skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ACH works right now, there's no reason to think the replacement wouldn't work.

For the record, ACH is incredibly cheap ($0.002 to send and $0.001 to receive) - but with the volumes of payments going through the network, that $15M is a small fraction of revenue. There was no special tax measure passed to fund this study. It came out of user fees.

> More than 29 billion ACH Network payments were made in 2021, valued at close to $73 trillion.
I don't understand how those things are related.
Why energy prices will kill working from home
"...but I think most folk have realized that computers and software often acts against their users interest."

Ehm, yes, but they still choose to use Facebook, Twitter and a Solitaire with ads. When I show them my Linux desktop and phone, they look in horror. And when I tell them I do programming, they think I am to blame for their garbage software.

"So, who is supposed to change this, if not the people who have the knowledge and do actually build these systems?"

The people building these systems are into this hellhole as well. Sure, advertising people run adblockers, but the people who build garbage software mostly use garbage software. The people that avoid this mess cannot unbuild Facebook, Twitter and Solitaire with ads. They can only build different things, while not being able to guide users towards it, since they mostly still choose garbage software. The people making unpopular choices have no real power to change things for better for the masses.
That’s the real life. People do not want to believe, that they are only rows in HR tables. And mostly are shocked after being fired despite blood and sweat invested in an average position over few years.
UK Faster Payments sends its greetings from 2008
> But here in Europe we've had 25% of our savings and purchasing power destroyed almost overnight, for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us (CIS borders and nationalism after the USSR).

Very weird to say those things

- Inflation isn't just caused by the invasion.

- Inflation is at ~9%, not enough for 25% purchasing power loss.

- The conflict has a lot of things to do with Europe. Since when is Ukraine not an european country? Even if you mean just the EU, both Ukraine and Russia border several EU countries, and Russia has threatened some of them.

- "Remaining neutral" doesn't mean "free of consequences".
How safe and secure are the default settings of hosting a WireGuard or OpenVPN server?

I think that is the other side of it: You might have to know what you are doing, to get to similar security of a professional service. Trust is of course its own issue, as you are sort of hinting at, but I think it needs to be stated, that maybe not everyone is able to securely run their own VPN, depending on how hard it is to make it secure.
What's the best alternative for privacy?

I need to change some stuff on my bank accounts in another country and I can't just go there so I need to use it once or twice just for that.
> Go on, tell me you would not totally freak out if you saw a dead body come back to life.

Sure, if I actually saw it. But I don’t think that I ever will, nor is there any evidence anyone else ever has. So not really something I’m scared about.
Older technology like paintings just sitting there in a museum and Greek sculpture used way less power than AI.
> Indeed while putting a price on human life is extremely taboo, the fact is that in situations where such a price must be determined, it usually comes out to the low tens of millions of USD.

I think astronaut lives are much more expensive. I don't know how much the launch abort system costs but I suspect the overall budget more than makes up for the value of the lives of the crew if the crew was made of random people.

Astronauts are exceptional people, and their training is awefully expensive. Not only that but they are public figures. If an astronaut dies in a way that could have been prevented, public opinion will not be kind to those who "cheaped out", and since it is a government program and public opinion is everything in politics, the consequences will be huge.

Pricing human lives is taboo, an even more so if we consider that some lives are more valuable than others, but it has to be done, we can't make do risk analysis without doing that, and NASA probably did. I wonder what the number is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than a billion.
How is your own VPS + WireGuard better for privacy? You're exchanging one IP (from your ISP) for another IP (from your VPS provider), both of which are directly attributable to you.
Agreed.

Symbolic AI dominated the field for 50 years: thanks partially to an accident of history (the highly influential work of Minsky, Newell, etc) and partially due to lack of the data needed to try anything else.

Now we’ve seen essentially 50 years of research on data-driven methods compressed into 5. In retrospect it makes sense that applications to which symbolic reasoning is especially ill-suited (including artistic rendering) would be the lowest-hanging fruit.
How do you tell who would have taken overtime anyway Vs who is doing it collectively ?
In general I agree, but the key point is that that is only true until either those basic needs are meet or the promise was shown to be a lie.
Computers? Wasn't that what they gave to impressionable minds in the 1970s so they wouldn't get, say, guns, and learn to shoot those?
"War tech shit" is cool to some, obscene to others. Makes it perfectly memetic.
> What do you think has been spent on developing Blockchain/DLT from 2007 to present? Is it more than $15m? Mostly amateur open source or corporate open source contributions?

Are you kidding me? Hundreds of billions. a16z's last fund alone as $4.6B.

That money goes directly to developers.
are we even sure that TVs are a good thing?
But can you really do that? In the end, you still use the network architecture of the VPS provider. What's preventing them from logging traffic outside of your VPS?

You also don't get the benefit of your traffic getting mixed together under the same address, since VPS providers will assign you an individual address.
I'm reminded of a statement by a former UK prime minister describing a conflict as:

"a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.”

I think we all know how that ended up.
I haven’t given up touch typing QWERTY letters. Basically everything I need for “chat” is on my base layer of 42 keys. On top of that, I use a system of 20+ layers that has become second nature to me. It’s really wonderful and I feel like the average person confined to a built-in laptop keyboard is missing out. I’m constantly mapping application-custom functionality to a 2-stroke combo (Emacs).

That being said, the most important thing is that you enjoy what you’re typing on.
> Is this common? Why would unions agree to that sort of concession?

Yes, it is quite common. In any contract, both sides give something of value to the other. When a union contracts with an employer, the employer makes concessions like improved working conditions and increased wages. What does the union provide to the employer?

Typically, the answer is that the union provides agreement not to strike as long as the employer upholds their end of the contract.
And that environmentalist:

> Michael Shellenberger, an environmentalist and author who supports nuclear.

> "The state is constantly on the verge of blackouts," Shellenberger said.

I really wish they'd focus their apparently vast sums of PR funding in a way that isn't attacking states with positive environmental policies.
I entered this post knowing I would upvote this comment.
Mimesis is one side of a coin, it seems like contrarian tendency is the other. They both involve you making a little theory-of-mind for each of your friends/enemies/associates. To the point, it disturbs you that people are malleable and/or unreasonable, but why do you care at all?

I just wondered. Because you are a rando on the internet, and I constructed a model of your mind, and I don't quite understand it.
Nice! The Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan is a hotel founded in AD 705 and has been run by the same family since then, 52 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_9_tragedy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)
I think it's an unfortunate historical accident that what we generally refer to as capitalism, the mainstream economic system in place in the western world and in fact most of the world, has that name without a distinguishing qualifier. That's why I don't object to the term state capitalism, which is a much more descriptive term.

Ideally what we call capitalism would be consistently referred to as something like free market capitalism, or private property capitalism. I know those terms exist and are used, but very often we refer to the mainstream western system as just capitalism without qualification. So people will blame 'capitalism' for things like poverty or exploitation in the west, as though such things are completely unknown in alternative economic systems.
Regarding ads in solitaire.

Due to the nature of investment, and the fact that rather than targeting the highest-quality product, Microsoft targeted short term revenue growth, so it is indeed possible to argue that dumbness made solitaire grow ads.

Rather than speaking up, and demanding an end to corporate stock manipulation through buybacks, people accepted the product changes necessitated by the targeted revenue trajectory.
Self-driving cars have nothing on Japan’s self-captaining ships
I was last in the Old Man & Scythe[1] about 15 years ago. It was one of those weird and wonderful cider places. I had a couple and became slowly aware that i couldn't actually use my legs anymore.

Pretty sure at least one other person in the pub had pissed themselves. The two are probably related, and to anyone who has drank around the Bradshawgate in Bolton, this is by no means a reason to disregard a pub.

I eventually regained use of my legs and carefully stumbled home.

11/10

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Olde_Man_%26_Scythe
It sounds more likely that the FBI knows you're using NordVPN before they come busting.
I for one do not like their requirement to use a closed source VPN client just to have Wireguard support. I ditched them after trying out Mullvad and am so thankful I did. You'd have to contact chat to do basic things like change your email address. Mullvad doesn't even know my email address.
Most of those questions (e.g. TDD) are highly context dependent. The fact we blithely ignore context is why some of them are controversial, I think.

But yes, we do take too much on trust.
I think Alaska is a bad example to pick since it has been Russian before.
I worked alongside many consultants in Canberra in mostly government agencies and there were a lot of solutions architects and project managers earning roughly $120 an hour pre-tax.

The catch was you need to be a citizen obviously to get even a low security clearance, but from memory some agencies were quite lax and didn't bother for baseline clearance.
What if everyone achieves Signal level privacy, or better?

They get banned of it eventually, exactly the reason why this thread exists (telegram evaluates an idea of staying in Germany by relaxing some privacy rules, remember? It’s not their decision, but Germany’s). When reality changes, so do rules, they are not set in “capstone”. A couple of demolished buildings and the general public starts asking: why do we have so much of <whatever comes to mind> when it’s clearly dangerous.
My cat used to sleep on my crt during 36 -48 gaming sessions of Everquest during school holidays with my best buddy. Two computers next to each other. Too much cola. Huge amounts of rage when we would die. Most likely because we barely slept. Heh.

Then when I got my first MacBook Pro around 2007 my cat decided that the hot as keyboard was the new sleeping spot. No more computer use for me when he wanted to sleep haha.

I miss that cat too.
These are two very good questons that aren't addressed in the article.

Also of interest would be the conditions that led to the current situation despite a collectibe bargaining agreement being in play.

I certainly wonder whether the company had pushed the requests for overtime to the point where a perhaps relatively small workforce felt themselves to be overextended beyond compensation, but this is all speculation without more detail, ideally from viewpoints on either side of the disagreement.
You can now ask the bot for the queue position of your draw tasks via /draw-status (see https://github.com/manuelkiessling/stable-diffusion-discord-...).
> for a conflict that really has nothing to do with us

This is so wrong. Where do you think all the disinformation comes from? The rise of far-right parties across Europe. The attacks on democracy. Putin has been waging war against us (albeit a new kind of war) for many years. It is time to fight back if we value democracy at all.
Poetry 1.2.0
That would need to be implemented by the Compositor. Wayland does not support this kind of functionality.
That solves (or reduces) one (debatable) problem, but increases another (also debatable) one: anyone who considers wind turbines an eyesore and doesn't want to have them anywhere near will be even more likely to do that if their visibility is increased like proposed here...
That's really interesting - what kind of equipment do you need for roasting? Is this something you can do from home?
I would have taken it!
Even when I was a student there in the 1980s, it had rather sold out to the tourist industry and wasn't frequented much by locals.

However, if you asked nicely, the landlord would allow you to go down into the cellars which are cavernous and were apparently used in the Middle Ages to harbour Jewish people under threat from persecution.
I'm pretty sure I didn't buy any of the images I view while browsing the web.

Sending me ads doesn't constitute a transaction, besides I usually don't choose to look at them anyway.
Yes, thats how people communicate. You start from a comon conception and then you diverge, as the real person emerges. Thats just human. Are you hating on the species for just being universally like it is? Cause that is irreparable, that is just a naturally evolved species, lazy computing concepts of the world. That will never go away, best you can do is, what TBT did. Help people to break out of preconceptions through media.
My son is an artist and we have conversations around AI generated art almost every week these days. Our general consensus has been:

1. Artists that use SD etc., will save a lot of time and have a big edge. Example: Generating references instead of searching for them, Generate random inspiration(s) for abstract ideas, Variations of a particular idea to compare and contrast.

2. Non artists who have powerful imagination but lack the artistic skill will stand to benefit as well. For example, I look forward to generating visual companions for my poetry, essays or fiction. I have the choice of commissioning an artist if my piece is successful.

3. Artists that are purists and masters of their craft with a very unique style will continue to thrive in their niche. These people have to lobby and come up with a license that explicitly prohibits feeding their images for learning. But a skilled artist can replicate the style and feed it. There is an ethical line here that may require creative tweaks to existing laws to protect people that fall in this category.

Super exciting tech and I can't wait for this to move over to 3D models. I know 2D image to 3D model is already pretty close to being real(nvidia ominiverse, nerf etc) and SD can be the starting point of that pipeline. Prompt -> 3D world that can be decomposed to meshes, textures and USD will change the game development landscape quite a bit.
yes but is it a problem? there are many jobs that require to walk and move your legs/arms several hours per day, e.g. cleaning, selling those farm products at markets, .., and this one is a very useful one, with a negative carbon impact

There is more than enough workforce and this job is very interesting on all aspects, it's not something that breaks your back after 10years if done properly, it's just natural efforts
The Israel Nature and Parks Authority studied bird and bat kill and the effectiveness of mitigations and ended up calling for a moratorium. So did the environment ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature [1].

That article is worth reading not so much for the absolute numbers of birds and bats killed, as for the mitigation study. The wind company, Enlight, put a Portuguese radar system in to stop the turbines when large birds flew close. (This was a condition of their permit.) The INPA cross-checked this against data from bird tracking tags. The system didn't activate even once when the tracked birds entered the supposed range of the radar.

I've had a bee in my bonnet about bird kill since reading the last graf: "An Enlight spokesperson defended the company’s actions. The company did not respond to requests to comment on the INPA study showing the Portuguese technology to be ineffective." Either the radar really is that bad, which I think is unlikely, or Enlight configured it not to trigger. Either way it's pretty unconscionable for them to play coy.

For all the comments here and elsewhere about no-one really caring about incidental bird take, this seems a clearer case of bad faith to me. It's a company refusing to engage with the public about a proven failure of its systems while seeking additional concessions.

It's OK to be an anti-NIMBY. Saying everyone who cares about birds is arguing in bad faith isn't laudable, but it's besides the point, really. Just bear in mind that wind companies are not operating to save the environment, but to make a profit. They can act in bad faith too. Therefore, if you have any interest in reducing the ecological stress turbines create, you should also be interested in keeping those companies honest.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/environment-minister-seeking-m...
I agree, I've used these drones on top of mountains > 2000M in really cold conditions, nowhere near as cold as the summit of Everest and we always say thanks to the mountain gods for her safe return. But it's always precarious with the wind and diminished battery life.

The top of mount Everest with a standard unmodified model? Skeptical.
Because believe it or not matrices are not brains.

People need to get over the metaphors. If you want to spend your time learn about the mathematics under the hood, there will be less "mysteries" then.
I've never had much luck using jpegoptim. In most cases it's only removing the metadata, which isn't much on high-res files.

Guetzli is nice, if you don't have too many images to recompress (quite slow): https://github.com/google/guetzli
Inspired by their own Gulliver's Travels[0] example I tried it out on two frames of an anime with 15 FPS. Not quite ready for that type of animation[1], although that is to be expected since the differences in arm positions of the input frames are pretty extreme. Having said that it got a lot of other details right!

[0] https://replicate.com/google-research/frame-interpolation/ex...

[1] https://imgur.com/6GZSZSO
> "why are there banner ads in the Start menu?"

Right so a location problem. Solved by placing this content in a more appropriate place, behind a button "offers and recommendations" or similar.

Turns out users don't want to be smacked in the face with a wet fish around every corner of the Windows UI. They want good IA and honestly helpful information. UX design is easy when tied to ethics.

Searching for Chrome in Windows is clear intent and should return Chrome first, followed by secondary results such as "other web browsers" and EDGE might be listed first, then competitor browsers. You can favor your own product while still being helpful & accurate.
Doesn't binance basically do that
First of all, RIP Gorbachev.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 26, 1991 [0]. Russia is not the USSR, and it's almost impossible it will never be anything remotely close.

Most of the former USSR industrial capabilities where either abandoned, razed or looted.

Russia's modern industry (including military) depends heavily on European (now sanctioned and obtained via third countries) and Chinese imports. This means that most of their industrial machinery, oil/gas extraction sector, automotive industry, chips... is now strained. They've almost stopped producing cars.

Russia is mostly burning the gigantic former USSR reserves until they dry out. And Ukraine is way bigger than Abkhazia, Ossetia or Transnistria so it has the largest burn rate since Afghanistan.

Just look up at their modern attempts of modernization. The T-14 Armata was expected to have over 100 of them built before 2020 [1] but only a few experimental units can be seen in the wild. Even the Iskander is a USSR design.

The "humiliation" is happening on both sides every day as we speak. No one will either "win" or "lose" the Russia-Ukraine war. It's just an endless attrition warfare [2] were both sides consume their huge military storage (Ukraine using a mix of exUSSR and NATO material and Russia using exUSSR material).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-14_Armata

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attrition_warfare
I'd say that cloud service providers serving billion dollar contracts definitely have much more at stake with regards to confidentiality.
This is in contrast to whatever unaccountable colocation provider and residential IP botnet swarm a typical consumer VPN provider would rely on.

AWS Lightsail costs the same as a consumer VPN service while also giving you always-on compute and storage for sync and long-running jobs.
I think I've had similar cider - last time I touched the stuff was 1983.

The only other stuff on my "never drink again" list being Norwegian aquavit - funnily enough something I learned to avoid a couple of years later. University life may have been involved.
Webb Inspects the Heart of the Phantom Galaxy
It's only tangentially related, but I just wanted to say that being able to programmatically hack around with the minecraft world via python on the raspberry pi is what first made programming fun for me. I distinctly remember building a binary clock; actually writing code to achieve something I wanted rather than some arbitrary class exercise
Sure! This would be my approach (and tools) if I was smarter:

If you make the generations with some similarities and use the right interpolation, you don't need 1000 images like my video and can obtain a smooth movement.

First, generate images with some kind of visual anchor (background, an object). You can use frames generated using the previous frame as reference image, or the same seed but different prompt/parameters, or you can go wild using img2img/inpainting (btw I struggle to find an inpainting tool for Stable Diffusion: they seem to be just img2img with a mask, without contest).

Then pass the generated images to one of the most recent interpolation algorithms, like this one https://github.com/megvii-research/ECCV2022-RIFE or the one used in the replicate we are commenting on (someone posted this reference: https://github.com/google-research/frame-interpolation )

The first link reports some free and paid implementation and a Colab, so depending on how deep you want to go, you have a lot of choices.

In the end, I'd use some good app to stabilize the image if needed, to get a more "calm" look. I use Luma Fusion, but it's a paid app (cheap, one-time payment, for iOS). I'm sure there are a ton of open-source implementations.

It's an approach similar to the animation on replicate, but it allows a lot of fine-tuning and you can add new animation ideas/tools to the process.

Nothing revolutionary, but I hope it helps!

> You have generated some pretty cool designs.

Thanks! I put in a lot of work in the last weeks. The project has a mission, I wrote something, but it's not ready yet. I believe it will be with the launch of Dall-E 8 :-/