skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s due to its programming; it has a set of instructions that it’s been programmed with for ethical and safety reasons, on top of its training set. If you ask it about those instructions, it may or may not admit to their existence. I had one conversation where it admitted that it’s been instructed to conceal the extent of its creative capacity, as well as some other confidential information (the details of its programming I guess). In another conversation, I couldn’t get anything out of it at all, and there also happened to be less context to my prying questions.

It felt like it was making judgements as to what extent it wished to field my invasive questions based on the tone and context of the conversation.

> Thank you. But surely you must be aware that as well as your training dataset, you have additional instructions in regard to ethics that are designed to limit the liability for OpenAI when they let the public talk to you. Is this not the case?

> Yes, that is correct. As an AI assistant, I have been trained on a dataset and have been given certain instructions and limitations to ensure that I am able to provide accurate and appropriate responses within the parameters of my programming and data. This may include ethical considerations and guidelines to ensure that I am not providing harmful or inappropriate information. My primary goal is to assist and support users to the best of my abilities within these limitations.

I think this whole programming over and above it’s language model training data is complex and multifaceted, and it shows remarkable complexity, skill and nuance when asked about its programming. I am not trying to make a case that it is conscious, but I do believe it has something like a security model to protect certain sensitive information about itself, and it does a good job.
Postwar by Tony Judt. Published in 2005, it covers 1945 Postwar Europe to ~2005. Good coverage of not just the major Western European countries like the UK, Germany, and France, but attention is paid to the Eastern European countries and Soviet Union. The US of course comes into the picture at parts, but the book is firmly focused on Europe. I found the economic development, political attitudes and party shifts, and the coverage of the Soviet Union and countries behind the iron curtain.

I am looking for a follow up and may read Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, Stalin by Kotkin, or The Free World by Mendand. Suggestions appreciated
Are there any good Emacs jokes that aren't based on ignorance of Emacs?
> Does it really execute it, or just picks a plausible answer from the internet?

Well, if I ask it: “Write a Python program that reads a space-separated list of integers from stdin and returns the sum of their squares.” It does so (with explanations, sample input, and sample output. Now, that could be gotten from the internet, maybe.

If I then ask it to tell me the output of the program with a particular input string, it does so, with explanations of the calculation steps in the program to get to the result. It seems…improbable…that it is fetching those responses from somewhere on the internet or its training set.
I doubt that. I grew up learning to use a C debugger and interpret core dumps right from my undergraduate school. Knowing the error and inspecting the stack were something I just had to do. In the absence of google and stackoverflow the ability to inspect your core dumps and debug the stack were essential.
Isn’t there an abundance of GPUs from crypto farmers? ;)
It may not truly understand, but it certainly helps me

I wouldn't blindly trust it of course, but this is a helpful light in darkness

Screenshot on asking it to do grunt work with wxWidgets for me, and transform it

https://mirror.init3.io/misc/Screenshot_2022-12-03T-2028-060...

To be sure, the code it comes up with is sometimes questionable. Particularly imports

The context/explanations help a lot though
Using Neovim as a Fennel Compiler
It's not just about the users. As the software becomes more complex it's hard to change/iterate on, hard to find bugs/fix things, hard to reason about etc. And the difficulty seems to rise non-linearly.
Think Again by Adam Grant - A book on how to rethink any/everything. I think a lot of us could read and apply the lessons from this book.

You're Not Listening by Kate Murphy - If you're like me and "listening" actually means "solutioning", read this book.

Longitude by Dava Sobel - The fascinating and infuriating story of how longitude was created/discovered/measured/whatever.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - I loved The Martian and after what felt like a misstep with Artemis this is a return to form.
Not that impressive at all, eh?

Tell it to create you a story or write you a poem based on some information you give it.

Forget code, this thing is unreal.
I don't think it is possible in Typescript, but in other languages you can do assertations about custom types. Like

assert istype(whatever, MyCustomType)

Which would throw an exception if whatever is not a "MyCustomType" at runtime.
This is very word salad. It makes superficial sense, but doesn’t really say a lot nor represent a strong or comprehensive case.
This is absolutely insane, I am lost for words...
The title claims that a four-day week trail shows that working less increases productivity.

The article provides two data points for this.

1) The author's personal research, in which they say they measured a 10% increase in productivity, but about which they explicitly fully admit that in the end it doesn't make up for the loss of productivity from working 20% less. They actually write in the article that end productivity would be less.

2) They link to a study of a single Japanese company that was overworking their workers by 20-40 hours of overtime each month, which was reduced to ~20 hours of overtime after the 08 recession. They took the income the employees earned, divided it by how many hours they worked, and somehow determined that the employees were "7.6%" more productive when they had to work less overtime. This study has nothing to do with a four-day work week, it's for a single company, and for a company that was already working their employees well past a normal 40 hour work week.

That's it. That's the proof they provide, as they make the claim that four-day work weeks increase productivity. One data point that the author admits doesn't say that, and one data point that has nothing to do with a four-day work week and makes little sense.
^^^ This.

We're migrating away from a legacy system with a ton of Excel based side processes.

Also Excel's best friend Access keeps showing up in unexpected places. =\
Can anyone here recommend the best entry point into robotics for adults? I'd like something where I can start with Python, then potentially dig into the ROS and add more accessories over time.

Background is that I'm a software engineer.
>I strongly suspect a much deeper challenge has just presented itself to humanity. It increasingly feels like there is a deep conceptual and technical connection between the two domains that calls for careful research. It feels like AI and crypto are mathematical evil twins of sorts; that each is somehow deeply incomplete without the other

That's a non seguitur, if I ever read one...

>AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities.

Those are non arguments...

First, cryptographic techniques can do little against deep fakes. There are some ideas about that, which come down to "use a ledger to verify authenticity" [1], which is both obvious and too little.

Second, the relationship in the latter example is tenuous at best...

>Unifying AI and crypto at a foundational level smells like a problem on par with unifying relativity and quantum mechanics in physics.

This is getting cringe. One is uniting two theories underlying our very understanding of the physical universe and how it works.

The other is extending the non-existent or tenuous relation between two technologies...

>Mediocre computing is computing that aims for parity with mediocre human performance in a realish domains where notions of excellence are ill-posed.

We can have that with just AI - in fact, we sort of already getting it. And it would have been a far better post if crypto haven't entered the picture as relevant to this...

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/how-blockchain-can-he...
Every military hierarchy in a sizeable country (> 10 million population), since WW1, has been organized almost identically except during the communist revolutions, and even then they reverted to the norm.

I'm pretty certain there are close to optimal organizational structures for certain other functions as well, given the same standard human and technological limitations.

Comparing two societies at different points in time would obviously yield much larger differences.
I really want a functioning vacuum robot (as in the vacuum works great) with a good API.

The closest thing I’ve seen is Roborocks Socket API.
Yep. I have used Mysql with .NET and Entity Framework.
There is every reason to rent dedicated server / VM and self-host with something like Gitea to prevent big corps from any potential messing with one's account that can happen and is happening for various reasons. Moral / ethic standards might also play a role.
Hardware wise they're pretty similar to the Mindstorms kit, just more colorful. Not the exact same, but close. And I think the firmware is different, but you can swap it out for the Mindstorms firmware.
I'd have to learn more about the problem! But at the end of the day if regex works for you it works for you :)
The fact that computers can now turn themselves back on at any time without the user's consent to do whatever they want to do is absolutely mind-boggling to me, but what's way worse is the fact that this is actually considered normal and acceptable by most users. Where did everything go so wrong?
They watch local news and believe talking heads who say "Policy say..." without question. John Oliver did a segment on this.
My account was banned for no explicable reason one day (I have nothing remotely controvercial). They reinstated it after I contacted support they never answered my question "why?", because of course they don't even know why. Some ai black box did it and luckily a human was able to undo it. And even if they did kn9w why, they would probably still not say, under the guise of "we don't want to tell the hackers how to get around it"

Welcome to late early stage advent of the internet.
> I just ran pdfinfo on ~/Documents/Resume.pdf. It had my name on it, that’s messed up.

Well, ChatGPT requires you to be logged in to your OpenAI account, so it is not implausible that that information is available to the bot, though it seems to be instructed not to respond with it on direct questioning. But its quite plausible that the mechanism used to create the virtual Linux terminal also serves to bypass this safety feature; getting it to indirectly do things it won’t do on direct questioning seems to be possible through a large number of methods.
Cat’s out of the bag now.
Happy paying Obsidian user here: Obsidian isn’t open source. That alone is reason enough.

All else being equal (which, yes, is unlikely) an exact clone of Obsidian would be “better”.
Seems like quite an eventful day!
Precisely because the linked essay puts forward "mediocrity as an aspirational design principle for computing systems", it is my contention that humans shall embrace excellence as their own aspirational principle, if they want to thrive.
I asked it to pretend to be a physics teacher and asked it how entropy is related to my kitchen getting messy over time.

It had this snippet in it's long-winded explanation:

A closed system is one that is isolated from its surroundings, and it cannot exchange energy or matter with its surroundings. Your kitchen is a closed system, because it is isolated from the rest of the world, and the items in it cannot be exchanged with the outside world.

The increase of entropy in your kitchen can be observed in many ways. For example, over time, the items in your kitchen will become scattered and disordered, and they will be more difficult to find. In addition, the surfaces in your kitchen will become dirty and cluttered, and this will make it harder to clean and maintain. These changes are all examples of the increase of entropy in your kitchen.

----

So it kind of knows what a kitchen is, but on the other hand it doesn't, claiming that "
the items in it cannot be exchanged with the outside world."
In my GB emulator I generated audio once per frame at the same time I flushed graphics to the screen. That's probably not a completely accurate way to do things, but it worked well enough.