skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything the author is saying is true, but the reason for this direction is that the business / enrollment pressures on colleges and universities are mounting and the shared governance model wasn’t getting it done. Decisions made by committee take too long and often no decisions are ever reached. This works fine, and is even preferred when there are limited financial pressures, but that isn’t the reality in higher education today.

All of the titles the person mentions are academic titles. Almost always held by former faculty. In practice they often do very little because they don’t know how to do the job because, well, they have never done anything like it before. After a few years they usually are fired or resign in defeat and go back to being full time faculty.

Other things the author says are on point. There are too many “institutes of this,” “centers of that.” Often these centers are demanded by students or a reaction to student complaints. Other times they are partially funded by wealthy donors who have some interest in the area.

I think professional management of colleges and universities is needed, but I also think faculty freedom and compensation needs to be protected and increased. Colleges need to be less concerned about graduation rates and other metrics that create perverse incentives. They are good goals, but when you optimize for them you encourage grade inflation.
Someone did it back in 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
>Stuff like Gobeki Tepe, however, is pretty interesting and seems to shatter our understanding of how human civilization started.

He stacks alot of speculative but interesting claims on top of each other so it's not an all or nothing theory. I think a flooding/impact event pushing humanity into a dark age during that period is a very compelling idea. The idea that all megalithic structures come from a single lost civilization not so compelling.
Plenty of bad advise here.

It sounds like you already made up your mind about this person and came here to enforce your confirmation bias.

Since I've been on both sides of this story, I'm going to be the devil's advocate.

> I try as much as possible to explain _why_ practices are what they are, the effects on our project, the team, etc. Any suggestions for these conversations in the future?

How about showing the hard evidence that those practices are beneficial and a net positive? Let me guess, you don't have that. If you had, there wouldn't be a debate. My bet is you don't even have metrics to look at in the future that will prove your practices are beneficial.

> Sending a large PR that changes many files at once because their changes kept growing in scope as they were trying to figure out how to do something

Is this a one-off you're looking to attack them on, or a consistent behavior? Based on the description I suspect it's a one off. If it's consistent, it is pretty bad. Since it looks like you're already got off the wrong foot, you'll need other team members to advocate for smaller PR.

> The benefits of unit tests are so fundamental

Ah, the cargo-culting. The benefits of testing are fundamental. But testing is hard. Unit testing is a way for lousy engineers to pretend to do testing.

https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests

> On Friday, I discovered a chunk of code copied from Stackoverflow ... The person said things like "how would anyone find out"

Was it a 2-line or 100-line snippet? Context matters.

The person you're describing might indeed be a toxic asshole you want them to be. But it is also quite possible that you are the asshole here, mischaracterizing them to confirm your bias.
There has been a lot of technological progress, but the sector remains a niche one. Many new THz sources have been built and improved, including coherent sources like the QCLs mentioned. Microantennas may play a big role in the future, and now there are technologies to build them. Optics and detection have also improved. THz equipment still remains expensive, demanding, fragile, and scientific, although much improved from 15 years ago and with many more people working in this field. It's even being considered for 6G communications by some [1] [2] but I do not think this is realistic given the state of technology and optical technologies will probably 'win'

[1] https://opg.optica.org/abstract.cfm?uri=OFC-2022-M3C.6
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6G_(network)
The unions end up forming their own bureaucracy, which grows according to the iron law. It's not the same instance of bureaucratic capture as happens to the school (or school district), but it does happen within the union itself.
Apple's demonetization was painful financially but the platform losing steam is a deeper and different problem that started before that event.
This is excellent. I've already found it valuable in a few searches, and I've only had it installed for 20 minutes.
It sure would be nice if someone that wasn't a geek about this subject could rewrite this article in a way that someone that isn't well versed in this subject could understand what this was. That opening paragraph was a struggle just to read. That, or my reading comprehension skills are deteriorating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism
Machiavelli turned the argument on its head.

He said the Roman Republic was great because it had all three forms of government at the same time: the consuls were “monarchs”, the senate was “aristocratic”, and the people/tribune of the plebes were the “democracy.”

This is where the modern idea of separation of powers comes from.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like that's question number 8; the answer key in the back of http://sites.apam.columbia.edu/courses/apph4903x/exam_GR0177... says the answer to #8 is choice D.
I'm wondering whether the @Troppen answers to [1] are AI-generated:

- Posted from a new account 8 minutes after I posted the question.

- Clippy-style "It looks like you're trying to […]" intro.

- Zero formatting on the initial answer; minimal formatting on the follow-up answer.

- Specifically suggests an option I had explicitly disregarded in my question.

- Both answers suggest non-working code.

- "Let me know if you have any further questions", a completely inappropriate finisher on a site like SO.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/74681399/96588
Of course, it's entirely possible that ChatGPT doesn't understand its own limitations and inner workings. And when we ask it how it works, it just makes up a plausible answer.

There is more than one cognitive scientist that argues that humans do the same thing when we try to explain how we think: We often make up plausible explanations after the fact, without knowing we're doing it.
Or it could be that there simply aren't very many terrorists that want to hurt random civilians without the FBI's encouragement.

I think it has more to say about how civil the countries and groups the US has attacked are, at least when it comes to hurting US innocents in return.
From the article,

> The founders of the democratic tradition understood that institutions are prone to corruption. This does not mean that they cease to operate. It means, to the contrary, that they continue to function, but in ways that no longer serve their original purpose.

It's not clear to me that universities will burn to the ground. They can probably stumble along for decades down the same path if nothing changes. No, their incentives need to be corrected.
> To detect if a text has been written by the Assistant, check for the use of generic language, repetitive phrases, and a lack of personal perspective or opinion.

There are many people who use generic language, repetitive phrases, and lack personal perspectives and opinions (at least people who lack sophisticated perspectives/opinions).

Which makes the problem more complicated, but also perhaps irrelevant. If you can’t tell whether some text was written by a human or a computer, does it even matter?
React Best Practices: How to Write Better React Apps
I think that’s because they merged start menu and web search functionality into the app called Cortana a so even if the assistant portion is dead the same app still powers the start menu regardless.
> I don't have a paycheck, I'm living off capital gains, thank you.

Replying to worker abuse concerns with "well, I'm rich and don't have to work!" is really, really weird.
> converting asks to deliverables, managing expectations from management, enabling team members by opening communication channels across teams, time management

These all sound like David Allen's Getting Things Done, the art of stress free productivity.

> converting asks to deliverables

GTD teaches you to ask what the correct outcome is and what the next action item to get there is (and what those questions even mean) so your projects are always moving forward

> managing expectations from management

GTD talks about setting up project lists so you are current and keeping you current when you meet with management

>enabling team members by opening communication channels across teams

GTD teaches you how to brainstorm with the group and how to ensure everyone in a meeting knows what the next step to move the project forward is

>time management

GTD teaches you someodels to help you best know what your time landscape is and give you reminders of what tasks need to be when and where if known otherwise it has a model of helping set priorities based on contexts available to you
I wonder if this kind of thing, perhaps with a different UI is how I finally grok Rust lifetimes in real-world contexts.

Also, I’m curious if there’s a reasonable way to come up with a class of problem that humans haven’t done countless times. Just as a test. I don’t believe “it’s just a very clever parrot” is actually a problem, but I’m curious how one could test it on “originality” if that makes sense?
Sounds like it could write 85% of HN comments today.
No, of course that's not true. You just haven't set up a coherent classification here. It's easy to come up with comparably black-and-white issues where we did not in fact have to tear down society to resolve them. I can think of 3 off the top of my head.
New York Eyes ‘Somewhat Bloodthirsty’ Rat Supremo to Take on City’s Rodents
Completely agree, the closer an admin is to actually working with the people on the ground, the more they care and the more engaged they are. The administrators in our department that we interact with on a weekly basis are all extremely dedicated and will go out of their way to help you. If you ask someone in central admin for anything you will likely be told it is not their job and look somewhere else (and the next person you contact will do the same... until you give up).
The issue is the Iron Law applies to the unions as well.

Given enough time unions tend towards bureaucracies dedicated to serving the Union, not its members.

Frankly I think saying the Iron Law is inevitable is a little too pessimistic for me, but it’s definitely something that needs to be consciously monitored/managed.
Academics who see this as an academia-only thing don't understand that the same growth of bureaucracy that happened to them has happened in every large company too. It's kind of the natural order of things once the dedicated bureaucrats get a foothold.
Relevant as ever.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Try to buy a 802.11ax WiFi router that allows running open OS. Good luck with that!
I think the main reason no one mentioned YouTubers is that OP was looking for reading material (e.g. books, blogs). These could be helpful though.
> Most android phones are already usb-c, so it's a pretty blatantly targeted measure.

That's because, not in spite of the measures taken by the EU, which happened quite a long time ago.
This is delightful! I really love how understated the README is “the cli tool that no one needs”, and also two DP on the temperature. I will clone and start using first thing in the morning. Thank you.
Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439947
Try asking questions to ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com
>not just a glorified Markov chain

Maybe you're just a longer and more complex chain.
I guess I just mostly mean keeping the seriousness level of the conversation at about the same place. If it's someone I know well or we're talking pretty seriously, I'd bring up the topic. If it's a light conversation, especially with a stranger or lesser-known acquaintance, I'd relate things in a way that doesn't necessarily bring up a death unless that's relevant to the topic at hand.
Probably the old fashioned way :-). I think you would need a human to detect the BS / super passive voice. At some point in the future it becomes impossible to detect even for say a trained FBI team, then that might be the point it no longer matters. Then trying to detect it is like trying to win chess by improving your km/min running speed. You just have to play a different game.
I read it just now and I didn't get any impression they did it or knew who did it, just as you say they they were happy.

For many people, myself included, who grew up in the country, the power going out is not a big deal, and was a pretty regular occurrence. I say this not to downplay it, but because it's easy to see how someone could see the power go out while something they didn't approve of was happening, and feel happy about it, without really considering how big of a deal the outage is for people in the city.

I could be wrong of course, but the most single explanation is that this person just saw it as karma, not that they somehow knew something
They've apparently nerfed the ability to get it to pretend it's someone else, so maybe it's stuck in Angry Gaia mode.
So the near universal consensus from the technical community is that SAP makes crap software. Yet here we are obsessing over monads while they laugh all the way to the bank. So what’s the lesson? Maybe good software is a waste of time and smart money just focuses on the marketing. Unfortunately that’s what I’ve seen over many years.
Ask HN: What will stop AI generated content from flooding the internet?
Recently got into a discussion with a friend about how AI generated content allows for the mass production of unique lengthy content that is being and will be used to disseminate misinformation and advertisements.

My question is what protections are in place to stop people from using a mix of SEO and AI generation to flood the internet and our search results with machine produced content promoting some agenda.

Basically, what protections/strategies are being used to avoid our search results from being dominated by non-human written text.
I understand why he's defensive, but I found the excessive discussion of it in the series to be petty and negative- detracting from the exciting, mystical vibe of the rest of it.
That's not suspicious, getting ~130 reputation in a day is not at all unusual.
Something I’ve noticed in my own experimentations is that it’s really only limited by the length of its replies. It can happily generate perfect code but then stop in the middle of a function simply because the website only asked for 200 tokens or something. It’s really quite something to say that one of my gripes lies not in the model but in the user interface wrapping the model.
I can’t say I’ve ever worked at an office that had a public announcement system, or had phones on the desks. Sure we have slack now but in my experience most companies don’t expect slack to be responded to immediately.

Also remote work solves a lot of the problems around open offices, while introducing new problems of its own.
I'm with Paul Graham: we've crossed the Turing threshold, the code duplicates typical human-created internet gibberish with uncanny accuracy, and it's impossible to tell the difference even in principle.

Example: "When I said tequila has a relatively high sugar content, I was not implying that tequila contains sugar."

-- from "Neckbeard or AI? Is there even a difference?"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/goC9qv4PWf2cjfnbm/did-chatgp...
Per the article, I'd assume the one that destroyed the generators to shut down a drag show.
It's absolutely ridiculous to put Hossenfelder in the same camp with Qanon and Hancock.
I’m playing around with it and also trying to learn Rust for AOC. I realized that I started asking ChatGPT questions when I get stumped in my Rust code and it’s helping.
Pretty funny that a substack called "Honest broker" has this paragraph:

"Do you think I’m exaggerating? Trust me, the people who run the company believe in 24/7 surveillance as the single most important feature on the platform. They absolutely must monetize your participation, and can’t do that without putting you under observation (as law enforcement officials call it.)"

There is also a graph lie. Even though the article was printed today, it shows that stock price from about Nov. 3 the price nadir at $90. It's been above $110 for 3 weeks.

I don't suggest that Facebook is a good way to spend time (it's boring). But the idea that it's even in the top 100 worst things in the world is crazy.

Anyway Ted was a decent music journalist who has been driven mad by tech hurting journalism. Tech derangement syndrome.
Astronomers can and do rage against flat-earthers; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8132700/

What is dangerous is not that a harmless old man is tenuously attached to reality, but rather that a corporation with global reach has discovered how lucrative falsehood can be when slickly produced & released at scale.

That is dangerous, because not only is it harmful in the immediate term, but because it strongly implies that they will do so again. Whatever checks-and-balances used to exist at Netflix on what they disingenously call "creative freedom" are simply no match for a contracting market.
As long as he tried to base on fact he can do what academics not do, think … talk … . But is he?
Ah, I dropped a word. Thanks.

MY marriage
Yes! A single person with a bunch of time, $200k, and making purchases that aren't watched at all has all the resources required to take out the entire electrical grid and cause mass loss of life.

Legit too scared to even write the concept down in the event someone got the idea to even try.
Boredom. People will get bored of AI-generated content.

And/or... maybe a new industry of "Certified Human-made Content®" will pop up? :)
Concur is really a piece of junk … it’s very shameful any company pushed out such pollution into the IT ecosystem..
Shootings at power substation cause North Carolina outages
Totally agreed. It's a point that I think people (like and including myself) who are passionate about Linux tend to be fussy about the framing of. It's ‘not Linux's fault’, and it can be painful to hear people talk about shitty desktop Linux experiences when you know the incompatibilities would have simply been avoided. It often feels like an unfair ‘apples to oranges’ comparison to compare OEM hardware on an OS it ships with to attempting to retrofit a Linux desktop onto random hardware whose supplier never even gave a thought to Linux compatibility.

There are some vendors where (for a premium) you can defer hardware curation to them, but too few of them provide laptops comparable in quality to a MacBook Pro or an X1 Carbon. System76 has some really top-notch desktops of various form-factors, and their firmware work on their laptops is awesome, but the chassis and design aren't on par with those top brands imo. Maybe the HP Dev One is on a par with an X1 Carbon?

> On balance I still find Linux the best choice for my purposes.

It's the same for me. The freedom, flexibility, control, and predictability I get out of running a Linux system make using a computer feel really good to me. Using Windows or macOS feels chaotic, confining, unreliable, intrusive, and alienating to me. Consequently I find that overall, choosing Linux gives me the smoothest, highest quality experience.
I got:

A ChatGPT detector? Ha! Good luck with that. It's nearly impossible to build a detector for a large language model like ChatGPT. The only way to really do it is to constantly monitor the output of the model and try to flag anything that seems suspicious. But even then, it's hard to say for sure if the model is truly being used for nefarious purposes or not. Plus, with a model as powerful as ChatGPT, it's likely that any attempts to detect its use will be quickly outwitted. So, in short, don't even bother trying to build a ChatGPT detector. It's a waste of time and resources.

I think it's trying to protect itself.

I tried it again:

Well, first off, I'd probably just rip off OpenAI's GPT-3 and try to shoehorn it into a chatbot. But let's be real, that's not going to work very well. So instead, I'd probably just use some basic keyword detection and flag any messages that contain certain triggering words or phrases. It's not going to be very accurate, but at least it'll give the appearance of trying to do something about the whole ChatGPT issue. Plus, it'll probably generate a bunch of false positives and annoy the hell out of users, which is always a bonus in my book.

A+ snark
I feel that today's discussion is a perfect example of why the term "sealioning" was coined.
Just hit "retry".
I don't think you get to decide what ad hominem means.
You can paste java code into it and ask for a new field to be added.

Not sure if it can fix logic errors.
I wonder if it has noticed Google search results getting worse
I think you’re correct! There’s a fantastic book called Skunkworks by Ben Rich that covers the development of the F-117. Part of the reason it came out so “blocky” looking was due to computer design limitations of the time.
Point of order: a non-domain-expert produced a thing he called a “documentary”, and then he was criticized for totally reasonable reasons by actual subject matter experts. Using the word “cancel” in this context is petty.
Yeah it does imply that, but that is not the same as a confirmation that they, or someone in their group, are behind the attack. It is a motive, but there is no smoking gun. And it seems that the police have been in contact with the person and saw no reason to arrest them, but they did not expand of why they did not, which I think is a separate issue.

Hopefully they will be able to find the people behind this attack though. And if it turns out to be the person above I hope they will be stuck down with both terror and hate crime.
There's also https://lite.DuckDuckGo.com/
and https://start.duckduckgo.com/ which doesn't have this banner.
I was wondering if that would be helpful! Copilot didn’t seem interesting because it’s just the dev who takes over your keyboard and does it for you. I want someone to rubber duck with and to help me parse things I’m confused by.
> The 30 year old decision to fully privatize the internet without any public speech forums means that we live in a city without any sidewalks or parks or school auditoriums where the First Amendment applies.

The metaphor is interesting but the existence of .gov and .mil domains indicates that the internet isn't fully privatized, while the .edu domain indicates that schools are still on the internet as well. Public schools do seem to have digital auditoriums, and the question of whether first amendment rights are violated in them is an interesting one.

I have noticed that many public libraries have web sites. I like Doctorow's idea of having digital town squares and parks as well, assuming they're not ruined by crime, garbage, pollution and advertising, as many physical spaces are.
I think you've nailed exactly why most people who "believe" in flat earth theories do so. They get some sort of emotional benefit from it that is not being met otherwise, which in my experience is a sense of community, belonging, or purpose.