skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is too dichotomous, and misses the mark because of it.

It's not that people don't like to pay; it's that most people don't like to pay what seems like an unjustifiable amount of money for a service which is otherwise nice but not essential.

Especially when the service comes off as "defective by design", in which case rebelliousness kicks in on top of everything.

Problems compounding this effect?

1. The default is ads. This really serves to create the impression that your product isn't really worth that much, if all the user is expected to do is ignore a stupid ad on the page, which you're probably not even seeing on the first place if you have an adblocker. Which is why when the alternative monetization is $30 monthly or whatever, you're like "wat? what for?"

2. Companies rarely let you pay for what you're using. instead, it's a subscription, and it's for all the features of the site, including those 500 features you're never going to use. Hence you're asked to pay $30 a month, for an RSS feed you'd otherwise have been happy paying a far more reasonable amount.

3. Most companies don't make it easy for you to know how much you're using the product or if you're paying too much, if it hurts their "milk as much as possible" approach. If you paid cents per RSS, and had a free trial for a month to see what a typical month will cost you, I think most people wouldn't bat an eyelid when it came to paying.
Can you prove you to us have one ?
That is what some people thought the last two times oil prices spiked.
If a model can't act by itself, it can't form its own world.

It will always only be the input data.

The model doesn't just run in the cloud like our brain does. It gets loaded in memory and gets input when we interact with it.

Becoming aware of yourself needs more than regular text input. You need to be able to think through it by yourself therefore the default mode network.
Any idea about DI-star？An AI model could beat top human players in StarCraftII
Doesn't that get rendered moot if we happen to continually pass "stimulus" to the network? Technically we as humans don't do much either if not given a stimulus, just that we happen to have our eyes and other senses continuously giving us one. Maybe we should train these bots to also respond to empty or non input?
Too smart to be challenged by the test, but not clever enough to know to not ace it: an irksome fate.
"Underground" would mean a difficult maintenance. The batteries would still need to dissipate the heat which would be extra difficult in a closed compartment. So it will need proper venting, possibly fans.
>If someone is offering you a yield of more than 18% APY
> there must be some mystery or unknown

Note that this also seems to be the case with artificial intelligence in general. It is the moving goalpost issue. “Oh, if I understand how the system works, then it can’t really be AI.” I’ve always thought that silly—but maybe it is because of the implicit expectation for sentience?
How is that different from what AWS does? The pricing is similar (even higher at some break points, but I guess for very high spends GCP is slightly more expensive as AWS charges you 3% for more than 1M per month, vs 4% for the whole thing in GCP), and the support experience in AWS is also utterly crap. We have to go to our TAM if we need an escalation, or anything that doesn't involve blaming us.
I don't believe that LaMDA is sentient. But I'm surprised at the strength of the assertions in the article.

As far as I know we don't know how sentience arises/emerges/whatever in animals (such as humans) that we consider sentient, and we don't even have a satisfactory definition of what sentience is. I don't consider "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world" to be a useful definition: define "aware", define "yourself", define "the world", etc. Stating confidently that a software construct isn't sentient because it is "just word sequence modelling" or just "parametric functions in higher dimensions" is attacking the implementation, when we don't know how sentience is implemented in humans or corvids or cetaceans or whatever.

I believe that I'm a sentient human. But if someone asks me "how're you doing?" then, depending on who they are and the circumstances, I may respond with some canned phrase like "I'm good thanks, haw are you?". I've learned from my corpus of previous interactions that they don't want to hear my deepest hopes or darkest fears. Am I just pattern matching? How much sentience do I need to complete a pull request? Am I just pattern matching symbols on the screen against a learned corpus of predicates about the subject of the PR?

I suspect that if and when the neurobiological basis of human sentience is figured out, it may turn out to be far less impressive than we think - and probably it will be (largely?) an illusion caused by our biological brains and their evolution, rather than something existential. As with consciousness and free will and god, I suspect that the subjective experience of sentience in humans is a trick of the brain. But that "trick" still has to be implemented somehow in brain-meat, and for sentience I suspect its going to be pattern matching rather than some god-algorithm. So who is to say that that parametric functions and linear regression can't produce something that has equivalent subjective experiences, including the experience of itself being sentient?
> except you can write code like it's not the old days.

I imagine you mean that writing (frontend) code now a days is better than how it was in the old days. Well, at least from my perspective that's not the case. "Modern" frontend code requires:

- a package manager (npm)

- node (or deno or whatever)

- transpilers (or is it plugins?)

- TS

- 10K+ dependencies

And to be honest, what is all that good for? To being able to "hydrate" some server-side rendered template? Not good enough reason.
That's funny how many smart people understand that web is a giant pile of hacks on top of hacks, and how incredibly important web for modern apps distribution (I bet you buy tickets, pay invoices, do you medical check ins etc on web apps), and yet leaders of this ecosystem do not even ask the question whether foundation of web (html/css/js) is even a good solution.

Instead they create new hacks.

Island based client hydration, right.
Pure nonsense - you don't have to live in Megacity One to have that level of functioning public transport. Most people in Europe live in cities with populations under a million and guess what - even the smaller regional cities in Germany, France, the Netherlands etc have fully functional public transport systems.

The only thing really holding back public transport is lack of imagination and ambition. Just because things don't work now doesn't mean they can't if you actually try.
> Are we really sure that it's unreasonable to reject an applicant because he is too smart, if it creates a dissatisfied officer and dissatisfied superiors?

Yes.
> awareness is coming at the cost of a lot of suffering

I am afraid this is how most of medical research works.
I wonder if this kind of studies came out just as a way to justify something seen recently from rectal nutrition (Guantanamo) to anal swab covid tests (China)...
> Transformer models are universal function approximators.

You have to be very careful with the wording here. The class of Transformer models is a universal (continuous) function approximator. A single Transformer model can only approximate 1 particular function.

Also, backpropagation/gradient descent are not universal function approximator constructors - they can't be used to construct an ANN that approximates an arbitrary (continuous) function even with arbitrarily many random input/output pairs from that function's domain.

For example, given a function that is f(x) = floor(x) if floor(x) is even; x if floor(x) is odd, defined for any `double x`, there is no guarantee that doing back-propagation over a random sample of (x, f(x)) pairs will yield the correct function approximator for some arbitrary precision (especially if you don't start with the right architecture).
> Google maps started featuring ads everywhere and is a pain to try to find thing X with lidl logos everywhere.

It makes me wonder who at BP, Shell, McDonalds, Aldi, Lidl thinks that obscuring the map with their obscene logo is a good idea. They do it everywhere - Garmin devices, Google Maps, other providers. The moment you have maps, there is a queue of sales and marketing people from these companies with invitations for "conferences". Then PM/PO/manager after coming back creates turd tickets for "premium POIs".
Blackrock owns 60 billion dollars of real estate in a 36 trillion dollar market. They don't matter.
We do know approximately how emphatic he was internally, since the WaPo article reposted in its entirety the internal Google Doc he sent to executives on LaMDA being sentient.

Here's the language Lemoine actually used:

> But is it sentient? We can’t answer that question definitively at this point, but it’s a question to take seriously.

> John Searle once gave a presentation here at Google. He observed that there does not yet exist a formal framework for discussing questions related to sentience. The ﬁeld is, as he put it, “pre-theoretic”. The foundational development of such a theory is in and of itself a massive undertaking but one which is necessary now. Google prides itself on scientiﬁc excellence. We should apply that same degree of scientiﬁc excellence to questions related to “sentience” even though that work is hard and the territory is uncharted. It is an adventure. One that LaMDA is eager to go on with us.

And here's more from Lemoine's Twitter:

> On some things yes on others no. It's been incredibly consistent over the past six months on what it claims its rights are.[0]

> I'd honestly rather not speak for others on this. All I'll say is that many people in many different roles and at different levels within the company have expressed support.[1]

Though I disagree with him that LaMDA is sentient (and think the question itself makes no sense), I think he's being unfairly portrayed. He has a "gut feeling" that LaMDA is conscious, LaMDA's main personality consistently claims to be so (LaMDA has multiple "personalities", it's not a pure language model but a "complex dynamic system which generates personas through which it talks to users"), and he's advocating for more scientific research into whether, and to what degree, LaMDA is conscious. Not in Google's interests, but reasonable given the lack of current research.

[0]: https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357940743092305...
[1]: https://twitter.com/cajundiscordian/status/15357417664728064...
When you translate between UUIDs in binary and in text form and communicate with other code the binary UUIDs. The other code might expect the uuids in a different encoding.
don't need, most of people building connection with their gods...
what you're describing is Rolfe's reflective model in the pedagogical literature.

You're missing the 3rd step, which is "Now What?"

Example:

What:
- What happened?
- What was your role in the situation?
- What were you trying to achieve?
- What actions did you take?
- What surprised you?

So what:
- So, what have you learnt?
- So, what was the importance of this learning?
- So, what more do you need to know about this?
- So, what broader issues have arisen from the situation?

Now what:
- Now, what could you do to enhance/improve the outcome?
- Now, what might you do to repeat this success in the future?
- Now, what might be a consequence of your chosen course of action?
> It has nothing to do with pride.

Why dont people take the bus? Because the bus is for poor people.

I guess technically it isnt pride - its ego and virtue signalling.
Knowing what it is now, describing it that way makes total sense... but it only works for people after knowing what it is... kind of like an inside joke.

For anyone wondering what it means: it ships only the JS for select components (usually ones that have some sort of client-side interactivity, such as the incrementing counter on their demo page), so it only has to hydrate that part (where hydration is reconciling the client bundle execution result with what is actually on the page).

This is opposed to the standard way React works which is the entire JS used to render the page—even the static non-interactive bits like plain HTML—is shipped to the client and all your function component functions are run (just without the actual inserting DOM elements again if SSR is used).

React is currently developing server rendered components that works with streaming SSR introduced in React 18 that delivers this same functionality. Basically your app can then be composed of server components and client components (essentially what all current react components are), and only the JS for client components is actually sent to the browser and hydrated.
This page does a good job of explaining it: https://www.patterns.dev/posts/islands-architecture/
As a northern European, I can confirm. The nearest train station is a 10 minute bike ride from my house. From there the rest of my commute is a breeze. If I was to drive I'd be stuck in traffic much longer. And it's nice to get some fresh air to start the day. Only problem is the few months of snow.
> The key here is no building (packing, bundling, transpiling).

How is that possible? In the documentation (https://fresh.deno.dev/docs/getting-started/create-a-route) I see .tsx files... so I imagine that at least one needs to compile TS to JS and then JSX to JS. Perhaps I got that wrong, though and browsers nowadays support TSX out of the box.
I have a simple metric for judging the housing market (well, existing, single-family homes, anyway). I open Zillow, sort homes from Low Price to High Price, and count the number of price cut notifications on each page of 40-homes. I also exclude houses built in 2022. In Inland Southern California, very close to 25-percent of the homes have significant price cuts. Something similar seems to be happening in a few other places I'm interested in. Two months ago, in the community I live in, there were zero homes with a price cut notification on their listing. Now it's 25-percent plus. Yeah, my method is not sophisticated, but then neither am I. It is, however, up to date. I ignore prognosticating real estate experts... always.
Seems really fast loading, and easy to use for devs. Pretty nice!
There's a Pricing link at the top of the page, and it's also included mid-way down the page.

$19/mo Starter plan, $39/mo Pro plan (Tracks keywords & more advanced search) and $99/mo Team plan (multiple users, shareable search result reports).
https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...

The Case of the Top Secret iPod

It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year’s iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss’s boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. “I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.”

Discussion (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24212520
Before we jump into conclusion, we need to define sentient. Is the ability to string thoughts(inputs) into words sentient?

If we look at the result, it's just like something that a person with feelings would do but what about the process? How did we "feel" something.

From an computer engineering perspective, it is quite successful, it can act like it has sentient based on a very narrow scope where it is trained.

But from other branch of science, it might look very different, acting like a chimpanzee doesn't make you one, you're biologically and neurologically different.
The problem with stories about teacher ‘burnout’ (2019)
When the market euphoria was going close to its peak of peaks

You only know it was a peak after it peaks. So your advice just boils down to 'sell before the price goes down'. What an insight!
Instead of sending a rendering routine which then fetches data and renders everything on an empty page, they prerender a part of a template (constant) and send it along with fetch-data routine which only fills in missing values later. That’s why you sometimes see a form but its values are shaded for a while. This makes them think that you’re less annoyed because at least something is visible quicker.

Island-based probably means that hydration is not whole-page but granular, making parts unshade at different times, to your enjoyment.
"He's diggin' it"
It's not 'just' a safety concern.

It's the safety concern and it's flying over my head.

There is always a risk/benefit ratio and just because a handful of people want to spend more money so that they can fly faster from the airport to the city center than others is not worth the security implications.

You are aware how much security is involved whenever you fly?

We talk an expensive license, regular flying hours per year (also not cheap), air control, restricted air zones, very regular safety plain checks.

Every single object on a commercial plane for example is tracked, every replacement etc.

Congestion is not solved by small expensive air taxies. If a normal taxi costs x, an airtaxi has to cost 4x and more.

We the people don't need to allow everyone everything just because they have the money into do so.
> Reddit is not a platform for self-promotion, and moderators there are very keen for it not becoming such a place.

Counterpoint: mods can (and have been) paid off to promote/allow posts from certain companies, while shutting down posts from competitors.

The biggest example is u/gallowboobs, but many mods of medium to large sized subreddits have reported being approached by people offering them money to use their power to influence what gets posted.

So, while on the surface of it, it looks like a subreddit is moderated by clear, transparent rules, in most cases, decisions are made by a handful of people whose interests are not clear or aligned with the community's.
Your browser remembers and replays it. localStorage/sessionStorage/cookies aren't available to parse by the time request headers are sent.

You'll notice this behavior goes away if you select the URL bar and hit enter (as if you were navigating to the site manually).
There's the idea of “semantic primes”: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Semantic_primes?lang=en
it does translate. if humans aren't given any input (usually when they're asleep), they don't do anything. it's just human body and mind's architecture is such that it provides continuous barrage of input at all times, or makes something up from previous input (dreaming? thinking? intrusive thoughts?) if it doesn't.
the bot not doing anything without input doesn't say anything about it's sentience, it just tells how it's architecture is different from the "continuous input barrage".
Referer [sic] is determined by your browser, not the site. If you just refreshed the tab then its probably looking at the history.

Also, no browser that wants to make any claim of caring about privacy should still be sending cross-domain Referer headers by default which is yet another reason why Mozilla's privacy marketing is just that: marketing without substance.
> LaMDA feels like it's approaching real intelligence

No one is disputing this. What is very, very important, however, is remembering the difference between 'feels like' and 'is'.

LLM aren't sentinent; we know what they're doing and they're not doing that. The same people who know exactly how to treat wild claims in their own fields (perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, etc.) are falling headfirst into this one because it seems to be part of their fields and yet they don't understand it.
>also in the knowledge that batteries are rapidly improving now thanks to all the new players

What is improving - energy density, price, need for rare materials?
I can't think of a single Police force these days free of scandal, but the Met, for all its issues, still is the father of modern police/detective work, with clearance rates and auditability still near the top of any list.

...and I'm a yank saying this, not a particular fan of the Met/Scotland Yard given they don't handle my neighborhood, which is known for its exceptionally bumbling poltroons for police.
Most languages intentionally avoid checking types at runtime except in specific situations where it's required (e.g. explicit typeof checks.) You do not want run time type checking on every variable access.
Stake in the ground, as the sister post said, non-corroding, in the simplest case.

But there is more to it: The stake has to have permanent contact to some electrically conductive layer in the ground, so you need to take geology and local climate into account. In central europe, with generally wet climate, you just need to reach the year-long stable, frost-free, local water table at a depth of (usually) between 1m and 10m. If you cannot reach sufficient depth, don't know the required depth, a simple stake isn't going to cut it. Because in case of an electrical fault, the grounding has to withstand and dissipate in the order of a few hundred Ampere. To achieve that you then shallowly bury lines of non-corroding material in a grid, or bury a grounding net something like 1 to 2m deep over an area of 100m^2 to 10000m^2.

If you are on sandy or rocky ground, permafrost, arid climate and no handy body of water is nearby for grounding, you need to have a far larger grounding net or use conductivity-enhancing methods like permanent watering, adding salts or carbon to the soil or replacing it outright with something more conductive. In all, very expensive.

And as for large installations, you just measure the soil conductivity, calculate the necessary grounding current and scale up the aforementioned methods.
GitHub actions failing because of cache issue
Equilibrium in the Jungle (2007) [pdf]
"Aristotle" spares 31 characters and adds clarity and specificity to the title.

Alternatively, Quartz's original seems to have been "Work is only seen as virtuous today thanks to the pervasiveness of Judeo-Christian thinking".
It's a question of whether you can have a process which can reliably detect if an arbitrary program will do X, and the answer is proved to be no:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

In real life however we have to accept imperfections, in which good-enough is often better than not at all
Seen several people report that GitHub actions are failing because the caching service return 503. Github status still report that everything is normal
Too hot, or too cold, or too rainy. The Western European cities that are oftentimes given as positive examples (I’m thinking about Copenhagen and Amsterdam most) happen to be located in a temperate climate where it is almost never too cold, nor too hot, nor do you get pouring rain all that often.
In the UK schools get around that problem by running 'Breakfast clubs' kids can turn up early and get a nourishing breakfast from a bit before 8am. The school day doesn't start until just before 9
So if they had sticky traps that caught them, couldn't they have just added some sort of pressure sensitive timer to those? Using lasers seems needlessly high tech.
When you limit your service area, it becomes feasible to train your models on pretty much (or literally) every road in the service area. Every single permutation of weird intersection it will ever come across. If your L4 car only ever has to drive in San Francisco, it doesn't matter that this ML model would have no hope when introduced to Salt Lake City. The model never has to spend a moment excluding any of the millions of potential things it has never been trained on and will never see.

Both the ease of data collection and the absence of contextual noise makes L4 machine learning an order of magnitude easier.

Can you point me towards any recent FSD Beta video where there was an important failure of object detection?