skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talk about dystopian. This is some Brave New World stuff. Can we look at the separation of human biology/human nature and ask ourselves what happens when we cut out the reason of human existence for the history of humanity, or even the drive of every living organism to procreate?

There are things that happen to women when they grow and give birth to children. What happens when we remove that? And will governments "fix" the human depopulation crisis the by growing children in vats and having the state raise them?
I live near Princeton NJ. Approx 4+ years ago years ago I bumped into a friend one evening at a local restaurant / bar. As it turned out, her date was a top guy at the Princeton Plasma Labs.

Long to short, Gates assured me (paraphrasing), "We're close. It's doable. All we need is more funding."

I hope he's right.

p.s. I know PPPL might not be directly involved in this announcement. I was sharing context on the topic.

https://www.pppl.gov/
OTA updates are updates to the OS, not the settings.
This topic reminds me of an observation I made a while ago. I have found many folks (esp. non-technical) confuse automation with intelligence (more-so Artificial Intelligence).

Automation ==/== AI. Automation consists of a series of systems that are designed (i.e., programmed using control algorithms, logic rules, machine/deep-learning) to operate under a series of pre-set boundaries. The boundaries are typically defined under "normal" operating conditions, and safe-guards are put into place once the automated systems deviate from those "normal" operating conditions (I see a lot of practitioners esp. in the ML world fail to account for abnormal conditions...may be this is what happened w/ the Uber driver?).

The only comment I will say about AI is that I'm glad I am seeing RL and the like come more into play. I also contend this feels like a supervisory problem.
Agricultural decisionmaking is ... distributed weirdly in many contexts.

First, in many cases, the local operators (who are often not owners) are not especially autonomous, and may be acting on behalf of corporate concerns or decisions made far away, not infrequently in entirely different countries. To that extent, governmental regulation is a countervailing force to corporate power.

Secondly, ag, food production generally (e.g., fishing and grazing), and forestry are classic cases of the somewhat maligned "tragedy of the commons" situation. Localised decisionmaking absolutely can and has resulted in long-term and permanent degradation of ecosystems and populations. This includes the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin as well as much of Europe, old-growth forests within the US, much of the Amazon jungle, and tropical woodlands throughout the world. (That some of this has occurred due to or subject to government planning doesn't negate the fact that much of the interest is corporate and commercial.) Even local small-scale decisionmaking can be exceptionally detrimental. Collapses of fisheries such as sardines off Monterey, California, cod off the Grand Banks, and elsewhere, commercial whaling, overgrazing throughout much of the world, and decimation of wild animal populations including the North American bison and passenger pigeon.

Third, ag production is governed by a huge array of factors ranging from local soil quality and conservation (see the recent HN article on topsoil loss within the American Midwest), seasonal weather forecasts, and international trade policies, tarrifs, credits, and the like.

In all, there are strong arguments against strictly local decisionmaking, no matter how unpopular that fact may be locally.

In practice within the US, the Department of Agriculture is among the most distributed federal departments, with both a strong presence in the District of Columbia and numerous field, research, and teaching operations throughout the country. "Distant federal oversight" is a poor description of the actual situation.
The part you mention I was aware of and am actually thankful for. This, at least to me, goes much further. Hence the shock. Updated my post w/more details so it makes more sense (hopefully).
> adapt their strategy to suit the new environment

Yes, am raising cash and looking for US government debt to go 10%+ to lock in some sweet risk-free yield.
After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation.

At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that will not be any means mean the overall system will be cheaper.

We'll have to see the cost tradeoffs: fusion makes much less radioactive material per kWh than fission (but it still makes some) vs. simplicity. Fission is relatively trivial: just put special rocks in a grid and pump water over them as they pour out their star energy.

Progress is good and exciting, but I don't see any reason to think this will have major implications for energy systems anytime soon. Would be happy to be wrong though.

Disclaimer: I switched from studying fusion energy to advanced fission 16 years ago.
I agree, thanks for writing that up.

Do you think it will require the phase out of things like Natural Gas peaker plants to make longer term storage more worthwhile?

Off grid, the most economic setup right now in California is essentially solar + batteries with battery storage sized up to about a day/24 hrs of load, with a propane fueled generator + propane backup heaters for ‘emergencies’ like long winter storms.

Generators get exercised regularly to ensure functionality, but otherwise don’t get run unless needed, which is rare. Maybe 16-24 hrs a season. They also charge the batteries when their full load isn’t needed elsewhere, which cuts run time.

Natural Gas would of course be the replacement for propane in a grid situation, where it was available.

The paperwork and permitting in general is a sign of the future for sure. sigh
Thanks for the correction and fantastic resource. I still resonate with the less-reductive sentiment of the quote; among friends in fields with little relation to their personal interests, I'm (un?)fortunate to have willed my way from childhood robot toys into a PhD in robotics. That childlike creativity is a useful asset to get unstuck.

Won't be quoting it again though.
Second hand may not have been the best phrasing on my part, I admit. What I mean is that the model only has textual knowledge in its dataset to infer what “basketball” means. It’s never seen/heard a game, even if through someone else’s eyes/ears. It has never held and felt a basketball. Even visual language models today only get a single photo right now. It's an open question how much that matters and if the model can convey that experience entirely through language.

There are entire bodies of literature addressing things the current generation of available LLMs are missing: online and continual learning, retrieval from short-term memory, the experience from watching all YouTube videos, etc.

I agree that human exceptionalism and vitalism are common in these discussions but we can still discuss model deficiencies from a research and application point of view without assuming a religious argument.
> No longer does a person need to know how to program.

I think this is getting caught up in media sensationalism. ChatGPT is regurgitating copied code from various sources. A way to look at this is if you could type out questions to Stack Overflow, then it responded by giving you code that most closely matches to what you asked. The thing about that is it is taking and searching code that thousands of humans have created, "filtering" based on question asked, and giving it back to you. Instead of a person doing the hard work of searching Stack Overflow and other sources, ChatGPT can be the new centralized source to get copied segments of code.

Copying and pasting code from various sources is not anything new. Because a person has copied a piece of code from somewhere doesn't mean they don't need to know programming, what is going on, or how to troubleshoot it. Some people, who are being lazy, might think that ChatGPT is a way out of studying and understanding what is being done, and they will sooner or later found out that it isn't.
I suspect the poster may have meant something along the lines of "going against progress", or other indirect suggestion.
It's fraud when you tell investors incorrect things in prospectuses, for example. These things are required to be signed off by auditors to participate in us stock exchanges
We seem to be getting to the point that CPUs are no longer I/O bound. This is sort of the end of an era, since starting as early as the 2000s we entered a time when I/O (RAM, disk, network) was the main bottleneck for most forms of compute.
I remember watching the Commodore 64 Christmas demo with my family on Christmas morning. Chiptune Bach and VGA graphics. It was magic.

Later that morning I started learning Basic.
There are some geographical teams, my brother-in-law loves the Dallas Fuel, but yeah they aren't all.
IIRC, Gandhi swept through most of the awards in 1982 and many movies that could have been recognized for their brilliance went unnoticed by the awards because Gandhi was such a powerhouse of a movie.
I remember that and I also remember as well some thumb drives that went ahead an emulated a CD-ROM drive in another partition with the driver installer.

After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.
Nice! There's some work on porting it to Plan 9 too.
14 Hosting Platforms for Python Applications
Hello, Tu-95
What about smart home devices would be useful if everyone had them but useless if only at your house?

(I’m a tinkerer but still reluctant to deploy most smart home solutions because they usually fail the household acceptance factor.)
Long term, I think esports are going to be fine. However, I think it's too early for them to really take root and embed themselves into any sort of mainstream or stable culture.

Physical sports have been around since forever and even if we're talking about some of the biggest games around at the moment we're talking about things like football which was invented in 1863. Plenty of time to shake out all the details such that everyone understands the game and some stability evolves.

Not only are videogames much newer, but the medium is up to the whims of large corporations with a history of making crazy decisions just to squeeze another dime out of the consumer.

Give it a couple of generations and I'm sure it'll earn it's place and become a staple of lazy sunday afternoons.
postgresql handles queues well. the tricks are skip lock, hiding the db behind protocols/micro services and judicious use of unlogged tables.

here is a 2015 talk on critical messaging using pg.

https://github.com/jmscott/talk/blob/master/ams-pgopen-20150...
Well... if Nuclear Fusion becomes actually possible in a cost-effective manner, so much for the need to roll out solar and wind-based electricity, which looks very much like a 1st-generation modern green energy technology in retrospect.

I'm not complaining. If we do crack the code on Nuclear Fusion, if I was the government, my next step would be to figure out how to build so many reactors that electricity costs go to basically zero. If you can charge your electric car for pennies, even the most diehard gas-car fans won't be able to resist. Offering a better product attracts far more users than, say, trying to shame people for CO2 usage (more flies with honey instead of vinegar).
For some context in case people don’t know, this is Future.com, the a16z PR site that they’re shutting down soon for lack of interest.
It doesn't have to have a metaphorical (or metaphysical or w/e) soul, but at this point it does not have it's own 'opinion'. It will happily argue either way with only a light push, it talks because it is ordered to, not because it is trying to communicate information. This severely limits the kind of things it can do.
New cognitive science tool to shed light on mental health
Yeah nowadays CSS is pretty powerful, back in the day the CSS couldn't even handle your website layout, had to use tables for that ;)
I'd argue that the key point is far more of raising awareness of appropriateness and inappropriateness of technologies, particularly in specific locales with which designers, implementers, and planners have limited exposure or knowledge.

It's not about the solution to this specific ferry problem (though generally: find more appropriate technology, or find ways to support brittle technology in a remote location) than it is to recognise the class of problems.
FT reported yesterday that there's been a breakthrough on Fusion - first time more energy out than used in powering it up (net gain).

https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589...

I presume there's still some embargo on the press release? Possibly much more news to follow. [edit: announcement coming Tuesday]
Fair and I don't have access to his thinking but was Steve Jobs so aggrieved with the world during that time? I always got the impression he had a positive worldview and a building mentality (granted thats public facing comments and his book does paint some challenging times).

Elon seems to be veering off building/positive worldview in his public comments and more about aggrieved and picking fights.
Agreed, it seems odd to be a fan of a team when they aren't "your" team, as in you can go and actually see them on a regular basis.

Racing and golf are examples of successful sports that don't have geographic ties, and they're both mostly individual-driven. Racing has teams, but nobody really cares about them.
> A large part of the problem stems from a tendency on the part of technology designers to assume that properties of time and place don’t matter,

I've seen a few family farmers, for example, and they seem very well aware of the importance of equipment that they can maintain themselves, and they also DIY a large number of pragmatic necessities.

But look around at our own field's technology design right now, and it's often:

* By people who don't understand the application domain, and apparently don't care to understand it.

* By people focused -- not on the interests of the users -- but on the interests of some other party. (For example, any time you see what we currently recognize as UX dark patterns, and then the other engineering effort against users' interests, for which we might not yet have terms.)

* By people who'll make technology choices for individual gain, not even gain of their company. (For example, to add a marketable new stack keyword to resume, even when it's clearly inappropriate for theis project and the company right now. Or to do an unwarranted new project, so that it can be credited to them.)

* By people strutting around and posturing about their skills/impact/status. (Contrast with your stereotypical small family farmer, where boastfulness is frowned upon.)

Maybe it'd help us to think of those stereotypical farmers, to remind ourselves of humility and user-driven design.
> My Tesla was ordered online (Apple Pay) and dropped off at my driveway. The only human interaction was the friendly Tesla delivery associate that had a couple papers for me to sign.

Did you get to inspect the vehicle before you signed the papers? Have heard numerous stories about that, where people either don't get a chance to do so, or when they do find concerns, are pressured by the delivery associate to accept it, "and we'll fix things at the Service Center".

Similarly, my Audi dealer has never tried to run the numbers on trading my car in when I've been in for a service visit, and the only vehicles they've tried to put me in is a loaner vehicle if the service time will be 2 hours or more (and unlike Tesla, they -always- have a loaner for you, even if it's one from the lot).
Is it simply a shot at women? As the only way women can make money that way is if there is an audience of men willing to watch and spend money on them.
It's 8×100G yeah, but they also use two fiber pairs so four lanes go on each.

The QSFP-DD modules are also bigger (they stick out further from the slot) and have more power available, so that probably helps somewhat with engineering.
Yes, Cell Broadcasts are controllable by carriers and that's even mandated in some countries (e.g in USA the carrier can send out a broadcast that will ignore all "silent phone" settings and scream loudly no matter what you've set and where). This will happen on all phones allowed to be used in those regions - whether Apple, Google, Samsung, Nokia or even Huawei.

You can attempt to disable it, but you need to be aware that in many places it's outright illegal for phone manufacturer and carrier to allow that.
misogyny isn't cool
Online chess tournaments have been sponsored by FTX and obscure poker companies with Malta ties.

It is pretty embarrassing how chess pros and streamers hyped bitcoin and online poker. The image will take a while to recover.
For years I've only used them for OS installs on personal machines.

At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...
I found Gnome to offer the best mix of stable tiling and normal UX while supporting both wayland and x11 with good enough customization options through its extensions, so it's an easier to set-up solution for notebooks to which often connect a mouse.
Even if fusion ends up producing more power than consuming in the real world, it still has to compete on cost. People too enthusiastic about fusion tend to ignore that it might not actually be a cost effective source of power.

Solar panels are cheap and batteries are easier to build and there are lots of ways of making them.
I guess people naively thought he'd have to be consistent with his "free speech" position, rather than think he could get away with "free speech for speech that doesn't bother the boss" while insisting it was really free-er not just a different boss.
Soccer clubs aren’t regional?
The problem with generalizations about “evangelical christians”, which often means unaffiliated baptists, is that you can’t generalize them… there’s no meaningful governance.

Most people of faith are just people who are trying to make sense of the world. But sometimes Pastor Bob is a controlling Nazi, and uses faith and religion as a way to spew his worldview and poison those around them.

Political operators and others exploit that faith too. The Giliad stuff gets pitched as faith adjacent, so parents or faith leaders who don’t know better get it in the hands of kids etc. It’s one of the reasons why keeping politics away from religion is important.
Google’s Quest to Digitize Troops’ Tissue Samples
To me, this is what's changing and it's not just changing esports.
> Left wing politics generally believe that the government and central planning are good in varying degrees, right wing politics generally believe that government is a necessary evil and should be given as little responsibility as possible with economics and social planning

Sorry, no. You're cherry picking the aspects of left-right that make for a favorable argument. In a different context, one could point out how leftists favor decentralization while rightists are fans of centralized control. Rather than getting bogged down in painting with a broad brush, just so the two contemporary "left" and "right" teams can duke it out over who gets to take blame/credit for the past, it's better to stay focused on specific beliefs and dynamics.

I agree that in this case, the revolutionaries are appropriately described as leftist. However once they've taken power and become entrenched, it's appropriate to describe those attempting to preserve the status quo of that power structure as reactionaries - just as it would be appropriate to describe any group (rightist or different leftist) attempting to overthrow that leftist-branded power structure as revolutionaries.
Which is why Mate exists.
Man, the AoE folks and the Starcraft folks really need to team up to keep things going. 20-year old games for the win.
Also consider making a replacement for the marquee element for a true nostalgic experience. Or does it still work in modern browsers?
Indeed. The top woman streaming on twitch ranks #64 and the second most popular woman does not break the top 100.
>Left wing politics generally believe that the government and central planning are good in varying degrees, right wing politics generally believe that government is a necessary evil and should be given as little responsibility as possible with economics and social planning.

Under this definition, the Drug War is left-wing, as are restrictions on access to abortion or contraception, restrictions on children's attendance or participation in beauty pageants or drag shows, and restrictions on either public nudity or traditional religious garb. Now if you really believe all of those policies are left-wing, fine, but I think it's not as simple as you want to make it seem.
Okay, this is seriously cool, it's a better summary of the code than I could give just by reading it (and the code being minified doesn't help here).
Pretty sure thats double density, the bigger ones were HD for high density. You could usually format a good floppy for either if the cutouts were made.
>After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like

I guess we still don't have anything better than boiling water, right?
> Teams are not geographical

Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.

> There is way less team loyalty.

My only real experience is with Dota. There is a lot of nationalist sentiment in tournaments, but you're right - most people follow players, not teams.

In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.

I think the big challenge is that it really doesn't cost very much money to run an esports tournament. There is no need for an expensive stadium (except to sell tickets to fans). Basically anyone can create the new premiere tournament by just paying a bit of money to organize the thing and have a prize pool bigger than the current biggest prize pool.

This really cuts into the power that a franchise model could potentially have - they'd have much less power to control the sport in the way that the NBA controls basketball or the NFL controls football.
The main issue with right-sizing infrastructure solutions by devolving them to small communities is myopia with respect to unknown-unknowns and especially to the question of whether there should be a small community in that location at all.
Twitter’s Rivals, Including Meta, Try to Capitalize on the Chaos
As "cool" as this is, providing actual healthcare for the veterans would be a much better step than creating a tool to flag people with mental health issues.
As supply chains unclog, consumers enjoy (tentative) relief
InstantOS: An Arch Linux based distro that works out of the box