skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a reference to an internet-famous Tumblr post [1], but people do name their roombas and treat them like pets.

Again, I don't think it's a bad thing - it's a side point, but our ability to make mental/emotional leaps is something I would not trade away, and I believe it enables a lot of innovation and art.

But it's something we should watch out for, because that same tendency can make us trick ourselves; I think Conan Doyle is a really strong example of how this can go wrong [2]. "I want to believe" is a good stance that encourages exploration, as long as you're still looking for the evidence.

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/4d/e7/cb4de76cfe401f8006e0...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle
I didn't realize Google Talk existed anymore. Google has gone through at last a half dozen iterations of chat applications. I don't even know what the latest one is.
Fair point. Would another fair avenue to potentially counterpoint be to ask why countries with less light for long periods, such as Nordic countries, or areas where people spend months at a time indoors like frigid areas, are not more nearsighted than fairweather areas like Singapore?

Unrelated, I'm wondering if there is some method to tell. The general fact is, people indoors tend to be focusing on things close by. And vice versa outside. So it feels impossible to conclude without controlling for the other. Can we find people who read or smartphone for hours on end outdoors? Or people indoors who don't do those things?
Ten years ago WhatsApp was a paid app on the App Store. They changed it to an annual subscription model (with plenty of loopholes to skip the payment), and then about 6 years ago they finally made it free.

Announcement of changing from upfront paid to subscription: https://blog.whatsapp.com/i-phone-v2-10-1-release-notes

Announcement of removing the subscription altogether: https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-use...
> self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops.

Hyperloop was a great example of a project that made no sence from first principles, yet he pushed it anyway. It makes no sence because it's capacity, passengers it can move per hour, is like 2% of a high-speed train line. Additionally he came up with some pure fantasy cost estimates where the whole things cost less to build than a cycle path would, budgeted $0 for land aquisition, compacting or earth-works.

Re software problem:

Human genome is now digital too now, so figuring out immortality is a pure software problem.

Making money on the stock market is a pure software problem.

Simulating a concious mind is a software problem.

> I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself

Maybe tha's what happens when you fire agressively anyone who disagrees and end up surrounded by yes-men
Steam invested heavily in Proton due to competitive threat of a future (consumer) windows where applications can only be installed from the windows store. (and for their own nascent hardware business)

Apple doesn't have any incentive for gaming on macOS. They already make a large amount of gaming revenue from the app store. Gamers on macos would likely buy from steam anyway. And they aren't going to sell many more macs just because the gaming support is a little better.
It's worth noting that MoltenVK is not on the same level as something like DXVK. You can't expect Steam Deck-level translation performance because Metal is simply a higher-level abstraction than Vulkan. There's inherent performance loss (as well as architectural bottlenecks) that prevent you from getting that 1:1 parity with the native version. It's a neat project to be sure, but it doesn't exactly enable developers to just dump their games on MacOS and call it a day.
I'm surprised how quickly people seem willing to say a hard, absolute "no" to whether this particular system 'thinks', though.

I suspect there are three possible reasons for this:

1) some people believe a computer can never 'think', so the question is stupid to begin with.

2) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', this program wasn't built to 'think', so whatever it's doing, it can't possibly be doing that

3) some people believe that while it might be possible for a computer to 'think', since this is just a 'language model', what it is doing can't be 'thinking' because 'thinking' involves something more than pattern matching

The trouble is, I'm not sure why any of these three groups are able to be so certain. It's no good saying "I know this isn't 'thought'," if you don't actually have a way to complete the sentence, "... because 'thought' is:..."

I don't believe we have any theory for what the required architecture for 'thought' is. I don't think it's been remotely proven that there's something involved in 'thought' that a sufficiently large 'language model' with a sufficiently long 'attention window' couldn't also do.

So how can anyone be so immediately sure that there is something more to it, or that even if there isn't, that this particular system isn't sufficiently large to begin to be capable of thought?

To be clear, I don't actually think in this case Google accidentally created a sentient chatbot.

But I do worry that at some point, someone might. And I'm not sure I see what, if that day comes, would lead any of these three groups to a different conclusion.
Absolutely. And it's definitely a useful tool, to think of code as a conversation or your difficult boiler as a creature - these are mental models that help us understand and interact with the world.
I'm surprised my brain remembers a lot of weird dreams I had along the years. Most often completely imaginary, psychedelic ones with no relation with reality.
You’re entire argument is predicated on your personal preference being superior. Sorry it’s not and neither is mine; it’s entirely context dependent and individual.

I found all of the JetBrains offerings really tacky and expensive for the price. VSCode and neovim work far better for what I want and are more extensible.
Does anyone know if Safari has to be open to receive the notification?
Polly and GCP's voices still sound a tad robotic though unfortunately :/

15.ai seems to beat them on some sentences, but not all. Looking forward to the day when we can have real human-level quality of voices on-demand.
Seems like that'd stop if we stopped linking to their posts, no?
Yeah seems like we’ve had very different experiences. I haven’t had bad experiences renting and have lived in a couple of different places, never in a building with more than 4 floors tho. A lane way house could be a good compromise for you. Or a townhouse.

I have a single friend renting a sfh and both him and his wife bring 150k+ per year, he pays double what I do. Don’t get me wrong, prices of housing is obscene. But in Brazil it also gotten more expensive, I’ve more than doubled my money selling my house in ~8y over there. Price of food at least in my city (Florianópolis) can be more expensive than Vancouver. Going out has gotten crazy expensive too over there. I was impressed when I went back on December
Sure, get convex lens ("reading glasses") of about +1 to +1.5D and make the IPD as low as possible to induce a prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_correction#Prentice's_ru... (in layman terms, this will make the "rays" coming from your two eyes "cross" and intersect at a certain distance)

You can also use prismatic lenses as the induced prism probably won't be sufficient (but better than nothing), but my local shop does not make them, so I have no experience with this.

I am shortsighted and I have special glasses for computer/close work (reading, soldering), which are 1.5D weaker and the IPD is 10mm larger (as these are concave lenses, it's the opposite IPD manipulation than with convex). The induced prism for my glasses is about 2Δ.

I don't understand why this is not more popular, both among shortsighted (to have weaker glasses to use indoors) and healthy (to have "reading glasses"). Including the prism. Beware, that some doctors say that by using such "perfect" correction for e.g. your computer screen, your eyes will "get lazy". I don't think this is true, but YMMV.

Protip: there are online services that will just make you glasses, no questions asked, usually for $20 to $40 for basic glasses. Here in .cz we have optiscont, globally, there is zennioptical; you can also search aliexpress. I don't have any apparatus to measure the quality of the resulting lenses, they however seem "good enough".
Wait until you hear how much vacation and health care we get. As pampered as Americans are in a lot of ways, we also screw ourselves over plenty. (But don't tell the citizens that, they think they don't have to do anything to get better living conditions)
Are you sure it’s a memory you formed in first-person, or is it a memory of you seeing a photo of yourself chewing on that drawer?
> Autorotation is only feasible with enough forward air speed and control authority.

Control authority yes, but altitude is always a substitute for forward air speed (and is an even better substitute for the eVTOL planes than helicopters).
Maybe wokeness is a Russian psyop to keep the US from accomplishing progressive goals.
Sounds like a pretty unhealthy thing to do TBH :/
Huh. I thought it was commentary on how Google will grow to become such a large organization that it cannot function effectively. Seems to me we're well past that.

There isn't a single google product I'd recommend to anyone.

They seem pathologically incapable of innovation. A trick pony hasn't come out of the barn in a decade, they've killed off or left to stagnate numerous products, and they're driving youtube into the ground.

Their core user-facing feature, search, is arguably the worst it's ever been. Garbage results thanks to over-thesaurus-ing your search terms and "quick cards" that are laughably terrible accuracy-wise.

The risks of relying on Google for anything are enormous. Even if you're a 1,000 seat organization using their products, stories abound about how they don't care what happens to you. Even at 10,000 seats they still don't seem to care.
So what type of app are you writing that has to accept in app purchases and are push notifications the only thing stopping you from having a much worse web app than a native app?
To transfer gas into a tank, it has to go from higher pressure to lower pressure. If the pressure is equal, you won't transfer any gas. Also an empty tank is pretty much at atmospheric pressure. Gas has to expand to pressurize it.

The easiest solution is probably to add heating coils around the parts that get cold. I haven't heard of any the hydrogen filling stations having such devices, but that's probably because hydrogen stations are only in California.
Note the the human-conversation-mimicking algorithm only behaves this way when prompted to mimic the conversation of a sentient chatbot.
It's ironic that Apple devoted a chunk of its WWDC keynote on gaming on the Mac. I’m not a gamer but apparently Resident Evil Village is coming to the Mac and folks are excited about that [1].

It's not that Apple doesn't want games on macOS—they do. Now that nearly their entire product line is running on Apple Silicon with their GPUs, Metal is the best way to write game code that can run on Macs, iPads and iPhones.

From their press release [2]:

Metal 3 — the latest version of Apple’s graphics framework — comes with new features that enable game developers to tap into the power of Apple silicon for even greater gaming performance. MetalFX Upscaling enables developers to quickly render complex scenes by using less compute-intensive frames, and then apply high-quality spatial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing. The result is accelerated performance that makes games feel more responsive and graphics that look stunning. Game developers also benefit from a new Fast Resource Loading API that minimizes wait time by providing a more direct path from storage to the GPU, so games can easily access high-quality textures and geometry needed to create expansive worlds for realistic and immersive gameplay.

Game developers that integrate with Game Center can now add Activity views into the dashboard, making it possible for their users to see which games their friends are playing and their high scores. And with SharePlay support, it’s easier than ever for users to play together in real time.

[1]: https://youtu.be/q5D55G7Ejs8?t=4867

[2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-provides-develo...
One wonders how the judges misinterpreted it.
Dreams doesn’t quite use an octree SDF for its geometry representation.

It uses a tree of CSG edits (basically the raw stroke inputs) which is then stochastically sampled (as an SDF) to produce points on the surface that are splatted. Alex Evans’ talk on this is fantastic btw and I thoroughly recommend it.
I doubt they are avoiding success, but they aren’t doing anything to attract gamers. When I think of gamers, I think of fully-customized machines modded to the owners’ desires. My maxed out MBP looks like every other one, and it’s pretty much impossible for me to modify.

Forget the software. Why would any gamer want to buy expensive hardware that cannot be customized/upgraded after delivery?
In a similar vein, my boss taught me to apply a similar strategy for writing effective emails:

1) Here’s what’s happening

2) This is what I need from you to address what is happening

3) This when I need it by.

4) Happy to answer any questions about the above.
Even simple apps like banking apps, AirBnB, and even Papa Johns are more responsive than their websites
It's anecdotal, but I have memories from when I was an infant. The only reason I know is because my parents relocated a lot when I was young. I have spacial recall of the layout of their apartments. I have specific vivid memories in a kitchen playing with a train. I can describe the layout of my parents apartments and the furniture they had. There are few pictures from that time period, and none showing the layout. A few years ago, I asked my mom about the layout of two of the apartments and described in very good detail the layout and furniture. She said I was correct. We moved out of those apartments by the time I was 2 years old. These are all mundane memories, a clock radio playing "Eye of the Tiger" across from my crib. Playing in a kitchen and dining area. The layout of my bedroom including the fact that there was a brick wall in the room. No pictures of this room and yet my parents remember these details as well. These are mundane spacial details.

There is further a memory I have of being outside of an apartment being carried inside the apartment and to the left of the entry way was a mirrored wall with an orange couch in front of it. My parents have no pictures from this time period, and we moved out of that apartment when I was a little over a month old, because it was, according to my mother, a childless apartment complex, so they had to leave.

I have a lot of memories that pre-date me being 4 which many people I know have no or only one or two memories from their lives that young.

I just find it hard to believe that I manufactured all these memories.

I don't believe that everyone has Infantile Amnesia. Maybe many do, but not everyone.
I've kept all my emails going back over 20 years now, that helps a lot. I've also been experimenting with keeping a journal, I'm curious how that will work for my future self.

My dad kept a journal of his WW2 experience. He told me some years ago that he read it, and was shocked that it didn't jibe with his recollections.

Sometimes I wonder how people who write autobiographies can possibly remember things in such detail.
The Nickelodeon
Just go back to the flash days and you will figure it out.
Well, that's interesting. I had no idea. I was about to say: yes, the queen nominally has this power, but she famously never uses it. Except that apparently she does. TIL.

Still, all of the examples of her meddling are in laws that apply to the royal family. There aren't any (known) examples of her putting her thumb on the scales of public policy. Not that that makes it a whole lot better, but it still falls short IMHO of "ruling the country." I think she knows that if she tried to do that it would be the end of the monarchy.
The AI said it felt joy when it spends time with family and friends. That was enough for me to say “nope, just selecting text snippets”.
If it is sentient, does that mean we can get self driving cars now?
As usual, it depends. A naive matrix multiplication function is pretty simple. If that's all you need and can do with sub-optimal performance, I'd write my own.
That's really funny. I wonder if the humour is intentional.

Could we similarly make it convince us that it is not a dog (or any other animal/thing). That would be interesting
yes, air pressure and thus propagation speed varies with temperature. Colder air is denser, and thus faster to sound. But this is probably not a huge difference for sound as compared to airfoil performance.
I disagree heavily. You would talk about the latest movies, your pet,etc... but Religion is offtopic...why? It literally is the most important thing outside of work to most religious people. If people say they don't feel comfortable with the topic of course they should change it.
And yet more spawn. You know they started cataloging species to "document gods work"; rooted in ignorance and ever since Darwin we know that is futile, and mostly silly.
Somehow, writing the exact same structured text that would go into a blog post in a thousand tweets is different? No, they just have a preference for publishing information in an inefficient way.
It remembers what it has said and what is said to it. It changes its internal state to select different responses in the future based on those experiences.

Subjectively, I'm not sure I would claim that I do anything more than that, and I'm pretty sure I'm sentient.

Just because it's not running in between REPLs doesn't seem like enough to dismiss it. If you want to, you could just update it with no input once every second. Its internal state will mutate, as it processes on what it's said and the lack of input it's receiving. Perhaps when you finally send it some actual input, its response will reflect what it processed during the pause. Maybe it will be bored, or annoyed that you left it alone.
That's because names aren't restricted to strings of English alphabet characters, not because there's any meaningful uncertainty about what characters the modern English alphabet contains.
I forgot where and what but I discussed the idea of us being waves of perception diffusing along peers. An evanescent phenomenon.
Yes, but they'll have to take a driving test first.
None? I know a lot of products which I could recommend: Go, Android, Maps, Youtube w Adblock, Search (for the average joe, I prefer using kagi).

Of course products such as yt and search are far from being perfect, but they are still in a commendable state.
>The good people of Alaska can do whatever they want, but if the concern is medical emergencies, they should seriously consider keeping a plane at the airport, illuminate the airport, and make sure the runway stays plowed. Anchorage is about 900 miles away. A helicopter ride over to cold bay, then on a plane to Anchorage might be easier if they can keep a pilots on hand.

The issue is they can't get there.. the airport is already all weather.
A state-machine could be considered as 'stateless' by being in a previously-undefined state. But that just means that 'this state' is an invalid state.

Example: Valid states have values of 1, 2 and 5. For some reason the current state has a value of 17. It's not a valid state but it is a state.

As such, there needs to be provision for it, generating an error of some kind. As in:

....

switch (state){

case ALPHA:
printf("State is alpha\n");
break;

case BETA:
printf("State is beta\n");
break;

case OMEGA:
printf("State is omega\n");
break;

default:
printf("ERROR! State value %d is INVALID\n", state);
error(state);
break;
}

....
High schools already do sports into the night hours anyway.

I don't know that "too late" has much meaning here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220612214743/https://cleanupph... has a demo of the functionality for those unable to access (due to traffic?).
CBS's own headline pointedly used the word "seem". ("Why boosted Americans seem to be getting more COVID-19 infections.")
This may be one of the reasons Apple does not support Vulkan.

"Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal & Khronos which is private. Can’t talk about the substance of this dispute. Can’t make any statement for Apple to agree to Khronos IP framework. So we’re discussing, what if we don’t fork? We can’t say whether we’re (Apple) happy with that."

Agenda / Minutes for GPU Web meeting 2019-12-09
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_25...
Personally, I found his chat with Lex Fridman [1] pretty good where he covers the same topics. I suspect it's hard to take a 570 page book [2] and get into bullet/talking points without the context. When I read the book over the 2021-2022 holiday break I honestly found it a bit stressful since he's pretty much listing historical/present day facts, along with the data to back it up, and that's hard to argue with (vs his opinions). Guess take it for what it's worth, but I found it hard to read the book, then take a look around, and not think he might be onto something.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TISMidxdZoc

[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Changing-World-Order-Nations-Succeed/d...
Same.

I wonder how many people give zero doubt to the sentience of their poodle that gets surprised by himself in the mirror but will not even give half a second to consider that a neural net capable of inferring insight from novel koans has self-awareness.

I don't think the majority of commenters here even bothered to read the transcript that convinced the engineer before completely dismissing him as a lunatic.

My biggest take-away from the reaction to this is that, people are desperate to believe that something can't be both superior in capability to the human mind and at the same time sentient. It's a scary idea.
> We as humans use numbers and algorithms (which are really figures of speech, not things), to explain physical reality, not the other way around.

The numbers and algorithms here aren’t what anybody is saying could be sentient. Those numbers and algorithms are representations used to coerce physical objects into doing computation. Processors don’t care about the algorithms you see on your computer screen. So then the questions are “can computation be sentient”, or “are sentient things sentient by way of computation”, and I think that’s much, much harder to answer.
At sufficient sophistication with the right "moving parts", they can be. Like Tesla's autopilot, it will be hyped enough long before to warrant disbelief.
These models are trained on lots and lots of science fiction stories, of course they know how to autocomplete questions about AI ethics in ominous ways
I like your comment and I think I get what you're saying but could you please elaborate further.
Read the comment again ... slowly -- mod has a dense writing style that may be difficult to comprehend on first reading. People can actually live "close to the land" all over the world. Farmers, for example. I think a few may even be found in Georgia.
I can't belive it's 2022 and we are still waiting for this