skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is there an equivalent for C/C++ programs? [...] For C/C++ all I know are multiple different possible build and make systems, but none works like a package manager, as far as I know

Downloading the source by hand, trying to wrangle what dependencies it has not vendored (which may or may not be available through your system package managers, in versions which may or may not be recent enough), and trying to find out how to build it.

Though do note that this issue can also hit when installing python, js, or rust package, if they ultimately have native dependencies. Their respective build systems will generally try to make it work out of the box, but if your configuration was not specifically tested / supported it can break with fun C-level compilation errors.
I need to remember the "sorry for the 'off-by-one' error" when I flip the bird in the future.

It could even become a hilarious t-shirt. Maybe I should look for relevant vector graphics and start designing.
You're being extremely reductive about the nature of "having a clue what it's talking about." The lack of precision in casual English (and, probably, human language in general) is getting in the way of true understanding.

Yes, there are humans who bullshit and bloviate and say things they don't really mean or understand. But that's worlds away from not even having a distinct consciousness that can "understand" anything.

To the best of my knowledge, none of our current AIs have anything that we could meaningfully call consciousness or understanding. The vast majority of them have a set of static "trained parameters" that dictate how they are likely to respond to various stimuli. These parameters are going to be tuned for particular kinds of stimuli. They have no continuous state, no continuous input, and no continuous learning. Every time you submit something to GPT-3, it is just taking that discrete input, sticking it into its neural network, and blindly spitting out what comes out the other end.

I don't know the details of how LaMDA is set up, but I'd guess that it's very similar: it gets discrete inputs and produces outputs that look very much like what a human would say based on them, but it has no internal experience of them. It's not "making decisions", it doesn't have a mood or thoughts or emotions of its own, because that's not how our current generation of AIs work at a fundamental level.

In terms of consciousness and sentience, these AIs aren't just not on the same level as a human: they're not even on the same level as an animal. Even the most basic animal, one that's got no theory of mind or sense of self or anything, is still operating in a continuous feedback loop of input, processing, output, and most animals have enough of what we understand as a mind to be able to continuously learn, and have an internal life of some sort. Watch your dog or cat, and you will be able to see that they have emotions and thoughts, even if they are not thoughts on the same level as our own (most of the time).

AIs have none of this. The entire idea of a current-gen AI "having a clue what it's talking about" is just meaningless, because they have nothing with which to understand it.
Fun fact: Diet Coke has 34% more caffeine than regular Coke

https://www.coca-colacompany.com/faqs/what-is-caffeine#:~:te....
> One wonders what the Private Equity firm's intention was here.

Gee, quite the conundrum.
> 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

Listening to the guests of Lex Fridman on the subject, I'd say the exact opposite: very few of them are pure materialists. I recently tried to listen into a virtual conference of neuroscientists and the keynote (Susan Greenfield) specifically said, "we're not going to be able to turn the water into wine here" that we're only going to be able to discuss the neural correlates of consciousness, etc.

I'm a casual consumer of "popular science" but I only see serious people acknowledge the problem as hard, or explicitly limit their discussion to what-can-be-discussed. I'd say the same for physicists interested in the subject (Richard Penrose and David Deutsch come to mind.)

I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here?

EDIT: I'll add that philosophical idealism isn't rooted in a desire to be special. An advaita guru or zen monk for instance is an extreme idealist philosophically and doesn't exhibit any evidence of wanting to be special.
There's Already a Web5?
I can see that happening. Thinking about Canada. The other day I calculated it would take 25 hours of work for the minimum wage worker to afford a weekend camping. And I think that's a pretty good indication we're pretty close collapse.
Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.
Why do we even think we're sentient? I'll put my hand up to reject that notion.
For me it wasn't a spoiler, and also the video contained more math that I understand than the Wikipedia link (that just was a list of lots of mathematical structures that I don't know anything of, and not part of the computer science curriculum, so I don't expect other hackers to understand them either).
, I say to the police officer as he shoves me into the back of his car and tells me to put my pants back on
There are often written reports in addition to testimony. I don't remember the exact timeframe as it was a long time ago but the report we created was something like 150 pages and was probably roughly halftime+ work for two people for a few months spread somewhat over a longer period.

Honestly, we had a perspective going in--which we had already written about publicly. Facts and conclusions were extensively footnoted. Someone could certainly choose to disagree with us but the fact that we worked on it for quite a bit of time (for which we were well-paid) didn't increase any bias. Indeed, we absolutely would not have taken the case from the other side.
First define what is a "working AI" even mean
Be careful AI is not an iPhone app you will not find any funding for BS in this env.
So often any of these single causal theories forget to look at timespan. Which was either decades or centuries... If system survived previously with mostly same things in place there is really no reason why such thing as lead pipes would be the cause of downfall part. By any reasonable conclusion the culprit in such case should be some disruptive innovation.

In the end gradual natural degradation of system is much more reasonable.
They have debt too. It’s clickbait style writing.
Does serving as an expert witness violate employment agreements with typical tech employers (eg FAANG)? Assuming you are being paid and you’re witnessing for an entity other than your employer.
ffmpeg will do it.

Webcam Capture:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam

Streaming:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide
If one has enough money and retirement savings to pad them through the next year, I'd highly recommend taking this tumultuous period off working in the corporate world.

Burnout is devastating, it cause people to rage quit, it causes people to be unresponsive, and to quit in bad times when they don't have good financial position.

The major points to remember are:

There will always re-entry pains, but you will likely return refreshed if you take time off properly.

Don't settle into the lure of doing nothing and not learning new skills during time off, just learn to do it at a good pace that fits you in between doing things you've always wanted to do while working.

Many companies are running on duct tape, life is always a gamble. It's your responsibility to balance your own risk with reward, and to reduce life's costs, being in undesirable situations, and unpredictability, no employer will do that for you.

Once you burn out, your stability and ability is completely thrown out of place, and you won't be able to maintain any work or life balance of your own. That's when things like homelessness and worse happen. It's important to work out a plan to never be near to, nor in, that burnout position. It's not easy if you're not wealthy I know, but you've always got to ask yourself if the people in life who ask you to do favors for them would do the exact same for you as a guide of who to trust... Life is unforgiving to people who don't have limits, ESPECIALLY during trying times.

Being neither selfish nor selfless is the best way forward in tough times.
Let's not forget his latest project, https://datasette.io/
Sentience seems like some anthropocentrist thing to try and explain why humans get to have dominion over all other species on earth. Well you see, it's because our brains are specialer!

Are we even sure it exists? Maybe asking if neural nets are sentient is as silly as asking what color Tuesday is? Grammatically correct but ultimately incoherent.

IMO it's a waste of neuroscientists' time to try and fit these lay concepts into a scientific model of the brain. Take 'free will' as another example. They could waste decades trying to pinpoint it in the brain, except we know that it was invented by a religious scholar. Does sentience even have a scientific grounding?
Not being forced to enter your credentials in android itself is a feature.

Back in early android-days many email-apps actually added an android account for IMAP/POP accounts. Which felt quite awkward. And I suspect that it was trivial for any app to list your accounts and get all of your registered email-addresses.
> Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data...

You could be describing my brain as well.
Does anyone have good real life stories of how data from a data lake made a real difference in a product or a business?
I'm not saying "the people shouldn’t have access to savings or retirements", I'm just saying that savings and retirements locked up in paper currency under a mattress or precious metals in a hole in the ground doesn't really do much for society as a whole and is negatively productive overall. Money shouldn't be what's valued, investments should be what's valued.

Like I said, I'm not a fan of EO 6102 so I'm not necessarily one here arguing the government knows better than everyone else what to do with your wealth. I'm just arguing its not great for society if everyone just digs their own hole to store their acorns indefinitely. Its better for us to actually use our wealth instead of hoarding it away in negatively productive places.

I have a good bit of savings and retirements. Very little of it is in "money". Most if it is in some kind of productive asset actively building wealth not just in my investment but with the rest of society overall. If your retirement is based around holding a lot of paper (money) in a box under your mattress you're gonna have a bad time.
While my system is admittedly hacky, anyone I would hand development off to would be able to pick it up much easier than the company's pipeline, as it uses the tools they know and is pretty basic... none of them know the CICD pipeline.

I used to try to align when possible, but lately it hasn't made a lot of sense. Keeping up with the tooling ends up being the whole job, as they change it every 6 months. This site is a side project to help out the team, not my primary job. I can't be dropping everything each time they decide to switch vendors, change up their variables names, or whatever else they decide to do.
I think sensory input is required for self awareness. Given this machine had sensors for interacting with the world, and was capable of replicating the complicated structures in our brain then yes, it could become self aware given sufficient development.
> I think that being able to dynamically replace behavior from almost anything at any point in your program is pretty much very different from Python, Java and C#.

Javascript is pretty popular.
That's very reasonable. But there was a slow collapse of the economy that is an intermediate cause in the chain of events that is central to the fall.

You can speculate what caused that collapse, that in turn caused the fall and there are also many causes to consider, but again, there is one intermediate cause that is Christianism. The religion altered several aspects of the economy: slavery, commerce and lending.

Now you can again speculate about what make them think it was a good idea to adopt Christianism as official religion. If a previous crisis existed that shook the foundations of the empire. Anyway, it seems the solution solved nothing.

So xxx --> Christianism --> Economy --> Fall
This article is subtle self-referential satire. It begins by claiming "most experts have no idea what they're talking about", and then goes on to fully illustrate this point with itself.
Think U.S. Gas Prices at $5 a Gallon Are Bad? Try $10
And you believe that Ruby both does not make it easy to learn this concept and makes aggressive use of this concept?

I believe you're severally overestimating the impact and importance of one quirk when many developers are picking up wildly differing languages and decently successful at it all the time.
This title is really misleading, they weren't fired at all, maybe they were almost fired. And it was before they started as a full time employee, but it was for something they did while working as an intern.
> One wonders what the Private Equity firm's intention was here.

no, i don't think anyone's wondering that. private equity firms have one purpose and one purpose only.
> I wonder how you could check this with any kind of application?

You find a lawyer or a firm that specializes in patent searches.

If you discover a patent and then infringe upon it, you'll be committing willful patent infringement vs. patent infringement. See https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/federal-circuit-clarifies-... .

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.)
Yup I've seen it at just about every company I've worked for. A cluster of microservices that is really just a distributed monolith. Is it really a microservice if changing one part of it requires making echoing changes to every service downstream? Is it really a microservice if one part breaking causes the entire system to fail spectacularly?

I feel like the pendulum is starting to swing the other way as companies learn that microservices aren't the end-all solution to their process problems, and that prioritizing new features every sprint and constantly pushing housekeeping, bugsquashing, and system improvements will result in a broken collection of microservices just as quickly as it resulted in a broken monolith.
adult individuals have the inalienable right to do what they want with their own bodies

I agree 100%. What is freedom if I can't do anything I want with my body? That's the most basic of freedoms. Do I know people who are alcoholics and have had their lives ruined by alcohol? Yes. I also know people who enjoy alcohol responsibly. Do I know people who smoked like a chimney and got lung cancer? Yes. I also know people who only smoke a cigarette or two a couple of times per week when enjoying a drink at a bar and don't have any problems. Do I know people who became heroin addicts and died in a span of three weeks from first using heroin? Yes. I also know people who smoke a joint every so often and are doing just fine.

Freedom has a price. Some people will use their freedom to wreck their lives. You just have to accept that, shake your head, and use it as an example to others for how not to use your freedom. At the end of the day though the choice is yours - you're free to wreck your life if you so choose. No government has the power to take that freedom away from you.
I’m surprised they didn’t rotate the handlers to prevent this very scenario from occurring. If I was running a totalitarian state, I wouldn’t want my “watchers” becoming too familiar with their targets.
this is pretty cool! i've definitely been digging through reddit threads - I like that you also index 'deleted' posts. how much are you looking to charge for the service?
> More concretely, phenylalanine is in all sorts of foods like eggs, chicken, milk, soybeans, and breast milk. Remember how phenylalanine is an essential amino acid? And remember how you’re reading this right now and not dead? From these facts, we may conclude that you consume phenylalanine all the time.

Oh man, this had me chuckling and is a great TLDR for many supplements.
Then maybe that’s why this service is shutting down? It was supposed to be a loss-leader, hooking people with a free tier. But now instead of getting more people to sign up and convert to paying customers, it’s just a drain?
Consciousness is a manifestation of desire. Its entire purpose it to fulfil desires.

Everything you do in life is in service of a need or a want. Consciousness is simply a really complicated computer designed to realize those needs and wants as efficiently as possible. Collect wood -> fire -> warmth -> get lucky.

So, from an artificial consciousness standpoint: how can we make a computer _desire_ things? What things do we want it to desire? What goal is chasing? What does it _want_? And, perhaps more importantly, _why_ does it want it?

Ultimately, the root of our desires is the avoidance of death. What impetus would a computer have, if not that?
Sounds plausible

To elaborate tether is making the switch to dollars harder so people are preferring other stable coins?
I think GP is referring to the ban on lead solder for tin cans that went into place in 1980.

A bit of a stretch to call it intentionally adding lead to food, but in practice, not that different.
Maybe not, but I'm actually kind of dismayed by how bad the refutations of the claim have been so far. They all just assume the premise that it can't be intelligent and say stuff like "it's just pattern matching" or "you're gullible if you think it's intelligent"... Ok, can we not do a better job making the case and explaining what the gap between this and a biological mind is?
That's pretty standard now for new home construction. Newly built homes are pretty tightly insulated as a standard.
> except they managed to hire a very senior GCC developer. I trust that he did his due diligence before joining them, so I must assume what they are building is real.

"Lots of money" and interesting challenge can be the due diligence, it's not like the product has to be realistic to get paid (it helps in the long run, but in the short run VC money pays the bills).

Hell, they might even believe in the product. Linus spent 6 years at Transmeta.
Thank you Simon, truly an incredible job creating, learning, and sharing with the world. Definitely one of my biggest inspirations as nearly every day there is a new discovery in the feed or on twitter.
I've been using Rails for 15 years, and probably written or supported 20 apps with it. In all the reading I've done on it, and all the work I've done with it, I've never used JRuby, nor seen it implied that this was the "correct" way to run an app in production. As an appeal to authority, Heroku's default is MRI.
I use Thunderbird on my late `09 Mac Mini. Last week I was testing an html email that uses Bootstrap css for the design layout and it looked great in Thunderbird, Gmail strips any tags for links to css files, and so does Roundcube, so it looked like crap in those.

So then I tried embedding the css in the email and same thing. Thunderbird rendered it perfectly and the others ignored and/or removed it. I'm at a loss as to why CSS in an email is ignored or stripped out by Gmail. Sure makes it ugly though.
Which is about $23k (down 17%!) for those (like me) who don't track Bitcoin that closely. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD?p=BTC-USD&.tsrc=fin-...

Bitcoin is an ecological disaster. It won't be missed.
They couldn't be more different.

Java's synchronized keyword changes how code is interpreted to use expensive locking and data fences in order to prevent logical race conditions.

Rust's semantics do not alter the compiled code or insert any locking behavior. They prevent you from writing incorrect code to begin with.

In other words, Rust doesn't do anything magical to deal with data races at run time. It prevents you from expressing programs that have data races in the first place. It's a compile time analysis, not a run time behavior.
> You say speculative, I say productive.

Oh I totally agree! Stocks in companies are absolutely productive assets. Though they are still speculative. I guess the first thought that comes to mind is well, so what? Does it make sense for individuals to plow money into the stock market even at all-time highs? Should you basically have to perform an investor level due diligence for buying these productive assets? Sometimes I think we are duped by the liquidity in ways we wouldn't be if we were deciding whether or not to buy a farm or a movie theater.

> Is a non-productive store of value actually a thing which exists in nature?

Gold is probably the closest we've ever gotten. Besides that I'm not sure. But then that begs the question I was responding to regarding savings for "regular people". Is it impossible to save money without buying into the stock market? Idk.
The numbing rise of IP TV
We use the name I specify because it's useful to do so. No courtesy. Just utility.

And if I had a distinguishing feature, that would be used to identify me too.

If I wear a big hat then I will be identified as a big-hat-wearer. When asked to distinguish me in a crowd they will say, "that guy with the big hat". Telling everybody that I actually identify as a small-hat-wearer will make zero functional difference.

That's how distinguishing features work.
> I think culture did, for a moment, put on stage real adults with a mature reconciliation with the nature of life. It seems we're sliding back into something.

I think that's just human nature. We long for transcendent meaning, and scientific positivism by its very nature cannot possibly provide it, so the scientist mirage that rationality alone with the careful study of nature could build a grown-up atheist discourse quickly fell apart and left us with the "new wave" religions.

As a rational atheist, I still have hopes that we can build a spiritual stance based on rationality and scientific advancement, but I believe that the basis for this position to work is eclecticism - i.e. not assuming any religious mental corpus as inherently superior to the others (that implies, not even atheism over all kinds of theism). Recognize that theistic religious believers can be as rational and deep in their mental models as scientific skeptics, even if you don't believe in those teachings yourself. It worked well for the Romans, so I believe this approach is viable.

How do you rationally reconcile as valid all those competing theories, when they are logically incompatible with each other, though?

My ideal religion would hold narrative, and the emotions it conveys, as the sacred tenet of spiritualism. Think of "Speaker for the Dead" novel by Orson Scott Card; that narration was created from a theistic belief, but it equally resonates with atheists on an emotional level.

All humans can identify with the power of a good story, it's hardwired into our brains. A religion that teaches tolerance towards alternate foundational myths, recognizing that everyone will have strong feelings about the stories they grew up with, can generate the empathy necessary for everyone to live with their own beliefs without imposing them on others. The teachings of this religions would be letting everyone believe in the narratives they prefer in those aspects that are indemonstrable by logic and science, thus avoiding religious wars.