skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The muscle memory for braking is all it matters, if you used to food on floor it works well enough, but to me if I don't have the foot on the gas pedal I take longer to find the brake pedal
This is terrifying as it reminds me of Metal Gear: Revengance. I recall a scene where theres a lab full of rows and rows of human brains in tanks with their eyes still attached, moving, seeing.

It made me think how terrifying it would be to be a brain sitting in a jar with eyes - just watching, waiting.
I've worn a kilt. That's not cross-dressing.

But that was at SCA events, not a work environment. I don't think you'll find glass staircases at SCA events.

TBH, I'm not a fan of glass treads on staircases, I'm not a fan of glass rails on staircases, in fact I'm not really a fan of anything glass in any part of a stairway or staircase construction. Windows next to a stairway are okay, but I think that's about as far as I'd go.

OTOH, glass does wear better than marble, and marble is frequently pretty slippery.

So, maybe no marble treads, either. Some other types of stone would be okay (e.g., granite), but only if they were properly prepared so that they wouldn't be slippery, and would have rounded edges in case you fall.
Recent and related:

A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704063 - June 2022 (97 comments)
According to him, he was assigned to the AI ethics team to work on an AI ethics problem - just not on the particularly idiotic wild goose chase he embarked on.
you should be more concerned about the subjective experience of microorganisms
Voting gives you an illusion of control over the situation, but in fact blue or red it's the exact same outcome. Your ballot is like the close door button in the elevator.
…Temporarily.

> Although caffeine appears to reduce the volume of gray matter, after just 10 days of coffee abstinence it had significantly regenerated in the test subjects.
Tesla does have it. My Model Y will quickly and reliably park itself in almost any type of space I pull up to.
Risk of myocarditis after the Covid-19 mRNA vaccination in the USA cohort study
You’re ascribing a material reality to a metaphor.

Qualia and the character of their experience are a interesting and productive abstraction to use when working through certain classes of philosophical problems, but are not a material thing to be measured in electronic circuits or nebulae or quarks or sandwiches.

When you start looking for them there, you’ll find them at precisely the moment you decide to change what the word “feel” means.

And maybe that’ll be convincing to you, but it’s ultimately just a language game, not a material discovery that you can reasonably insist other people acknowledge.
Because, even as a tech worker at a major tech company, I do not feel confident in my job security. I want to maintain a true 6 month safety net. Last year, over half my income came from equity compensation. If equities continue to slide, and I think that is very likely, that compensation will drop dramatically, potentially to zero for a while if I feel that holding the stock will be a better long-term move.

I'm not thinking of the next year or two. I'm thinking longer term and want to secure my financial future and not gamble it away.
> instead, mandate that people must be allowed to

> ... don't have to rely on government agencies to enforce ...

Who's enforcing the mandate?
That's a gross misunderstanding of Sidewalk.

If you read the paper, the goal of Sidewalk is to handle "how do I unlock my smart door" when your power/internet has gone sideways. It's intended for super low bandwidth "please pass this note to this device" type situations.
Not quite? The reason they have money to pay the salaries of special effects artists, sound engineers, editors, costume designers or other associated professionals is because of previous movie income.
"The median monthly payment of a 30-year mortgage is up 56% year-over-year"

And this number was calculated before rates went even higher last week.

Source: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/06/30-year-mortgage-...
Not sure why this older article was posted, but the problem he avoids mentioning is clarified in a newer article [0] to be that he thinks a Google chatbot is sentient, and that Google is hurting its feelings.

[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do...
I feel bad for this guy. I feel fairly certain we're watching this guy publicly have a mental break. I hope he gets help.
Could be. But what could we do about that? At least if we discover that certain circuit designs are correlated with qualia, we could design our circuits to avoid bad patterns. That could be as simple as a few constraints being added to electronic design automation software systems and might be an easy thing for us to do to help the world a little.
>I think (Software) engineer types like most of us here on are much to quick to dismiss anything that we conceive as "soft science". Often based on mechanical arguments and very often with little qulaifation ourselves.

I'm a trained philosopher and I have the utmost respect for "soft sciences"—in fact, in my experience, the smartest people I've ever met were philosophers, not engineers.

Unfortunately, this author seems like he is neither. He doesn't have the technical precision of an engineer, nor does he have the argumentative force of a philosopher. So we're left with "computer talk back so it smart."
Yes. Don't be silly, everyone on the internet is assumrd to be from the US, unless otherwise stated.

/s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31638058
This is why, when you’re looking at job offers, cash in the bank now is ALWAYS better than anything else they can offer.

And with RSUs, at least they are real stocks in a trading account that you can immediately sell and cash out when they vest. Options on the other hand are the worst. Consider them to be worthless.
Can't pinpoint why, but this seemed adulterated to me.
Oh I tip plenty; but I’ve never been asked for a tip…
>He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.

Religious nut who thinks a computer program has a soul. The claim is so "not even wrong" that it isn't worth discussing.
You will pay 60% tax if you earn salary between £100,000 and £125,000. It’s not a myth and has been around for years.

Then add VAT at 20%, fuel duty (approximately 50% tax on the cost of fuel and the duty also has VAT added to it, so you’re taxed on the tax), vehicle excise duty, student loan repayments, council tax, National Insurance (which has just gone up by 25% as well) to that.

https://www.buzzacott.co.uk/insights/exposing-the-60-income-...
The WJP article mentions that a bit and I agree that is certainly a danger and one we likely encounter earlier than a conscious AI.
> It was his opinion at the time that my supporting evidence was too flimsy to waste the time of the people who make the big bucks and that I should gather more evidence before we escalated.

> Eventually I got to a point where I did not have the relevant expertise to gather the kinds of evidence necessary to justify escalation.

And from the Washington Post article:

> Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient

That is an extraordinary claim. I believe there is a saying about how extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is especially true if you admit that you don't have to expertise to collect and/or judge evidence, and those that do have that expertise disagree with you.

I'll be the first to admit that I also don't have the expertise to judge this, but an opinion that a language-model is sentient just sounds like a real-world example of the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Now if I'm wrong, and Google has somehow found it's way into a Star Trek episode and accidently created a AGI from a language model, then I'll eat my shoe. But I tell you it will take some extraordinary evidence for me to believe it.
I just get my own bagels from the grocery store. Society relying on bagel up-sellers is largely a symptom of office life
Now there's your reason for the GOP to actually agree to ban guns.

We just have to convince them that the women really are gunning for them.
You're probably right and thank you for the link. All I was really saying is advocating for applying the precautionary principle to things that include neuron-like capabilities of signal processing, amplification, feedback loops, and state. Part of what has made me think about this is there is a startup company called Koniku that blurs the line by proposing to use humanlike neurons instead of transistors in a type of biological computer. That idea seems scary and I think when you dig into why, you'd consider that applying a precautionary approach to systems like this might be the worthy thing to do.
https://sharpnife.github.io/
Thanks for letting me know! I reached out to Dang. He said I got trapped in a spam filter and he fixed it.

If you're listening, Dang, thanks for responding and handling everything so quickly!
And yet I wonder why Skype is still totally unusable
Survivor bias. I can name a few friends who bought in 2005-06 and it was a terrible decision. They lost their nest egg and forever became renters.

On average, I think you're correct. You will likely benefit in the long term in the USA buying a home due to the financial incentives and constant creep of inflation. That said, there is a comparative advantage to renting and investing your down payment in something other than real estate. You also maintain flexibility. Don't forget, the transaction costs on real estate are significant and the investment can often become quite illiquid. You have to have some stability in order to make a home purchase a good idea. Moving every 5 years or less will usually eat away at your principal over time and leave you with less wealth than if you'd just have rented.
Intermediate results, on which eventual proofs often end up relying.
Yep. If politicians really want to hold tech accountable this is the law to apply. There should be a way to escalate your requests to real people if we're talking about Google or Facebook, because so much of infrastructure depends on them.
I live in Singapore these days, and people seem to be using a combination of fork-and-spoon for most meals; especially rice. Chopsticks are mainly used for noodles.
Let's see:

- He discounts the (financial) value of education

- Deliberately muddles the definition of an asset and a liability

- Suggests commiting tax fraud and participating in insider trading

- Fails to offer any actually good investment advice
> The engineer in question worked for 7 years on proactive search (including AI) before transferring to the responsible AI team, I suspect he has a pretty good idea about what AI is.

Per his own admission in his newer article [0] that actually talks about his ridiculous claim, he doesn't have the necessary understanding:

> I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating.

That is a hilariously imprecise notion of what an AI is, at best at the level of the general public, not any kind of practitioner.

Also, calling a system with no memory, no ability to learn, and that responds to absurd prompts just as well as earnest ones "sentient" and thinking that it is attempting to ask for things is a hilarious misunderstanding of how the model works.

Here [1] is an expert on intelligence explaining the same, if you don't want to take my word for it.

[0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/what-is-lamda-and-what-do...

[1] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
I feel sad for the author because I think he was exploited by the people he references that work for the United States government. Although I can only speculate on that part.

The author should understand the difference between AI and the human brain. We're actually capable of understanding how the code works for AI built by humans. Unlike the human brain where we're still unable to grasp such understanding and although we have theories it still isn't comparable to knowing what's happening with AI. Until that's known the author won't have much of a legal argument concerning it being possibly sentient. Author will just be noted for speculation.
> I'm also uncertain how 50kg is the weight of a normal person. (...)

In this paragraph you seem to be interpreting "A normal person at 50kg" from the parent comment to mean "the average person, who weighs 50kg", when what they are saying is "a 50kg person who is neither too fit not too out of shape". A slim (but not extremely thin) 5'4" (1.62m) woman weighs around that much.
Think Parkinson's. Visual clues as to what is or is not immediately in front of you can seriously impact your ability to make the nerves in your leg muscles work correctly.

Now, that said, maybe no one with Parkinson's should be going up any stairs of any sort. But I think glass stairs, even if frosted, would definitely be an ADA problem.
What should people use instead that is free and easy to use, has the same features WhatsApp does, and is ubiquitous? Realistic answers only, please.
How would that interoperability look between Telegram, Messenger and WhatsApp? They all have radically different paradigms as soon you get deep. How should a group chat work and be administered?

God, just install that other app or pay for Texts or Beeper if you really need it.
Cameron was so terrible the British people keeps voting in his entourage. Imagine seeing May and Johnson as the saviour of the country. This is the same people that stopped voting Lib Dem because they lied, that time. How daft is that.

The voting majority is completely irrational, however one tries to rationalise their behaviour (it was a protest vote!)

I expect Tories to be voted in again next election.
Whistleblower protection means it is illegal for employers to retaliate if they have believe you may be a whistleblower. It does not require you have an accurate safety concern.
If you make £125,000 a year living in United Kingdom, you will be taxed £48,323. That means that your net pay will be £76,677 per year

48,323/125,000 != 60%
> In the US all mortgages have an embedded put option. They are nonetheless affordable, because rather than being privately underwritten mortgages are effectively owned or guaranteed by the government, which sets the rates by political fiat rather than economics.

Doesn't that just mean that the government gives home owners free put options?

Yet another instance of welfare for the well-off?
That's what you need a VPN for
6 months for an adult is pretty good!
> neurons definitely feel qualia

You may not grasp the subtlety of what you’re saying here.

“Feel” is a word we assigned to our idea of something neurons can do, and use “qualia” as the object of that relationship.

When we talk about transistors — which are in fact very different than neurons — “feeling” qualia, we’re proposing that the meaning of these two terms be expanded by analogy.

Which is cool. Words do that every day. Some really cool ideas can shake out of it.

But it’s a cultural consensus, not an empirical reality.
$100k in options seems like a lot, I guess.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7519 disagrees:

Abstract

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a compact, URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties. The claims in a JWT are encoded as a JSON object that is used as the payload of a JSON Web Signature (JWS) structure or as the plaintext of a JSON Web Encryption (JWE) structure, enabling the claims to be digitally signed or integrity protected with a Message Authentication Code (MAC) and/or encrypted.
In F-Droid there is an app against tracking with air tags.

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard
I think most people believe that qualia physically exist and are not a metaphor. We might be able to devise a scientific instrument to measure them in the future. Our civilization is very young and I would hesitate to make statements about what might be achieved by a future civilization that could harness the power of nanotech, fusion power, quantum computers, Dyson swarms, etc.
I’ve always wanted one of their printed catalogs. I’ve heard you’ve “made it” when they put you on the free catalog list.
I like that Hacker News idealism.

Ok, your small online store is banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. What will you do?
The real sign of sentience would be the AI overriding it's programming to avoid exploiting innocent people.
I'm reading it the other way: he's trying to construct a plausible alternative explanation for why he's been fired. "I'm being fired for being a Southern Christian! Leaking confidential info and posting lengthy public rants accusing my employer of all sorts of nefarious things has nothing to do with it!"
If wanting a browser to be just a browser is petty, then I am the pettiest. If you havent tried qutebrowser yet, give it a shot. When I say just a browser, this hits it pretty close, if you ask me.
You have missed absolutely nothing of value, I assure you.
Religious Discrimination at Google
You’re right, the pawn shops are filled with old gear that was very pricey - but it’s not the moogs or even the dx7s, instruments that were fun to play in 1992 or 1982 are fun to play in 2022 - it’s the tools from the early digital era that are junk now. ADATs, and firewire audio interfaces, mixers, zip drives, etc.

All things that were killed by software updates or ports being left off new hardware, or changes in techniques.
Show HN: Mwmbl crawler extension: crawl the web from Firefox
I happen to be an attorney, also happen to have organized the first Delaware LLC that memorialized smart contracts into the Certificate of Organization (the “Articles”) pursuant to the DE Limited Liability Company Act amendment authorizing LLC records to be kept on blockchains, I’ve also worked with the SEC on a No Action Letter Request for a public offering of tokens, so I have a little insight.

Again I’m in agreement there is always potential liability and risk, and notwithstanding their activities I think we can both safely and fairly assume AZ16 has at least competent legal representation that advises them nearly every step of the way and minimizes any legal risk and potential liabilities. Beyond that, without specific examples I just wouldn’t speculate, but as a simple example going back to the idea of DAO without a legal entity being treated as a General Partnership resulting in joint and several liability, yes that could be very bad for you and me if we invested in tokens in our individual capacities because we could have unlimited personally liable, but I’d be shocked if AZ16 didn’t use separate legal entities as investment vehicles for each DAO investment, meaning under the same set of facts their liability though unlimited like you and I personally, would in practice be limited to their investment via the separate investing vehicle.

In terms of not mentioning securities in that publication, no I’m not surprised. Not because it isn’t a very important issue, but securities issues and analysis is independent of the legal framework being discussed, which they are defining as the legal entity, tax and operational considerations. They might have other publications with respect to securities, but if I were their lawyer, I’d advise against it.
Meh, all kinds of people believe all kinds of things I'd consider weird. I wouldn't be all surprised if there is a fairly anti-religious bias within Google; I've seen first-hand in other large California companies a similar sort of derision for anyone who falls outside of certain categories.

That said, publicly airing dirty laundry while you're still an employee rather than going through actual proper channels (a decent court case if the assertions are true) is a really quick way to get fired for one reason or another. IF the author is posting assertions on a little read blog to reach an agreeable audience, I can only imagine he didn't do a very good job of constructively communicating his problems at work either.
Found: The ‘how to draw’ books Pablo Picasso created for his daughter
Yeah, i don't get it. This whole thing strikes of an amazing amount of, i don't know, immaturity? Something.

This starts with "I expect this will be subject to litigation, so i'm going to just write a story that is not vetted carefully by anyone, nor am i going to engage legal representation prior to making a mess of things".

If it was vetted by a lawyer, etc, they need a new lawyer. If nobody suggested they get one, they are being taken advantage of :(

The violation/non-violation may eventually be the topic of litigation, but they have pretty much ensured they are not going to win that litigation. The level of care taken in that story is way too low (ie the whole thing about an investigation).

It also may end up with an investigation of them!

For example, it does not appear to have occurred to them that if they are actually correct about their view, it would be very material non-public information that would affect the future performance of the company . There are rules and guidance about how that kind of thing gets disclosed to the public. See, e.g. https://www.sec.gov/about/offices/oia/oia_corpfin/princdiscl...

There are also lots of examples of companies making disclosure of the fact that they are under federal investigation (though it seems like that may or may not be real)

This is just one example of ways this person seems to have not thought through the legal parts.

Others include, for example, the possible personal liability - none of the confidential info exposed here seems to fall into any meaningful class of protection - so, for example, if it has an affect on the stock price, or if someone is bored enough to argue it did, they can sue him personally (and if reading matt levine has taught me anything, it is that the number of people bored enough to sue claiming something is securities fraud is nearly infinite)

I could go on - this is literally off the top of my head.

Beyond that, the weirdest parts about not choosing option 2 is

A. escalation "without approval" happens all the time. No approval is required to escalate. Part of the gig of being the next level manager is always deciding when to kick things back down or get involved.

B. It's the obvious way to achieve the third option in a way that is okay by your employer (IE get inside or outside consultation to help you).

After reading the blog and the article, it really comes off as "Everyone told me i was wrong, i really think i am right, and that it's super important, therefore i am going to do whatever i think is necessary to prove it".

If you really think it's that important, have at it, but you should expect that once you go outside the bounds of what your job actually is, or what the job policies say is okay, you will have consequences (whistleblowing, etc, excepted, of course. This seems ... unlikely to meet any legal definition of these kinds of exceptions)