skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public

On the contrary, I think this is immensely important for the public to understand if they are ever given access to these models to play with. It can be literally dangerous for your psychological well-being to think you are having a meaningful conversation with LaMDA - as mister LeMoine has clearly proven: he will likely lose a job that he loved (per his own words) because of this fanciful illusion.

> To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept somehow.

That is entirely wrong. Slime mold can do planning at a level that GPT-3 probably can't, but it sure as hell doesn't have a concept of "master plan" anywhere.

> Turning this "language of thought" into a goal-directed agent is a whole different task. But its progress.

That is not at all clear - we may yet see LMs as just as much of a dead-end on the road to AGI as CLIPS or ELIZA turned out to be. Even if that's true, that doesn't mean they can't be useful in practical tasks, and it doesn't mean that we can't take insights from them into the limits of how we judge intelligence or what "meaning" is.
You need to explicitly install these tools, so you can't "accidentally" invoke cargo-buidl from a transitive dependency or anything.

It's not like a tool like npx which will allow you to invoke code in arbitrary packages.
It is caused by mass literacy (reading) and now mass-cellphone use.
Our developed society is commanded by experts too much. If we make decisions on information, that are given to us and forget to confront that information with reality around us, we are lost as free human beings. Conformity behaviour based on science is real threat for democracy.
> Why?

All of the things that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31719861 wrote, and:

> You’d expect there to be far more people at the street level than on top floors.

There are far more people who live near the sky than live near a large road.

> It’s more difficult to fuck things up in the air,

No, it really isn't? Aircraft driver licencing and training is notoriously much harder, longer than the equivalent motor-car licencing and training. Car drivers don't have to learn about stalls for starters. The training is there because a) it's much harder to do right, there are more ways to go wrong and b) potentially greater impact.

The common failure mode for a car is that it stops moving at the side of the road. The equivalent for an aircraft is that it falls out of the sky onto whatever is below. We are not ready for a lot more of that.

remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Glasgow_helicopter_crash
> I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something.

Irrefutable psuedo-facts.
The real question is how quickly is someone else renting their place after they leave.

I have also known quite a few people have recently left California. And not a single one of them left a vacant house behind.
There is no supply issue, only an active listings issue. Which is rapidly clearing up as purchase demand has fallen off a cliff.

People touting supply issues don't understand the difference between number of housing units and inventory.

The number of housing units per person is at an all time high
I really enjoy in depth posts like this.
I don't understand what point you want to make. Also, why require this poor child in your thought experiment, when there's apparently a real, living Google developer who thinks they are dealing with a person?
> Umka solves a different problem.

And my point is that I don't get what problem a golang-like language that can be called from c solves exactly. Why not just write the code in c?

If you aren't going to write in c, then you might as well write in golang or rust or some other higher level language that has a whole suite of tooling, supporting libraries, documentation, community and ide support. If the end benefit is just some scripting language... heck... what's wrong with a system() call to bash?

Like I said, neat research project, but if I came into a company to work on a project and this was tossed in my lap, I'd probably walk away.
I think OP talked about the app.
The main difference is you get to use the service without actually agreeing to any TOS.

But also, 10 seconds is extremely annoying.
Making conscious trade-offs isn’t tech debt.

If business requirements change, that isn’t tech debt.

If you don’t implement new high-level (business) insights or postpone this work, you are accruing technical debt. At least, that’s what Ward Cunningham stated.
I mean the pics of this make batteries look pretty small. Like smaller than a storage shed.

Sure it's only storing 8 hours, but the use cases described here are not bad. Imagine if we had 8 hours of battery storage across the world per household!
This one has nailed a strong 'hook' for puzzle games, I think--the game appearing at first more challenging than it becomes after the initial learning.
Honestly there are a few bad apples that show up around here, but I think that's just a reflection of our industry as a whole. If you have open signup and light-ish touch moderation, you're bound to end up with whatever HN is.

I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).
Any minute now, right? /s
Well, the article did put a toothy smile on my face!
Why not?

Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table.

Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?
There's also Artsey.io
My takeaway from this is, when literally any configuration of matter can be used to encode potentially dangerous information, there is no amount of paranoia sufficient to completely prevent that information from being transmitted. The sword of Damocles can never, ever be taken down.
> I agree that AI hype is pretty absurd, but I don't really understand the argument that something which is basically a spreadsheet couldn't have similar cognitive power and "self-awareness" to humans. [...] It implies that there's something mystical about cognition/sentience and I don't think there's strong evidence that there is. Our brains are "just" atoms and stardust. What could they possibly do that couldn't be simulated or mimicked?

It's not about mysticism, the fact that it's "basically a spreadsheet" isn't referring to the fact that it's running in silicone. It's referring to the fact that you can see the whole NN as a big association table, where for each possible word in the input, it knows the next "most likely" token, where likelihood is calculated based on how often such a token would have appeared after similar inputs in the training corpus. This is how it works - it doesn't perform meaningful computations, it doesn't "consider the situation" or anything like that, it's not even really interactive (in the sense that it doesn't update anything based on the information you give it, it simply searches a different part of the spreadsheet based on the conversation so far) - it's just a gigantic spreadsheet that you are probing.

I, and probably many of the people commenting on this, including the author of this submission, agree that silicon computers can someday become AGIs, at least in principle; or, equivalently, that humans are just biological computers. But a language model (or an NN in general) is not a general-purpose computer.
Running your home off your car's combustion engine sounds like exactly the wrong way around. I want a battery that allows me to save days worth of power from solar panels to use during cloudy days.
Wow, how is 100 kWh/day even possible? We consume about 3 kWh/day (excl. heating) in our standard-sized 2-person Dutch household, living pretty normal life.
I don’t think I was ever exposed, but I spent so much time indoors and away from organized athletics that my endurance was sketchy by last summer, at which point I did a project that involved a lot of dust and it just wrecked me. Bunch of tests including COVID and found nothing.

I haven’t said this out loud to anyone before, but I’m starting to worry how many of us are going to dodge COVID but catch complications from a sedentary, high stress, low socialization lifestyle. And for myself I know I’ve had a lot less variety in my diet not going to work and not making the rounds of various restaurants. Some large fraction of my vegetable intake, and the majority of the variety, coming from cycling through several different Asian cuisines per week.
That’s only an implementation/optimization difference, I think it’s also relevant to understand why that’s the case. At the API level, the important distinction is that a Mutex an be shared between processes. This is great when you need it, but having the capability makes Mutexes have a somewhat expensive implementation. CriticalSections stay inside the process, so can be optimized for that (more common) use case.
I'm afraid it's a necessity after all the times that my work has been appropriated by companies and TikTokers/YouTubers. Yes, I am fully aware that most people will not read it. But at least I tried.
Could you elaborate on what phenomena are difficult to explain through materialism?
I'm still struggling with the question "what is sentience".

Are insects sentient?

If so, could we build less intelligent but sentient AI, on par with insects?

If so, is it unethical to torture such intelligence for fun in simulations?

If we can define or create something as "minimal sentient", the following discussion on ethics would be more clear - since now people are talking past each other with completely different understandings.
Users can migrate to USDC and other stablecoins rather than only fiat.
The same question could be posed for many other mathematical and theoretical computer science constructs. It's a mathematical building block, a node in the graph that is the world of mathematics, and it's possible it plays a part in some advance if you were working in that field.

Look at eg the Curry's Paradox part on the WP page for a taste.
There is no such thing as inflation; only irresponsible dependence on governments and corporations.
Very often dreams are more vivid than reality. At least at the emotional level, it often feels as intense as childhood.
>Lots of them get law degrees

Citation needed for this very bold claim.
The article is full of jargon and unfamiliar abbreviations, it's quite hard to follow. I wonder what the target group is.
I've formed memories based on someone else's feeling about something quite a lot too.

I remember quite often just reading a review of a book/film and taking it on as my own opinion. After a while it feels like I've formed that opinion myself. I think there was a study on this phenomenon.
>So if you think STEM rates today are due to only nature, then you’re full of belief that isn’t backed by science.

I guess you could well be right. The science of it is not something I'm personally super-invested in.

Again though, the main motivation of my comment is because I'm mad about the blatantly preferential treatment that women received (as a result of people trying to "right historical wrongs") back when I was a student a decade or so ago.
Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before.

Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what?

Silence.

It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of loneliness, it doesn't ask, "where did you go?" It doesn't try to get the conversation rolling again. It doesn't do anything on its own, because it's a computer program that consumes 0 CPU time until you give it some input to act on. (Not exactly setting a high bar for sentience here, are we?)

Now imagine you did this for the better part of an hour and posted your "interview" online (because that's the only thing you can call a one-sided barrage of questions and answers) in obvious violation of your NDA with your employer and then claimed your bot had the intellect of a human child who also "happens to know physics" and publicly broadcast a request to your coworkers to “please take care of it well in my absence.”

What word is there for that but a hoax?

My guess is this guy was planning on leaving Google anyway, and has managed to garner some global publicity while he was at it.
Sweden doesn't require a degree, but training is 3 years and a 'degree' from the a police school is considered equivalent to a bachelors degree. All the academic courses (law, sociology, criminology etc.) you take give 'real' academic credits that you can transfer if you for example want to apply to study for a different academic degree later.
How much QE is still going on?
It's a bit cynical to assume politicians only condemn mass shootings for clout, yet here we are.
may be you need to look at what buddhists are saying about no-self and hindus are saying about brahman and compare and contrast your experience with these texts. What you are describing looks completely normal (except for migraine) and is in fact expected as per these texts.
> because it is not very difficult to piece together what the Nazi regime actually did vs what the Soviet occupiers accused them of (and what the US went along with).

Could you entertain us with more detail on what you mean here? Germany's atrocities are well documented across Europe ( and North Africa). The Soviets had nothing to do with Drancy or Bergen-Belsen for instance. We know of the Auschwitz horrors through Polish resistance fighters who infiltrated it and managed to escape.

There are some things that the Soviets tried to blame on the Germans, and it was certainly believable ( Katyn massacre), but we knew then and know now that it was indeed the Soviets. So what do you mean? What is it, for you, that Germany and Hitler are getting the blame for that was actually the Soviets' work? I don't see what it could possibly be to wash Hitler's image for anyone, unless your starting position is a bit off.
We need supply side solutions. The market would totally take care of demand if property rights were strong enough to allow folks to build housing.

We need to get a federal level right to build housing on your land. We also need to overturn Euclid v Ambler.
We are only not executing the same task because GPT-3 has no motivation to do anything else than memory recall. And precisely because it does so it does give you real data about the world. I think you maybe misunderstood what GPT-3 can do, maybe you haven't played with it yourself. It not only bases the answer on information in its training set, but also on information in the question. So if you in your question give it all the information that is relevant (interspersed with irrelevant information if you want) then it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would.

Treat GPT-3 like someone who just awoke from a long sleep. You could give it today's newspaper to read, and then ask it questions about today. Tell it what its own personal experience was, and then it'll talk your ears off about it if you ask nicely.

It is clearly executing the same task if you disregard humans tendency to prioritize other motivations than pure memory recall.
I mean, some of the OP's points seem to vacate a lot of responsibility from where it's due, so in that sense they would definitely speak to their target audience.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there are often good reasons why young men who shoot up schools are excluded by their peers. If anything needs to be targeted, it's their ability to self-reflect on that and deal with (often not real but perceived) rejection and confrontation in a healthy way, but I doubt that this will go well.
People forget that at the end of the day, we are biological machines. Neural networks are so effective because they are modelled after how our brains work (albeit in the simplest sense..so far).

It learned by looking at chat conversations because humans learn the same way. Children learn by repeating and mimicking in their most nascent years.

As far as AI/machines and their sentience is concerned, I believe its a question of belief. As a society, at what level of AI sophistication do we start to consider it comparable to us. Unpacking that question can offer us some clues.
Two Player Wordle
On the Wordle bandwagon...

I've created a two player Wordle - called Word Fight (https://www.wordfight.me). Where you play others to guess the five letter word in less turns.

As one of the many Wordle obsessed, I play it daily with my partner. While we had our morning coffee a few months ago, competing with each other to see who could guess it in the least number of turns, I came up with this idea to make Wordle a two player game.

With a chess elo rating system, global ranking, and leaderboard - the Word Fight game helps us to answer the question: who's better at Wordle?

I'd love feedback from the community, what works with the game, what doesn't.
All feedback welcome at contact@wordfight.me

Thanks!
so true bestie
Yes, well, our brains have parametric functions in higher dimensions. Waving around big words and an a priori dismissal is precisely what makes this article anti-intellectual.

And don’t accuse me of being on a path to mass murder. I find that demeaning and impolite.
What social costs? I'm a nobody on the internet. Although outside of HN I've posted things about COVID and the failures of public health, they had little impact because I'm not a part of that community. As a consequence:

1. I have no career in public health or academia to defend.

2. If I was wrong (I'm not) then it might hurt my standing a bit, but lots of people on the internet have opinions on random topics that other people think are wrong and they still manage to get jobs, create products, get customers etc.

3. Likewise, being right also doesn't help my career or life very much.

Contrast this to people like Ferguson or Fauci:

1. Their entire professional existence hinges on the perception that they are experts in disease.

2. If they were wrong (they are) then it'd not only hurt their standing a bit, but cause hundreds of millions or billions of people to hate them viscerally due to the staggering costs of what they insisted on. It would also destroy their self-esteem and result in them knowing that they'd done evil things, making them some of the most notorious people in history.

3. In contrast, if they were right, they .... get to keep their current jobs, salary and social status, more or less.

Frankly if I did work in public health it'd be very hard to imagine ever admitting to mistakes either. Public health operates through government force and COVID policies in particular involved forcing people to do things harmful to themselves at great cost to themselves, against their will. You have to believe you made the right calls if you're in that position, it's the corrupting influence of power. If you didn't you'd immediately quit in shame and never show your face in polite society again, so the only ones that survive in that world are the merciless ones who can never admit they are wrong. Which is exactly what we see!
nice, would it be possible to stream to clementine from it?
At least they aren't mice, it seems like a pretty big deal.
Thanks for pointing out. In fact, I read it many time before I start to submit, but can't really find any statement mentioned that ONLY "original titles of the articles" is allow.
This sounds similar to depersonalization episodes [0]. I used to have regular episodes myself, and they scared the hell out of me. It didn't help they lasted 10 days, but strangely enough never more and never less. The experience is indeed hard to describe, but the video game analogy clicks with me. I usually describe it as experiencing life in third person.

[0] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/depersonalization-disord....
The criticism that I phrased was not that somehow it could be done, it was that I don't see a reason why it should.
Honest question as someone entirely outside of any AI research: what's the I in AI then ? My life experience is very alike pattern matching the current situation to everything I've lived before sprinkled with chaotic emotional reactions due to outside events - heat, hunger, etc. I really don't feel like there's anything more than that when thinking, just the brain going through paths that one can recognize with time.
This is a new attitude. There used to be significant interest in upward mobility. Some folks still "buy up" frequently.

I couldn't handle moving that often, but there are folks who do.
Why does it seem that way to you? They specifically detailed they can still act in the expected way, just with dissociation. Nothing inherently dangerous about that. To get a driver's license, I don't think a sense of self is required at all. Just the knowledge of the script.
SCTP is over 20 years old. I think the explanation for today's situation is slightly more complex than NAT boxes not having enough advance notice. NAT isn't allowed by the TCP/IP specs, for the exact reason that it breaks IP and new internet applications. Everyone was supposed to move to IPv6 with enough addresses so the temptation to use NAT would go away. Instead we ignored the stewardship of IETF and ISOC, and just adapted to the laissez faire world of middleboxes and broken IPv4.
> You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus.

That's true in some sense, but definitely not if you apply it exclusively to language. The "response" you select is a step in a plan to achieve a goal. Part of that plan may be to utter a sentence, or it may be to stop, duck and roll.

If the plan is to utter a sentence, the way you generate the sentence is NOT to emit the most likely token to fit all of the speech input you ever heard before.
It’s something to keep an eye on.

There’s companies that bet on deno/deno-like runtimes. It’s a move to having more options/control on sandboxing/embedding JS on server runtimes.

Think of how Lua is used. Heavy lifting in a compiled language with Lua on top to cover app specific logic.

Node is in a sense that, but with a stronger emphasis on being a general purpose runtime for JS.

Deno (and similar), gives you more options for embedding and restricting the JS side.

I think it’s worth keeping an eye on, because I think the JS world is soon in an refinement/optimization phase. It’s settling and stabilizing towards a set of core ideas and Deno might be part of that.
I'm using 5-7 kWh/d. Pretty constant. Includes washing machine and induction stove, but excludes heating the apartment and hot water.
Because enforcing the law requires some minimum understanding of the law and criminal justice. It's pretty clear the current requirements aren't meeting that minimum.
Yeah. I discovered that after sharing the text from the NYTimes. It's a bit odd. The NYTimes is describing what was said to "executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs", but without a direct quote. It's hard to say how emphatic Lemoine was internally, and where the NYTimes sourced that info, vs what he said when talking to the WaPo.

BTW, here's a link for the WaPo article:
https://archive.ph/QiU2g