skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I think, therefore I think I am (I think). :-)

(Not original with me but it has been so long since I first saw this that I don’t remember the source. It was part of a longer dialog.)
My co-workers are online too but that has no bearing on whether I see friends in person, nor does it encompass my entire social life.
You claim to have told a random story with no contextual point?
This is a great idea! I’m having trouble advancing with my fitness too so this will probably put me in a better state physically and emotionally. Thank you!
They're also the ones with all the wildfire and power outage risks though.
Google backs call for tighter open source security in aftermath of Log4j
Gain-of-function research, conducted carefully enough, might expose risks ahead of time that could be vaccinated against. You would generally prefer that it be in pathogens not already adapted to humans, or in places those are handled.

We are guaranteed pandemics regardless, just by how much international travel we do. What matters is the response. We are lucky monkeypox (actually a rodent illness) is rarely fatal.
We farm in Central Valley California because it has year round sunshine and good soil. California no doubt uses more water than it is allocated, but about 80% of water usage is in agriculture. And when we say agriculture it’s not just almonds that use a lot of water, it’s also Alfa Alfa and regular pastures that go in cattle feed. And despite having a much smaller percentage of the country’s farms, it produces the most amount of food. A third of the country’s vegetables and two thirds of fresh fruits and nuts are grown in California. If we could farm better elsewhere, we actually would.
>Because when the government goes and says "I need 40 million acres of solar panels"... Who is going to do that? Where is that going to come from?

1) the empty arid land where we would put 40 million acres of solar panels is for the most part already owned by a state or national level government. go look at a map of how much of nevada is controlled by the BLM for instance.

2) governments already pay for electrical generation through nuclear power plants, building hydroelectric dams, etc. the question would be to apply that same money to building giant ground mount PV instead.
There’s no mention of motion in the post but as someone who did WFH for 2+ years before the pandemic, I can attest that even café hopping falls within the author’s first bulletpoint, which is that everyday is exactly the same. It’s expensive, too, since you can rarely just sit in a café without ordering anything.
There are special cases where two (or hundreds of!) cars can have the same plate.

https://patch.com/img/cdn20/getty/22887410/20200526/033010/s...

https://www.thedrive.com/content/archive-images/ap_111036136...
Wait until you hear about roads.
It did and the best time has passed. Right now we have rich getting richer poor getting poorer and middle class evaporating. The way it works it may no longer serve the purpose. Not like there is any viable alternative. We have finite resources and ever growing population. Unless these factors are mitigated somehow (dirt cheap infinite energy for example) we do not have much to look forward to.
I mean, it is our best/easiest bet for future power generation. I can totally see why more money keeps being pumped into it.

Either more efficient panels, cheaper panels, or simply a greater manufacturing capacity are all fine for securing the energy needs of the planet.

And we won’t have to worry about running out anytime in the next billion years or so.
A wonderful read, amusing and at the same time makes me self conscious. I consider myself fairly intelligent. I have to wonder if there are any beliefs I have that are completely oddball.
Amazon Pharmacy still exists though and I'm sure you know there are always many projects within Amazon that don't become public until much later.
Yes, that's correct (although I mostly built the infrastructure for exacycle rather than doing the actual research). At one point I personally had control over more CPU cycles (choosing which jobs to run) than any other person on the planet. I also worked on the Ads Database and its related data processing systems, plus the Making in Science team (we built and ran the booth at the Maker Faire), created the predecessor to Google Accelerated Science, and spent years working on ML software and hardware.

My last work, unpublished (and probably gone forever) was using the idle time on TPUs to establish the using multiple large TPU and standard clusters to do multitask training on large multimodal corpus (the docjoins, labelled youtube) with the goal of creating a model that generated a image of a human head that could be interacted with verbally, and had enough context/state to pass any test humans give it (my prior is that you can make a non-sentient system that fools experts, not Blake, although I would be delighted to learn that merely making such a system generated a truly sentient life-form, it seems like that would be truly impossible to demonstrate convincingly).
It’s not an unfair set of points and this one rings true harder than most:

> It’s extremely hard to be friends with your co-workers. You have to go out of your way to reach out and be available. Friendships don’t happen “organically” like they do in the office

…because, most people seem to think they can just on their asses all day, don’t post on slack, don’t talk to anyone other than on standup and just get work done.

So many tickets done.

So totally miserable.

I’ve seen first hand so many times the last couple of years. There’s only so much you can do to reach out to people and give them the opportunity to engage.

…but they have to be proactively social.

Some people don’t like that, but it’s the reality of working remotely.

Also, get a standing desk. :)

Sitting all day is bad for you, and it forces you to take breaks.
Sounds like a good place for a recording studio.

Meanwhile, I've been trying highly recommended headphones, and it turns out everyone loves open headphones with no sound isolation, but then I just hear cars outside, my fridge compressor running, computer fans…
All significant consumer problems are solved. It's about specialist or overarching organisational problems now.
So long and thanks for all the fish. So sad that it has come to this...
This simply isn't true. Many of my closest friendships started online - with people who share the same interest as me, which is rare to find irl. I have since met a handful of online friends in person and they're always as lovely as they were online.

Online friends were very important to me growing up, and still are today.
It’s also a problem for housing affordability. Even ADUs require solar now.

Making it more expensive to build housing in California at a time like this is a bad move, and I doubt the benefits of solar outweigh it.
The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.
There's a level of human connection and validation that can't be satisfied virtually. We're animals, that contact is important. We wouldn't settle for a virtual significant-other, and by the same token the experience of quality time with buds over extra-curriculars isn't going to be fully replicated in a chat-room, blog message or email.
not a fan of the business itself (IE, Sundarland) but I continue to appreciate the amazing technical work of many of its employees. I wouldn't put too much stock into what people wrote about what Larry said back in the early days; it's a lot more heat and noise than light.
I don't know who dekhn is, but I can confirm that lots of the factual stuffs explained in the parent comments are true as an engineer working on heavily ML related stuffs.
It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.

It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.
Most buyers are savvy though and buy reputable brands. Search for ‘USB flash drive’ and invariably you will get cheap Chinese muck that will break within a day. Then just filter by respectable brands like SanDisk and case closed, all the cheap stuff is filtered out!
Demanding perfect authority is itself a pathology. Claiming perfect authority is a favorite tactic of liars and demagogues.

The best we can hope for is people doing their best with what they have to work with. Very many do.

The worst make shit up, routinely. They hone their message to attract dupes, and always succeed. Many of them believe whatever pulls; most don't care what is true or isn't.
Sounds like something an angsty teen would post. Get disciplined wrt to diet and exercise and find some worthwhile hobbies/pursuits.

> I can’t move out bc I have nothing determining my location

Not sure I understand this one... any insight?
Finger tighten (use just three fingers) then back off a half to 3/4 turn.
If energy production is increasing exponentially, an astronomical demand very quickly becomes manageable and then trivial

The computation demands for a computer to beat humans at chess were astronomical, and then suddenly they were manageable (and it happened, quite publicly), and now Deep Blue loses to a Raspberry Pi
You're analyzing everything in relative terms, which makes it seem like being at the bottom of the totem pole is an equivalent experience in any society or time period, because the bottom is the bottom. This isn't true.

From a high level, self-reported happiness has an extremely strong correlation with a country's GDP. On a personal level, the average impoverished person in a developing country like South Africa has a much worse lived experience than the average impoverished person in America. You would be hard pressed to find a San Francisco janitor who wants to switch places with a Capetonian one, or a 2150 single mother who wants to switch places with an 1850 single mother.

It's not just consumerism that's at an all time high. It's wealth. It's technology. It's ease of life. It's leisure time. It's healthcare. It's the ability to communicate with others. These things don't just come out of nowhere. They're created (by capitalistic markets) because people like them and they improve their lives.
> I don't think it's malicious.

Not yet it's not. It's when he realizes he can cash in on it that we'll see the inevitable book(s) and appearances on Coast to Coast / Alex Jones.
Sorry mate - it sounds like I called you out too soon.

Ideally, keep race or skin colour or religion etc out of any discussion. As a rule of thumb I try to avoid noting any difference beyond M:F and even then - advisadly.

I don't think there is any reason to note Jew or Hasidic in your post. I have no idea whether a Jew might be offended by that because I would not even get to that point - no need to pontificate about something you don't know about.

People are people, regardless of race, creed or colour.

Let us embrace similarity and not disparity: Us not Them.
The one in sacramento is the one that is closing down. The nearest one now is ~90 minutes away.
We don’t need to shift all necessary electricity from one end of the earth to the other right? Just the shortfall that a large number of batteries cannot deal with overnight.
There is a Linux version now but it doesn't cover all the APIs - only the SQL and MongoDB.

It's been frustrating as I've been wanting to develop against the Gremlin API locally, I've resorted to using TinkerGraph but it's not ideal.
I've run Starlette apps and Flask apps on Vercel just fine. I wrote some notes here that you might find useful: https://til.simonwillison.net/zeit-now/python-asgi-on-now-v2
> english education in the US is really quite poor so a lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large

This is false. It was impressed into us many times throughout grade, middle, and high school. People just don’t care enough to get the right spelling because they were using the words natively long before they learned to spell them.
Growing up on the coastline, I feel this way if I go too far in-land.
> Alas, it will never be.

Humans of every age, at every time, seem to alway feel that they had “arrived”. That we as a species were closer to the end than the beginning. That the arc of progress was bending towards its end.

They’ve always been laughably and entirely wrong. I personally suspect this will continue to be the case.

Specific areas where I think we will make world altering advances are in communications (yes we have a ways yet to go), materials, energy, health and behavioral sciences, and economic policy.

All this is assuming we don’t find some cute new physics hack like exerting some unforeseen capability of controlling gravity, or teleportation, or whatever.
What Are Masked Services in Linux, and How Do You Manage Them?
I'm a Bay Area -> Sacramento transplant and this doesn't surprise me one bit. The 'tech scene' is essentially dead here.
I love these cheap ARM laptops. I wish there was better support for the hardware, though. I have been using an Asus c101pa as a second laptop for so long that it's outlasted three thinkpads, but e.g. there is still no Linux support for the GPU and probably never will be.
> But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin.

Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.
I agree that these are not sentient, but sentience does not imply self-awareness, and so lack of self-awareness does not mean that a being is not sentient. For example, it seems likely (to me anyway) that a bear is "sentient" (has experiences) but lacks self-awareness, at least according to the mirror test.
That doesn't actually contradict me.
AirBnB has revealed a massive gap in regulatory.

We would almost all rather a hotel.

We're not going for the company, but for the price, and sometimes charm.

There should be professionals able to provide discount lodging with a bit of charm.

There is something perversely wrong with zoning in cities, it should be completely reasonable to have 'lodging' basically anywhere people live.

Literally any building could/should be used for temporary lodging with just a few parameters/adjustments.
You’re right; but that doesn’t make me wrong.

Not being able to install malware is safer.

Maybe you should be able to, as an adult, decide to install it, or, as you say, decide to drive dangerously.

…but you can’t argue you aren’t safer if you choose not to drive (or install malware).

Driving is dangerous.

It’s safer to not be able to drive.

The argument the parent post made was that you are no safer not being able to drive.

Which is wrong. Categorically.
> The US alone effectively created that much money out of thin air during the pandemic. All of the countries combined printed far more.

The difference being that most of that money ended up in rich people’s pockets, and are now causing a global economic crisis.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G200141480...
The man from Earth
Is there a formal or informal test for sentience, or is it "I know it when I see it?" My IkiwIsi test would could tell an original joke, or communicate an original, mostly coherent dream scenario.
Google acquired a company in 2007 which had expertise in multicore at the time multicore was really improving quickly. One of the acquired principal engineers wrote a manifesto saying that GPUs were a waste of time because they didn't solve problems like speeding up search (it's probably still around) or the other things Google was spending a lot of cycles on (ML training). It was a great example of a technical leader being completely wrong about one of the directions of the future and the technical solution to it. Now, I should say that multicore machines are still highly relevant and complement GPUs nicely- but the manifesto happened at a time to convince leadership to avoid making strategic deals with nvidia at a critical time.
We know regions associated with consciousness in the brain. A recent paper took that knowledge and did something kind of clever - they looked in species where that region was under development. Out of it came a lot of conjecture related to the region being used in the development of complex self-simulation motor control.

It struck me that the intelligence theories of reinforcement learning have been encountering this same paradigm of self-simulation being necessary. A Tesla for example when it has to go down a street that also has another car needs to do a rollout not just for itself but the other car in order to actuate such that it can move in this motor control task. Not being able to model both agents makes it really trick to do planning. These tree search married to modeling problems seems to show up all over the place in the top performing architectures.

For this reason I'm really suspect of the language model view of consciousness; it doesn't seem plausible. Or at least, I'm a little skeptical. In theory for a significantly large enough language model I don't see why you couldn't use a "loop unrolling" argument to posit that for some subset of the network there is an analogous computation to what my best guess about what consciousness is might look like. Worse for me is that when I strong man the argument I run into things like "the training task involves predicting the output of conscious entities and so a truly generalizing agent would be directed to learn just that unrolled loop". I'm not saying I think the language models are conscious, but I do see how reasonable people can arrive at those views.

We probably need to write down a very hard definition of consciousness even if its wrong - or use terms that are better defined - because the ambiguity in the realm of things we don't fully understand makes this an annoying "words" problem rather than a concrete "facts" problem.
Remote works best for people who already have their lives stuffed with meaning and structure and don't need any help from the office on those fronts.

OP might have resonated with me a decade ago, but now I have a wife and kids. I don't need office socialization to give my life meaning. I have my eight hours of work to do and then I have my life to get back to. I definitely don't need to lose two hours a day commuting.

There were days in my twenties where I had no idea what to do with the day, and on many of those days I ended up doing nothing. I haven't had a day like that for the greater part of a decade.
You realize that viruses are visible via electron microscopy?
I read recently that Mexico was nationalizing part of its electric grid and user prices were expected to rise as a result.
No it’s not and the GP is being a overly sensitive for no good reason. It’s a relatively recent sect of Judaism with a well known insular “ultra-orthodox” (more formally Haredi Judaism) Jewish community in New York, primarily Brooklyn and Israel. This is similar to something like the Amish, and pointing out something about Amish furniture or dairy businesses doesn’t make it automatically racist.

Because they are an insular group they are known culturally in the US for their retail enterprises. B&H Photo-Video being the most famous one. Go there now (bhphotovideo.com), you can’t even order during Shabbat.
It's a shame to see this closing. They seemed awfully ambitious building out with 4 locations at one point. I imagine Covid was very hard on this.

Too far to be practical for Sacramento folks, but the Curious Forge in Grass Valley, CA is still doing well. They're a lot more scrappy and have a long history in the community. https://thecuriousforge.org/
But nor does what you said really answer my question. Online friends are real, and often provide things that local friends can't. No one here is saying they're a substitute for local friends, but that doesn't mean these relationships should be denigrated.
The error handling is so far from best-in-class that it's not even funny. Lisp conditions and restarts, which can be implemented in C, are best-in-class. Beyond that, does Zig allow arbitrary values as errors now? Anything that doesn't is not best-in-class; they would be worst-in-class.

Footguns are never just relevant to beginners. I say this as something close to an expert C programmer. I hit footguns all of the time. I just don't release them because I always assume I hit them and hunt them down.

Making things easier to fuzz is table stakes; even C can do that now. I set up fuzzing for my code with a simple build option. It's not hard. It's also effective at finding test cases for you, if you use it right.

Does Zig do Design by Contract? That would make fuzzing easier. Does it do Property-Based Testing? That's a more focused version of fuzzing. In fact, it's the same to unit testing as fuzzing is to integration testing. Until Zig has Property-Based Testing, I don't believe it's making testing easier.

For that matter, as far as I know, Zig only makes unit tests easy. Unit tests are okay, but not really effective. The test suite for my code is only integration tests, which makes things easier to refactor. And yet it is effective at finding bugs.

tl;dr: What Zig has is table stakes in 2022. It is nothing special for helping people write correct code.
Do people think he geuinely belives this AI is sentient, or he is pushing this narrative for some other purpose?
Certainly one cannot judge a decision by its outcome, but we can perhaps learn something if the skeptics we were banning from social media ended up being correct.

Whether they were following proper reasoning or not, if they were right it’d be good to take a step back and figure out if anything in the “proper reasoning” system needs adjusted.
Is that a necessary condition for sentience?

Look, nobody knows what makes a thing conscious or not, and anyone who claims they do with certainty is talking out of turn. Is this guy being a bit silly? Yeah, I think so. But let's not pretend that anyone on earth has suddenly answered a question that humanity has been thinking about without significant progress for thousands of years.
That's an extremely cringe policy in 2022. At this point if you're wearing a mask you are quite a kook. I'm in Miami, I very very rarely see anyone wearing a mask except senior citizens. The way it should be because they are at higher risk of not only covid but flu etc.
LOL.
I just have to chuckle at trying to bring a moral or ethical argument in favor of banks, given their practices of maximizing of fees they charge to least able to afford them, how they reorder transactions to ensure people go over and they can then extract the most fees.
The problem I’m seeing is the people who see work as:

* completing tasks

vs

* who see work as a piece of their life

People _need_ social interaction (this is an indisputable fact of being human) and remote work divorces the social from the productive for the first time in history (there are jobs where you are isolated for periods like oil rig workers, but this is on a completely new scale).

There aren’t any proven methods to manage this, so your experience is largely dictated by your social reserves and social skills/circle (outside of work).