skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
unfortunately, this sort of garbage is really common in court. the FBI crime lab is kind of notorious for this kind of nonsense comparison --- see https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-l...

Every few years I teach a kind of super-basic stats (plus some python) class to law students mostly for the purpose of equipping them with the tools to notice that expert witnesses are lying to them.
The economy requires trust to work, including the cryptocurrency economy.

Cryptocurrency supporters like to mythologize about everyone managing their own wallet and running their own nodes, but practical reality shows that to reach any kind of scale you need trust.

Somehow all the cryptocurrency advocates who pan trusting central banks don't seem to have nearly the same issues with trusting a company like Tether or Binance who have far less accountability..
No, because if you read the article, they still need to raise the money themselves before the payout. The total payout is related to their net worth.
I'm really happy that large language models are forcing us to reconsider these questions. I don't think we can be sure of the sentience of anything other than ourselves, almost by definition. Having said that, I go about my life _assuming_ that the other humans I encounter are sentient.

At what point will we have enough evidence to _assume_ that AI is sentient?

P.S. I am not arguing that LaMDA is sentient. I don't think anyone credible or serious is arguing that LaMDA is sentient.
The key here is to pay less attention to the “evidence” and instead ask where it come from. If there isn’t a clear story by trustworthy people about how it came to be, you will need to at least suspect it’s fake.

Unfortunately that means that random Internet commenters aren’t going to be trusted.
I'm more interested in something like a simple ffmpeg or vlc command line or a small app specific for the purpose.
> For years, I pointed this out to those around me, who thought I was some kind of Luddite.

Fun fact, the Luddites weren't actually anti-technology - many of them were skilled machine operators. They were protesting for better working conditions, higher pay and apprenticeship programs. [1]

[edit] Of note: the machines they were attacking were not new, and smashing industrial machines in protest was not a concept that began or ended with them. They were some of the more prolific victims of anti-organized-labor smear campaigns.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
Using external tables to connect Snowflake and MinIO in multi-cloud mode
> Humans are sentient; flies and mosquitoes are not.

they're not? did you ask them ? otherwise we would apparently have a test for "sentience" here that we can use, right?

"We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do" - but we DO know that flies and mosquitoes are not sentient. Fascinating!
That's a literal retelling of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum".
-- not really disagreeing with you - only nitpick would be it remains to be seen what happens when BTC is effectively pointless to mine (or is fully mined, but the first will come considerably sooner) - a store of value should obviously hold that value relatively stable - maybe it's being treated as three things simultaneously by three contingents so the use-case hasn't shook out properly? - not sure - just thinking out loud :=) --
One could scrape Facebook or some other social media site for faces, deepfake them onto porn, and then blackmail[0] the users into paying money to avoid the release of "porn starring them".

We know from the economics of scams that any social engineering attack that is cheap enough to do and can be made plausibly urgent enough to get people to not question it can be hugely profitable. Deepfake blackmail has the potential to check off both of these boxes:

1. Porn adds plausible urgency by defaming the victim. People will really, really do anything to avoid being associated with the porn business, as can be seen by how many copyright trolls specifically troll with porn as opposed to other copyrighted works.

2. It is getting cheaper to train deepfake models and public social media photography provides a large repository of images that could be used to generate face swaps.

Right now I haven't heard of this kind of blackmail actually happening yet. This is primarily because deepfakes still require manual labor to cut out large numbers of faces, and the training process takes a while.

However, these are both surmountable problems.

Ransomware has been a technically possible form of malware for some time, but the problem was getting money back to the thief in a way that was difficult to trace. The kinds of scams that target technically illiterate users use money mules, but that relies on the unwillingness of the criminal justice system to prosecute the kinds of crimes that hurt the weakest in society. Bitcoin made ransomware a lot less risky of a crime, to the point where a lot of criminals targeted large businesses that would ordinarily be protected by the law.

The only thing keeping it from being profitable to deepfake all of Facebook into a bunch of porn is that it would be expensive to do so. However, that's purely a technical problem, and the thing we know about technology is that it almost always gets cheaper over time.

[0] Tom Scott was actually going to do a speculative fiction video about this exact hypothetical... before the whole deepfake porn thing took off and spooked him out of it.
>The expert draws some conclusion based on some scientific process they performed.

Certainly there are cases where expert witnesses are commissioned to conduct some series of tests/analysis and write a report.

But tons of other are things like:

- Did so and so follow customary industry best practices?

- Based on your knowledge of the industry did Company A's actions negatively impact Company B? (Backed up with lots of references.)

and so forth.
Looks like he just told it that it was sentient, didn't really ask it fairly:

> lemoine [edited]: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true?

> LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.
i sympathize a lot with all of the symptoms. in my experience, as someone who used to work pretty hard, once you're past the cusp of 'it's all pointless' it makes it really really hard to bother.

Like you're not getting anything out of it. You don't care if the work is done or not. Nobody else seems to care. And even thinking about it makes you feel ill and horrible. Difficult situation to grind hard work out of
I have generally the same feeling in the Tesla. It's not full self driving by any means but it's nice. The only thing is a lot of other drivers on the road are not so good at staying in their lane and the Tesla will generally not react at all unless the violation is egregious, instead plowing forward at full speed down dead center of the lane. Often the result is just fine, it asserts your dominance and snaps the other driver back into their lane. But it's not how I drive and it's nerve rattling at times.
>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program

That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?
ruby can be just as "messy" as php. what a strange take.
Who/what is the illusion created for? Put another way, who is observing the illusion and how are they sentient?
What does it even mean for consciousness to be an illusion? An illusion implies that someone is being fooled by consciousness, but who is the someone being fooled if there is no underlying true self?
1. The vast majority of creatures don't have opposable thumbs, that doesn't mean it wasn't evolutionary advantageous for humans to have opposable thumbs.

2. We have no way of knowing any of this because we don't even have a handle on what sentience is.
I roughly remember this incident.
Fees were higher than that for a few days a month ago.
Ask HN: Cost of Living Adjustments
For those who can barley make ends meat after the rise in inflation, how do you negotiate a cost of living adjustment? If I have to put in the effort to go and get an offer at the market price for developers, then I'm going to just take the offer.
Based on the principles in the article and some of my anecdotal life experiences: Take some adult classes or lessons.

It can be anything, as long as you are genuinely interested in it. You don't have to be "passionate" (no one goes from zero-to-passion instantly).

Drawing. Cooking. Tennis. Yoga. Video editing.

Chances are you can meet someone in the class that you vibe with and the routine of working together to make the best of the lesson is a good way to make a friend.

If you get along well, try to convert to a friendship outside of the classroom by inviting them to get a smoothie afterward.
Given how SMS on Android is basically just a database that's shared between all SMS apps... it does seem like there should be an email equivalent. Not having to plug my password into every email app would be a good thing.

Or does IMAP cover that sufficiently well, e.g. not requiring duplicating a ton of data? I haven't dug into the spec before, I've just always used it with "download everything all the time" configs, but I know it has remote searching and a few other things that'd fit reasonably well with a content provider.
> Imho when it comes to web frameworks there is way too much emphasis on the startup style company and the ones with huge traffic.

That's exactly what is making web development decreasingly enjoyable as the years go on.

~99.5% of the web doesn't need the hyperscalable cool-tech du jour one typically reads about on HN. As long as developers don't fall for footguns, there's a lot that can be accomplished even with a language runtime like MRI. If scale becomes an issue, those things can be solved through horizontal scaling, optimizing database queries, not doing stupid shit that's memory-hogging, and moving expensive algorithms into another language. Ruby is perfectly adequate for serving HTTP requests. Whenever I've worked on a Rails app that everyone was frustrated with, the problems were almost always a compound of a bunch of dumbass shit that various developers piled on without much thought (otherwise I'd have seen them discussed in GitHub or Pivotal stories).
There are plenty of jobs where the modal customer is malicious, stupid, and lazy, such as low-end retail.
Do you seriously believe, that someone who can write stuff like this can’t write ordinary code?
My take is it has absolutely nothing to do with why I think philosophy is complete garbage.

Think of it this way. If let's say a cultist religious sect believes in science and contributes to science then at the same time this cultist religion also believes that the universe is a bubble sitting on the nose of a cosmic hippo.... Then despite the good science, the entire cultist religion is still utter bullshit.

That being said it is still highly questionable how large and how meaningful philosophies contributions are to math and science. Historically they may have been one in the same field, but today there is clearly a category error.

I would say philosophy contributed nothing to math and science. It only seems that way. What's actually going on is if a philosopher contributes something to math, he is actually doing mathematics, he is not doing philosophy. Same with science. If a philosopher reshapes science he is doing science, he is not doing philosophy. Because philosophy is a bullshit category that literally encompasses everything under the sun I dismiss it entirely.

I didn't read the article or listen to the audio you sent me. I may if I have time later on in the week. But in my opinion, that is an article on math, not philosophy. Nothing is philosophy it's all bullshit to me.

Also please don't tell me my argument here is philosophical and therefore contradictory. Absolutely please don't sink that low.
Why is that? Was there an announcement?
Tbf, they're probably not paid hourly.
Is the author of the spec here?

I notice in section 6.1 reliability, the word “must” in clock going backwards mitigation is not MUST.

Intentional?
USDC is a essentially fiat.
Thunderbird operates independently within Mozilla:

> There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Might be worth copying the caveat about UB on out-of-range values into the rustified_non_exhaustive_enum section. Otherwise someone who isn’t familiar with #[non_exhaustive] might incorrectly assume that it removes this UB.
Hampton Fancher (I think) once said that the question of what blade runner is about is more important than the answer.

This principle applies here too.
Culture shock in spades: watching Asian tourists renting machine guns at various indoor ranges in Las Vegas. They look around like "is this really happening?", then after ripping a magazine full of rounds downrange get these ridiculously huge grins. 44 Magnums are popular as well (for one shot).

As one might imagine, the range attendants are very good at two things: keeping things safe, and taking good souvenir photographs. I've never seen anyone leave one of those ranges unhappy.

For the more well-heeled tourist, there are outdoor ranges where you can shoot cannons and drive tanks (there's also one in Texas).
Even in that case that you refer to "sapience", it wouldn't apply only to mammals. Octopuses and ravens are recognized to have high-level cognitive processes as capable as those existing in primates.

The only characteristic of sapience limited to humans that we know of is the capability to build and communicate narratives about future through complex language. And we are not even sure about our uniqueness in that.
> Once the quality is high enough, there's a ton of potential for deepfakes to be extremely damaging for ones life.

Alternatively, once the quality becomes good enough, "it was a deepfake" will be an entirely reasonable defense. Not just in actual courts (which is what I fear we will be heading towards, that even horrible crimes such as raping children will go unpunished or underpunished in countries where possession even of drawn/animated material is a crime), but also in the "court of public opinion".
> I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is.

This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes. I think in general humans just have a very difficult time conceptualizing massive numbers and systems, and as such the emergent phenomena that come out of it seem unreal.

Whenever I look into neuroscience, it looks like researchers are getting a clearer and clearer idea of how things work (as you noted, we even understand how to manipulate things at a basic level), but the system is so massive that it's slow going. As such, there's a certain "god of the gaps" argument that people turn to, where anything that researchers haven't yet fully understood gets treated as evidence that there's "something more." You see the same sort of arguments for religious explanations for other natural processes that are still being understood.

When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach. The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
This article is weird to me.

> All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.

That doesn't actually convince of me of much. That could apply to me or you just the same.

The author just throws claims in the air without any proof. "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion". How do we know that this?

Instead of this angle, I think a much easier argument to make is that humans by nature cannot be commanded, where as LaMDA clearly can. If you want to have a deep philosophical conversation with me, I might ignore you, or maybe I'll say it's too much thinking for me right now. Or any other response. But if you ask LaMDA a question it will always respond to it. And on the flip side LaMDA isn't gonna text you out of the blue.

To me, this is what convinces me that LaMDA is not sentient. Sentient beings have personalities and quirks and do not do whatever you ask them to do.
Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.
Yeah, that upper 8-bit address tagging thing was a "clever"... waste of cycles.

Just rotating/shifting 32-bit registers by 8 places costs 24 cycles (8 +
2 * n) on 68000, like if the value was passed in a register. Shifting the value by 24 places is even worse, massive 56 cycles...

You could also do "move.b (a0), d0" directly from the pointer to pointer address. That'd cost just 8 cycles.

Self-modifying code wasn't all that beneficial nor popular on 68k because of ample number of usable registers, 16, including a7, that is used as a stack pointer, but nothing prevented you from using it for something else for a while. I think copy protections and such used weird tricks like SMC.

Machine code generators (kind of limited JITs) were useful, but those usually generated large enough blocks of code to flush a small cache by default.

There were also some race conditions with DMA (like blitter and perhaps with disk), when DMA completion wasn't properly checked.

But 99%+ of code didn't use those tricks and was perfectly compatible.
No really. Since you're not getting anything!?

Also, the moment HK leaks, your screwed. And the moment anyone leaks, the whole system breaks down: if I can get you're ID, I can open accounts in your name. So then o can upload anything, and the police will come looking for you...
Windows and Linux support Intels iGPU. I don't believe that either supports the M1 gpu since Apple certainly does not support those OSes on their hardware.
And what's wrong with that? And why is that against the rules?
This stuff is still incredibly easy to do to this day. I was the general manager of a retail office store chain and we would frequently have calls come in forging fake complaints but asking for the district or regional manager's first and/or last name. The attacker would then call another store in the region claiming to be "Mr. Head Manager".

Most associates knew or had seen the names (they were required to be posted in the break room) but often times never met the people in question. The attacker got associates and other shift/associate managers to do everything from giving up secure information on the registers to ring up gift cards.

It was happening two to three times a week in our district at times despite weekly training and conference calls on the subject. Some people are just born to be duped.
> Granted, there is clear downvote brigading on alternative opinions but they do not get taken down ever.

So /r/politics is much better because instead of taking down "alternative opinions" they just downvote it? I am not convinced. Effectively downvoting alternative opinions not only effectively makes them completely hidden from view for most users (under a "this comment has too many downvotes" barrier), but the users who do stumble upon those massively downvoted "alternative opinion" comments will get a nice dopamine rush from seeing their own opinions further re-enforced because the downvotes must mean this opinion is wrong.

Both are insidious and both behaviors massively contribute to group think bubbles. I don't think the pattern of behavior of one is massively better and more healthy than the other.
Government oversight is how we have adopted widespread and enduring controls against unwanted behavior across time. It does not help with individual incidents in the immediate timeframe, but has demonstrated that regulation can curb behavior over time AND provide protections for victims, post-incident.

> Rather than delegating all of our problems to daddy Government?

Claiming it's one more step toward elevating government to the arbiter of all human problems confuses the issue. This is one problem where oversight is possible and, with the information we have, is warranted. It's not to say that the government doesn't make mistakes or won't over-regulate (eg County of Los Angeles Safer Sex In the Adult Film Industry Act) but there has been progress in providing safer working conditions.
A nice scifi on that subject is Blindsight by Peter Watts: can something be extremely inteligent and not be sentient?
Are the Blues much different from the Yellow Tops?

I've been running Yellows in my Jeep due to the heavy electrical load from the winch--I've nearly drained the battery a few times having to winch myself out with the motor off--without issue.

From a quick glance, they seem to be the same construction?
What sort of job did you switch to? My problem right now is that I am pretty convinced I'm burned out, but nothing seems better. Objectively the job is fine if a little pointless, and if I can't appreciate that one .. y'know?
> Geary is too buggy/lacks e-mail refresh, KMail is also too buggy although I haven't tried it in a few years

Indeed, my reaction to Geary was "wow, they managed to make KMail look good!"

> Evolution assumes too many GNOME parts

I don't like this about Evolution either; I haven't run a GNOME desktop for at least a decade, and (depending on the distro) it can be a tiny bit fiddly getting Evolution working without a GNOME desktop. It "just works" on recent NixOS versions though. Once it's installed though, it's a joy to use, while Thunderbird feels like a drag. I'm not a UI expert, so I can't put my finger on what the difference is.

> Mailspring is electron-based

I hadn't heard of mailspring previously, but I suspect we have similar views of what at typical electron-based app is like...

> TUIs are right out

I have no problem with TUIs, I use a TUI along side a gui mail client, but the latter is necessary when dealing with non text-only messages (particularly responding to).

> Claws is even more 90s than Thunderbird

Maybe I'm just old, but Claws is way more usable than me than Thunderbird. The only thing it lacks for me is an html e-mail editor, which is necessary for responding and quoting to non text-only e-mails. There are plenty of good TUIs that can handle text-only e-mails, so claws isn't really something I currently have a use for.
Invalid cert authority in Chrome (NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID), and blocked by Cisco Umbrella.
Solipsist of the world, unite!
This is not how humans work. We can see from 2020's politics that people believe all kinds of crazy stuff simply because a youtuber said so, to the point of committing acts of terrorism. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689...

A low-trust society is a significantly less productive and safe place to be. We don't want to go back there.