws