skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If accurately reflects the world population then only one in six pictures will be a white person. Half the pictures will be Asian, another sixth will be Indian.

Slightly more than half of the pictures will be women.

That accurately represents the world's diversity. It won't accurately reflect the world's power balance but that doesn't seem to be their goal.

If you want to say "white male CEO" because you want results that support the existing paradigm it doesn't sound like they'll stop you. I can't imagine a more boring request.

Let's look at interesting questions:

If you ask for "victorian detective" are you going to get a bunch of Asians in deerstalker caps with pipes?

What about Jedi? A lot of the Jedi are blue and almost nobody on Earth is.

Are cartoon characters exempt from the racial algorithm? If I ask for a Smurf surfing on a pizza I don't think that making the Smurf Asian is going to be a comfortable image for any viewer.

What about ageism? 16% of the population is over sixty. Will a request for "superhero lifting a building" have an 16% chance of being old?

If I request a "bad driver peering over a steering wheel" am I still going to get an Asian 50% of the time? Are we ok with that?

I respect the team's effort to create an inclusive and inoffensive tool. I expect it's going to be hard going.
BASF Collaborates with Pasqal to Predict Weather Patterns
You want me to provide your random herokuapp app with my financial information to "validate"?

What user is going to be willing to do that?

You create the contract?

What landlord is going to accept that?
That's not really a new problem, though. At one point someone got some bad training data about an old Incan town, the misidentification spread, and nowadays we train new human models to call it Macchu Picchu.
It's an extremely popular opinion. It's the tech grandma phenomenon. A lot of people in tech want to optimise for their grandmas. So whenever something like this is proposed, the standard response is, 'But what about my grandma ?'. It's a variation of the 'But what about the kids ?' argument.
Since we're talking Polish cinema. I recommend 2 films from Andrzej Żuławski:

* Possession (1981) starring Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani. It starts out sort of like a relationship-gone-bad film then goes into a full-on crazy mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah4Z1yIAoFM

* On The Silver Globe (1988) -- Unfinished sci-fi, super innovative, completely bonkers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Silver_Globe_(film)
July 20, 2022: Atlassian Security Advisory
Write Your Own (LC-3) Virtual Machine
It is comparatively cheap and comparatively less useful
"I'm going to tell a joke and you are required to like it."
It's stupid in that it has exposed pins. It's stupid in that its proprietary. It's stupid in a lot of ways. It's not not stupid because you like it.
No pain, no gain? How the brain chooses between pain and profit
> I see that you have a hard time following an argument and the rhetorical techniques I used. I will break it down.

In this one sentence you betray yourself as uninterested in debate, and instead just like to hear yourself talk. The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries (and, I might add, they gamely came to your turf, which you subsequently tried to dismiss). Instead of doing the hard work of revising your views in the face of a potentially fruitful comparison, you dismiss it out of hand and assert your self-righteousness.
All 10 pieces of Decalog (Dekalog) are worth watching. Kieslowski is one of the greatest film directors of all time.
For posterity: I think anyone really interested in these ideas of remembrance would enjoy reading Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time". It's very long, but I genuinely believe the length contributes meaningfully to helping you appreciate the weight of the insights portrayed in it. Basically I think the length helps you feel the passage of time better in a way that could not be truncated.

I think think the digital age is rendering Proust's key insight, that we associate memories with physical places/sensations, obsolete due to the inherent lack of physicality for our brains to work with. Recent work[1] in psychology/philosophy seems to be backing up Proust's observations more concretely, and it makes me wonder if projects like Dynamicland [2] will become more mainstream as we recognize the value of physical interaction in how we think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
[2] https://dynamicland.org/
We have not operated fractional reserve banking for generations.

A bank today can give out loans and mortgages without any assets.

https://positivemoney.org/2011/04/monetary-reform-myths-1-10...
I Am a Puts Debuggerer
Make the App Store a separate company from the one that sells you the phone and OS.
Open source platform enables research on privacy-preserving machine learning
Lyft’s adjusted EBITA was $55 million in Q1, given their active rider number stands at ~19 million, at best they are likely offering rides at cost.

That still leaves out the costs incurred by the drivers. Opex for transit agencies includes maintenance, insurance and driver salaries and benefits which are much more costly than it is for Lyft.

You are right that sprawling metro areas are very well suited for mass transit, though. There does need to be a sufficient amount of demand in order for it to work.

The fact of the matter is that the main problem is a land use pattern that requires over $9 to travel to and from a child’s daycare.
You might enjoy Somalia.
MidJourney definitely struggles more with complex prompts from what I saw. If you like the output more, that’s subjective, but I think DALL•E is the leader in the space by a wide margin.
> "protecting the most useless employees from being fired"

Unions don't do that, that's pure propaganda. Unions bargain for more free time, better pay, better work conditions (healthier, safer).
Some statisticians may say that, but as the two cultures swap places (http://www2.math.uu.se/~thulin/mm/breiman.pdf) more folks take a mechanistic view of data collection, in which some observations are truly what we would call "out of class where the class boundaries are well-defined". I suppose this gets into your definition of reality and how that relates to class boundaries.
I am still excited about Apple's answer to this. They have been extremely creative so far in mitigating rules.

I believe that they will find a way to somehow undermine these rulings. EU hasn't won yet.
One interesting comment about this is that some models actually benefit from being fed their own output. Alphafold for instance was fed with its own 'high likelihood' outputs (as demis hassabis described in his lex friedman interview).
Yes, quitting is always breaking. It is just that breaking isn't always a bad thing for the player
There are legitimate reasons to reduce externalizations of societies innate biases.

A mortgage AI that calculates premiums for the public shouldn't bias against people with historically black names, for example.

This problem is harder to tackle because it is difficult to expose and resign the "latent space" that results in these biases; it's difficult to massage the ML algo's to identify and remove the pathways that result in this bias.

It's simply much easier to allow the robot to be bias/racist/reflective of "reality" (its training data), and add a filter / band-aid on top; which is what they've attempted.

when this is appropriate is the more cultured question; I don't think we should attempt to band-aid these models, but for more socially-critical things, it is definitely appropriate.

It's naive on either extreme: do we reject reality, and substitute or own? Or do we call our substitute reality, and hope the zeitgeist follows?
Apple's advertising for the last few years has continuously focused on privacy. There must be some interest from iPhone buyers if Apple spends their advertising money this way.
It wasn't that long ago that I've have also been disappointed in the change, but today I'd be happy about it.

So yeah, so long as there's more options, rather than just completely changing everything to be "healthy", I think it's an improvement. Otherwise, someone gets the shaft.
Hey, good questions! You know your stuff.

Re: do you have any concerns that your users might shortcut the work to produce high quality estimates of their Scope 3 emissions when you have made it so easy to get lower quality estimates?

> I think the high order bit here is that 99%+ of companies don't measure their emissions at all. This is for a good reason — measuring your emissions historically has been quite labor-intensive. Even for large companies, there is always a 'long tail' of 'Scope 3 goods and services' transactions that are hard to measure. Our goal is to create a scalable solution so that a much larger share of companies are able to participate.

Re: your grocery store example —

> This is a fair point. Our main belief is that realtime, actionable data trumps perfectly attributed data, if perfectly attributed data requires a bottoms-up manual model. The advantage of the spend-based approach is that (1) it's realtime, and (2) it aligns incentives at the company level. The holy grail, however, would be itemized spend data (level 3 data), where you could factor in the emissions of your specific line-items. Unfortunately, that data is nearly impossible to get (yet). Maybe that's Bend 2.0 :)

Re: re-accounting historical emissions —

> Yes! We use the emissions 'factor' that most closely matches the transaction date. So for example, if you bought a Starbucks coffee in 2020, we would use the 2020 Starbucks factor, and if you bought a Starbucks in 2021, we would use the 2021 Starbucks factor. If Starbucks is late to publish their 2022 report, we would recalculate the emissions when the info is updated. For our category fallbacks, we also take currency / region into consideration.

Happy to chat more, either with you or the WRI folks! Thanks for the questions.
Apple: it's impossible because of the encryption

Regulator: what are the others using?

Apple: something very similar but slightly different

Regulator: and it's impossible to develop an open standard thet allows p2p encryption to be maintained?

Apple: Yes obviously in this specific field of technology that's not possible at all.

(Not the) Regulator: Sounds legit
If you don't like a company's offerings then buy something else.
What we need are more films in the $30m-$70m region; art-house blockbusters. Superhero fatigue is real - what audiences really want is someone like Michael Mann in the 90s.
Many of the abandoned houses in Detroit are owned by speculators who will do nothing with it but wait for land prices to increase.
Fix the data input side, not the data output side. The data input side is slowly being fixed in real time as the rest of the world gets online and learns these methods.
These sorts of articles have always confused me. This would be a great problem to have! If gas usage gas halves then double the tax, and so on. Once gas taxes are 10-20x what they are today, we can talk about how to find replacement revenue.

Also; the annual ongoing damage Britain is incurring from burning fossil fuels is already way above 35 billion pounds. Focusing on where the money for those repairs is coming from is probably more important.
"The median outcome is steady growth" - Yeah, no that's wrong. There's no algorithm you can use to get steady growth from a fair coinflip. Math 101
I suspect you simply need to use it more with a lot more variation in your prompts. In particular, it takes style direction and some other modifiers to really get rolling. Run at least a few hundred prompts with this in mind. Most will be awful output... but many will be absolute gems.

It has, honestly, completely blown me away beyond my wildest imagination of where this technology would be at today.
There's no teardown required here. Developing an empty lot and selling the result will lose you a $1M+ in my town. Spec home development ceased here in 2019.
Interesting. Considering this is now a paid product, is modifying user input covered by their ToS? If I was spending a lot of money on it I'd be rather annoyed my input was being silently polluted.
Thanks! I wish I could afford a designer. I'm trying to do my best with TailwindCss ATM.
Back in the late-70s/early-80s the town I lived in had a thing called Dial-a-Bus which was longer than a minivan with maybe 10-15 seats, built lighter than a modern airport shuttle. It could pick you up from home and drop you off at an address, etc. I remember when the price jumped from 10 cents to 25 cents per ride. Prank calls were a thing unfortunately.
Yeah, even the ones run by major tech players- the Amazon and Samsung Android app stores, are really just there to serve their own devices. They don't contain any exclusive apps that are forcing Android users off of the Play Store for.
Changing federal funding rules for suburban infrastructure would be a big head start. Right now, there is a permanent pressure for local governments to "expand". The Federal government doesn't fund maintenance, and new-urbanist expansion is not prioritized enough. If the federal government prioritizes funding for projects which increase density rather than lower it, then there would be some degree of shift.
> You can always choose to live in a cheaper home.

So your 90 year old grandpa has been living in a two bedroom apartment on the lower east side for 65 years. When he moved in at age 25, it was considered a crummy but affordable neighborhood, but now it's expensive and desirable. You want a 90 year old to have to move? I agree that maybe a 65 year old couple no longer needs to be in a 3,000 square foot home, but there are a lot of cases that make this complicated.
I wrote about this happening two days ago on my sub stack post, "OpenAI will start charging businesses for images based on how many images they request. Just like Amazon Web Services charges businesses for usage across storage, computing, etc. Imagine a simple webpage where OpenAI will list out their AI-job suite, including “jobs” such as software developer, graphics designer, customer support rep, and accountant. You can select which service offerings you’d like to purchase ad-hoc or opt into the full AI-job suite."

In case you are interested in reading the whole take: https://aifuture.substack.com/p/the-ai-battle-rages-on
Seriously, won't this combined with GPT-3 flood the influencer market?
Where they implement such taxes, people with homes often get lower taxes because the tax on vacant or underutilized properties makes up for it.
Ah, yes, if only Apple Computer could have borrowed the wisdom of the famously prescient and tech literate European Union, it might have seen its way to these changes and new customers alone.
Was really excited to see something more reminiscent of the Scaleway era -- small 4-16 core ARM boxes with modest memory/storage/network

Not quite sure how to phrase my reaction. Not really disappointed, but I suppose confused. Something this beefed up I'd probably rather have Epyc
> What's the difference between the two in reality?

One taxes the land and the building(s) on it. The other only taxes the former.

In practice, this means that while property taxes and land value taxes both penalize speculation, LVTs more precisely do so, without the side effect property taxes have of penalizing construction.

> However better-looking homes are then a signal that drive up demand for (and therefore price of) land so ultimately it seems LVT does punish improvements if only indirectly.

Even assuming that effect does happen, it'd be considerably worse under a property tax.
It's kind of funny just how long I had to work with statisticians to see that stats people and physics people look at generative processes in two completely different ways:

"There are two cultures in the use of statistical modeling to
reach conclusions from data. One assumes that the data are generated
by a given stochastic data model. The other uses algorithmic models and
treats the data mechanism as unknown. The statistical community has
been committed to the almost exclusive use of data models"
This news is funny since it doesn't actually change anything. It's still a waitlist that they're pushing out slowly (not an open beta). Nice way to stay in the news though.
If this doesn't, DALL-E 2 will: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1549761827969544192
Or producing meat, or maintaining prisons, or building security critical CPUs, or funding medical research...

These people think the market exists, but really we just have a fucked-up version of socialism that privatizes the profits while subsidizing the risk. It supports toxic industries while fucking everyone else over.

In this case, particularly talking about agriculture and the prison industrial complex... or the huge scam with the covid loans where they just used the money for stock buybacks.
I can't imagine that anyone expected anything else.

It's an undertold story that Intel has been a drag on the PC industry since the early 00's by numerous decisions that have reduced the performance gap between mainstream PCs and smartphones. Intel's real goal has been to sell as much of the balance-of-system of a PC as possible. They're offended by the idea that NVIDIA or AMD gets some money from the graphics card when you buy a PC so they came out with integrated "graphics" functionality in the CPU which is the reason why people think Windows Vista sucked.

The other day my son and I found an old PC which had a "Pentium" branded chip from the early 2010's that had an artificially limited number of PCIe lanes. This chip claims to support 16 PCIe lanes which makes you think you could hook up a graphics card, except some PCIe lanes are eaten up by the SATA, ethernet, sound, Super IO and other features. This machine is now e-Waste because of this short sighted decision.

People who've never built a PC or tried putting cards in an existing and fought with the restrictions on PCIe lanes don't realize that PC's have been badly starved for I/O since 2010.
'Significant Uncorrectable' Meteoroid Damage to James Webb Space Telescope
Ask HN: Ideas to Fight Climate Change?
Does anyone have any idea or know of some initiative where HN community members could contribute?

It does not matter to me how tiny the contribution might seem as long as it can have some impact.
Yes, plus personal property tax. If I own the car for 8 years before selling it and the battery is about $10,000 In value and the sales tax rate is 6% or so, the tax I’m paying is already equal to the gas tax I already typically would pay driving a 30mpg the average number of miles per year in a typical state. And some localities have personal property taxes, and that $10,000 battery often puts the car in a higher bracket, so you end up paying a 4% personal property tax EVERY YEAR on the battery, which is about 5 times what state gas tax would be.

And keep in mind many states already charge EV owners a high registration fee that more than makes up for the lack of state gas taxes. So sales tax plus personal property tax plus EV registration fee… you’re already paying nearly an order of magnitude more than the typical consumer pays state gas tax.

It’s a pretty stupid idea to charge far more taxes for far lower emissions vehicles if you think climate change is real. Regardless of your rationale about use taxes or whatever. It’s just stupid.
Have you tried any of the "human or Dall-E" tests?

How did you score?

I only scored as well as I did because I knew the kind of stylistic choices to look out for. In terms of "quality" I really don't understand how you've reached this conclusion.
Truly an instrumental resource for getting through Operating Systems course at Georgia Tech.
> The cyclists in the US I see in a suburban area are almost all doing it for exercise (pretty obvious from the getup), not to get somewhere.

That might change if there was more dedicated bike lanes.
Fairly sure this is to increase population density in the area, so selling old homes for tear downs would be a net gain.

The more reasonable approach to this would be discounts for the primary residence, and possibly discounts for populated units, depending on if you are targeting home owners / overall population and housing cost.

Quarter acre per family might make sense across the US as a whole with large swathes of empty land across the middle, but it makes no sense if you look at the average individual given the percentage of the country living in urban areas.
AI-Generated News Stories
In my condo association, owners cannot do that kind of maintenance without breaking a rule and getting fined. It's in the bylaws that the condo association is responsible for anything structural or foundational, as well as the roof, and other areas like balconies and decks. As the owner, you're responsible for everything inside of the studs, basically, and nothing outside them. I assume this is very common, especially where units aren't fully detached. Doing maintenance and repairs on these areas is part of what HOA fees are meant to pay for.
While true, this likely has nothing to do with the happiness experienced in western culture.

Short term happiness comes from things that release dopamine/oxytocin: (1) Drugs, (2) Sex, (3) Cuddling (4) Video games... etc

Long term [personal] happiness usually comes from self-actualization (I am doing meaningful work and am competent at it) and having an upward sloping trajectory in life (i.e. things were worse for me before, but they're getting better and they will be better in the future). It's affected by expectations (i.e. did things turn out better than I expected). It can also come from having meaningful relationships with other people.

Modern society:
(1) Sets high expectations of what is achievable which sets people up for disappointment for what they will actually achieve

(2) Reduces in person connections due to a lot of work being more solitary/computer work and people interacting with the physical world less

(3) Does not highlight the "bright future" of tomorrow (and specifically how things will improve if you live in a western nation)

(4) Lots of people end up choosing whether to do meaningful work or get paid well - meaningful work rarely pays appropriately (teachers, nurses, etc. even things like nuclear engineers being paid less than frontend software developers for ex.). Partly this is due to bad incentives and cost of capital that is too low (i.e. software/finance has gotten disproportionately "fat" relative to it's contribution to social well-being. Higher interest/hurdle rates would solve some of this)
Just to be clear, they’re assuming $50/kWh, cheap infrastructure costs for the recharging system, alongside heavy taxes for tradition ships, plus other assumptions, to get to your claims. It’s much more of a stretch than you’re letting on.
No, it doesn't. I extract more value from Apple's offerings than they extract from me in $$$.
Safari is only a competitor because folks don't have a choice. This would force Apple to actually compete against Chrome by giving users a reason to keep using Safari.
This is more true for game testers/QA (notorious for low pay and turnover) than software QA in other industries. SDET's are developers that focus on testing and get paid on par with devs.
The real world is a lot less dramatic than it was in the past in many ways.

A movie about chasing the love of your life down at the airport right before they board would be solved with a text message and some emoji instead.

A movie about everyone going off to war would instead be droning some people from far away. Even getting droned is less dramatic... no chase or fight or glory, just one second there and the next second not. The war in Ukraine would be implausible as a modern movie (An evil villian attacks with tanks and blows up schools to rebuild some mythical empire? Uh, sounds dated and cliche.)

So drama in movies is now mostly due to people making unnecessary drama. And has anyone else noticed that political dramas are almost always about what people say and never what they do?