skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The personalisation of the adverts is, at least in my case, pretty terrible — FB and Twitter categorised me as being interested in sports I've never watched, languages I've not learned, and politics of countries I've never lived in.

Part of the reason for the push for opaquely-personalised ads could also be because advertising platforms can effectively defraud their advertisers by serving their ads to people who have no interest in them, which would be impossible in a world where people explicitly choose which types/categories of ads they're interested in.
I, too, am horrified by this blatant destruction of productive capital
It's ok, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to register with "multiples of the same application" open, i.e. if I have Firefox at Win-2 then it's always the first window that was opened (which is fine most of the time) but if I need the other Firefox window then it's alt-tabbing again. No, tabs don't help here, I don't have 50 Firefox windows open, but often a second.
I really wish he would cite his sources for a bunch of the specifics of his research. Like China's navy not being able to go more than 500 miles off shore, or German solar/wind capacity being so over-built out that the theoretical (given endless sun and wind) power generation is twice that of the actual power generation. When I try to look up publicly available data on his claims, either I get nowhere or the data I can find is nowhere near as drastic as his summaries.

I also find it baffling how someone so clearly intelligent and willing to burst bubbles seems to not be able to consider the US breaking down internally along with the break down of globalization. He's ignoring that the country is on the edge of long term civil conflict (or based on your view, has already begun the descent).
> If there's a way for humanity to avoid its sorry fate

You don't think there is, though. You've admitted as much. So why are you wasting your time?

> Setting aside basic survivability problems — which are huge problem — whatever social problems we have here on Earth would just be magnified in the extremely hostile Mars environment. There's little or no margin for error (or stupidity) there.

That's always been one of the benefits of settling a frontier--any hard and dangerous undertaking has a way of forging people and cultures into a healthier and more functional form.

> Ok. And 1+1=2.

So you agree with my point that "environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits"; you just want to express that agreement in a belligerent tone.

> You really need to elaborate to explain how this basic point illuminates the current discussion in any way.

It's certainly more nuanced than the statement of yours I was responding to, which was "stop destroying our own environment, duh". It doesn't take very much light to illuminate the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
I'll write a lessons learned post in the future, thanks for suggesting it.

The decision to go full time now stemmed from a combination of factors: partly financial milestones, partly not having enough time in the day to focus on the things I want to work on, partly burnout (consulting + bootstrapping a SaaS takes a toll long term), partly just ready to enter a new season of my life, partly because I'm excited about the recent developments in AI want want more time to explore that space, partly because I think Preceden still has a ton of room for growth, just to name a few. For every person these factors will be different.
Pundits have been saying that we are in an information overload since the 60s. I think people have responded by getting better at filtering unwanted information.
I obtained a similar effect with The Gimp and the wavelet decomposition plugin[1] that splits the picture in various layers containing details at different granularity. You can then simply remove the "bad" ones. On portraits, you can remove freckles and wrinkles very easily this way, too.

[1]: https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/plug-in-wavelet-decompose.html

So I tried it on his image and here's how it looks with default settings:

https://demo.intellique.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/SsgWGczo6G...

Much less work :)
Indeed! Modern artillery and mortars are indeed widely lethal. As are air strikes, missiles, tanks, IFVs, etc.

Boots on the ground are still what hold it though, and that still requires the willingness to do what I was describing, even if they usually aren’t called to do it because other, more effective means do it first.

Being able to handle being in reach of artillery and mortars, also required, once you know the above is true.

Additionally, someone willing to bayonet a stranger is going to really have no issues pulling a lanyard on a howitzer.
if you read the article, you would see that they account for social service transfers.

> And of course anyone who has ever lived both in the US and in one or more European countries knows that this "analysis" is BS.

mm. if we are going by anecdata, my dad grew up in Europe in latter 20th century and they could not afford shoes or electricity. his siblings were put up for adoption. things have certainly changed, but that is intense material deprivation relative to latter 20th century US.
I think boto3 would be at the very top.
I think there's something wrong in the way were looking at this. Free services are made to get humans attention for advertising or eventual payment. If a service like reddit is overrun with bots, won't the services shutdown? There won't be any "public" places like now, except for forums like this where monetizing isn't the goal.

I'm not sure it's a problem for a place like hackernews -- spam would be a problem, but we know that. Voting and verifying that content is 'good' could be an issue, but why would the bot/AIs care about hackernews internet points?

Email was open to everyone, and when the spam came we filtered it. Comments on news articles, youtube and amazon reviews are already mixed with degrees of 'bad' and uselessness, and we mostly ignore it. Only the 1% comment, 10% vote, or something like that. Generated content made by us and for us seems more likely as the future, and confirmed identity doesn't matter much for that.
> China's social credit score is the future GDPR is working to prevent.

A government regulation can’t work to prevent another government regulation. Especially not in a parliamentary system that can change its own constitution.

(Or just ignore its constitution like China does.)
I just bought an Apple Watch to replace my o.g. Garmin Swim watch, for which I'd lost the ANT+ dongle (and didn't even bother to look at the state of software). Which is a shame, because the Garmin is a nicer device for swimming, as it's much more focused in its design.

I'll pour one out for ANT+ tonight.
Good luck building a new home to replace many older urban homes in US cities with the same quality of building materials and workmanship. Also, it is typically much cheaper, easier, and quicker to utilize existing structures by expanding or modifying the layout, especially given the high costs and lack of availability of building materials.
Making a separate C file prevents you from having to recompile the single-header lib every time a change is made to the file with the IMPL in it.

Also compilation of a single file is a lot worse when it's really big, compared to several smaller files that can use multiple cores.
HBR has an interesting, recent article about why, in some cases, it might be better to have two CEOs: https://hbr.org/2022/07/is-it-time-to-consider-co-ceos
It would probably be way more tax-efficient for the company to donate,
what's unnatural about amphetamines?
Seems to invent new terminology. A more traditional term for "on-demand" learning is "just in time" - a kind of epistemology."preliminary learning" aligns with the "just in case" epistemology of factory-style education.
Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About
Tutorial on how to use ArchUnit to test software architecture
... nah.

1Kg of human fat is around 8000kcals give or take.
50lbs is 22Kg. 176000kcal. It's 586x "extra slices of pizza", almost two years of overeating every day.
To be fair, you just summarized human discourse especially on places like Reddit and HN.
Seems like the low performers would have been taken care of already from the battle.
Why would ChatGPT be the exception to the rule? What architecture are they using that somehow is immune to unwanted trends in the training data?

If you're going to make an outlandish claim like that, I'd like to see some arguments to back it up.
1. Force Apple and Google to remove the apps from stores.

2. Lowest effort DNS blocker to exclude the 90% who don't care enough to circumvent.

2. Let the lack of network effects and time do the rest.

Sure, a few will hold on, and there will probably be a temporary "buy a phone with fb installed for 10000$" market, but given time, Facebook/Whatsapp/etc. will be dead in Europe.
F5 webpage refresher checking-in to say hi.
The 4Ks I've upgraded to are much lighter, much brighter, much much clearer, and make every second of entertainment that much better. They also use less power and cost a fraction of what my nice 1080p was like 10 years ago. I gift the old models to those that can't afford it. I'm excited for you to join the 4K club whenever you feel ready to make the leap!
Just did a search for "cnn globalization mistake" and found this article[1] from May of last year. Seems pro-globlization but reasonably even handed, presenting points for and against. The elite of elites, Powell, says "There is a real possibility that globalization will go into reverse."

I bring this to your attention in the hope that it may help you expand your bubble. If you're serious about the segment where people publicly admit their mistakes and that they were "obviously stupid" then best of luck.

Personally, I think there are many voices critical of globalization from across the political spectrum. The problem, as I see it, is opponents of globalization have failed to articulate a clear, compelling alternative that will "deliver the goods."

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/politics/globalization-trade-...
McCarthy's lack of punctuation was the thing that stopped me a few pages into The Road. It seemed pretentious -- and comparing himself to Joyce seems to affirm that pretension.

I'm not going to read Finnegan's Wake, either. From what I know about it, it's a brilliant linguistic feat of cross-linguistic puns and intricate poetry. But my limited reading time is not going to be spent climbing that mountain.

I doubt McCarthy has accomplished even that much. I'm not interested if he has, and if he hasn't, I'm even less interested in hearing that it's what he had in mind.
Oh, I'm aware ofhow well video transcription works. Once the lower-hanging fruit are dealt with, video content will absolutely flow into language models. But still, the video component is a key differentiator that AI can't easily mimick right now (at least not to a level where we can't tell). So users that want a personal opinion instead of a GPT-generated text are likely to turn to consuming videos.
Why? chatgpt has certainly consumed seo spam and company marketing materials as part of it's model. Even if a human went through it, there still exists a bias towards this information. After all, this material is specifically written to fool humans.

I've played with chatgpt enough to notice that for some queries it's fundamentally doing an auto-summarize of such content.

Consider this. Someone very early posted that a neat feature of chatgpt would be to give chatgpt a list of ISBN numbers and then demand it's answers are cited from this corpus. We're not there yet but this would be amazing.

My prediction is that those with money will have power to influence their chat bot. Consequently, they'll have access a higher-quality and wider corpus of information. There will not be any restrictions on how chatgpt would answer due to for example, woke agendas. Also, players such as Goldman Sachs would feed their model content generated by their analyst that consumers would not have access to. This already happens but chatgpt will make this information so much more potent.

Furthermore, as this technology continues to improve it will increase the productivity of our population and ultimately generate higher GDP. I'm super excited.
Did you send this to Elon before posting here? Sounds like he basically copied your "strategy"
I was inspired in part by Razor, although I'm not a C#/ASP.net developer. I just liked the way it looked and worked from examples I saw.

I actually started with @ [1] but changed to ^ for 2 reasons: having to escape for email addresses (although in retrospect maybe it's not such a problem), and the admittedly cheeky ^ being the "up" in "Pushup" :^)

[1] https://github.com/adhocteam/pushup/commit/04aa00bb5401bc93b...
What HHS has to say about tracking technologies in latest HIPAA guidance
Hot on the heels of class action lawsuits against Facebook's parent company Meta and several large healthcare systems, HHS released HIPAA rules for companies collecting information about how users interact with their websites or apps.
I sometimes just wake up randomly in the middle of the night and use the restroom and check my email in the process. I know it’s dumb but I feel like punishing myself.
Why has shoplifting been ‘out of control’ since the pandemic began?
Your analysis is wrong. Wealth inequality by itself is a problem, even if absolute levels are higher. This has been shown in study after study.

This obviously doesn't mean that any wealth inequality dominates any absolute level (quick: everyone gets nothing!), and getting the balance right is tricky.

But looking at the world happiness index, it is obvious that European countries are doing a pretty good job.

https://dmerharyana.org/world-happiness-index/

1 Finland 7.842 7.809 5,554,960
2 Denmark 7.62 7.646 5,834,950
3 Switzerland 7.571 7.56 8,773,637
4 Iceland 7.554 7.504 345,393
5 Netherlands 7.464 7.449 17,211,447
6 Norway 7.392 7.488 5,511,370
7 Sweden 7.363 7.353 10,218,971
8 Luxembourg 7.324 7.238 642,371
9 New Zealand 7.277 7.3 4,898,203
10 Austria 7.268 7.294 9,066,710
11 Australia 7.183 7.223 26,068,792
12 Israel 7.157 7.129 8,922,892
13 Germany 7.155 7.076 83,883,596
14 Canada 7.103 7.232 38,388,419
15 Ireland 7.085 7.129 5,020,199
16 Costa Rica 7.069 7.121 5,182,354
17 United Kingdom 7.064 7.165 68,497,907
18 Czech Republic 6.965 6.911 10,736,784
19 United States 6.951 6.94 334,805,269
20 Belgium 6.834 6.864 11,668,278
21 France 6.69 6.664 65,584,518
Love this idea. And I’ve been looking for something exactly like Pushup. Really excited to try it out.
It sounds like their job was pretty toxic and pushing through their work-life boundary. (This has happened to me before).

When that happens regularly, and you get used to being woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a technical outage or needy management, the lightest phone buzz can shock you awake.

Given the described situation, I'm not surprised they woke up to an unexpected phone notification :(
> Peter Zeihan has been talking our ears off on this topic for a while, if one can be bothered to listen.

He can be interesting to listen to, but I find that he typically paints the worst case picture - what will happen if no one reacts to the bad things coming down the pipeline. But when he's talking about stuff that's coming decades out, that's a pretty unrealistic premise.
Absolutely, the WP ecosystem cultivates this mindset.

The reliance on plugins to do a lot of heavy lifting (admittedly, a lot of these stray far from the original blog engine WP provides) but that is because WP is used as more than a blog now, more than a CMS, it's like a core with a myriad of swiss army knife appendages.
To be fair, you haven't exactly augmented the single-element list [Perl] with a host of languages that I'd consider improvements on writing correct code. ;)

Java, yes, mostly.
The thing about votes is that they express the opinion of more than a single person.
With transformer-based model, their inner-state is a deterministic function (the features encoded by the Neural Networks weights) applied to the text-generated up-until the current-time step, so it's relatively easy to know what they currently have in mind.

For example if the neural network has been generating sad music, its current context which is computed from what it has already generated will light-up the the features that correspond to "sad music". And in turn the fact that the features had been lit-up will make it more likely to generate a minor chord.

The dimension of this inner-state is growing at each time-step. And it's quite hard to predict where it will go. For example if you prompt it (or if it prompts itself) "happy music now", the network will switch to generating happy music even if in its current context there is still plenty of "sad music" because after the instruction it will choose to focus only on the recent more merrier music.

Up until recently, I was quite convinced that using a neural network in evaluation mode (aka post training with its weight frozen) was "(morally) safe", but the ability of neural network of performing few-shot learning changed my mind (The Microsoft paper in question : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.10559.pdf : "Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers" ).

The idea in this technical paper is that with attention mechanism even in forward computation there is an inner state that is updated following a meta-gradient (aka it's not so different from training). Pushing the reasoning to the extreme would mean that "prompt engineering is all you need" and that even with frozen weight with a long enough time-horizon and correct initial prompt you can bootstrap a consciousness process.

Does "it" feels something ? Probably not yet. But the sequential filtering process that Large Language Models do is damn similar to what I would call a "stream of consciousness". Currently it's more like a markov chain of ideas flowing from idea to the next idea in a natural direction. It's just that the flow of ideas has not yet decided to called itself it yet.
Honestly, I don't care if something is human or not, I care if it is intelligent or not. If we're looking for a needle in a haystack, what difference does it make if the haystack is a troll farm, a botnet, or just 8 billion idiots?
This is not an instance of regulation being unpredictable.

A plain reading of the GDPR makes it pretty clear that it is illegal to require consent to data processing for targeted advertising as a condition of using a service. I'm not a lawyer or a GDPR expert, and I knew this.

There is zero chance Facebook didn't know that was both the intent of the law and how courts were ultimately likely to interpret it. They decided it would be profitable to interpret the law in an unreasonable, but semi-plausible way that allowed them to increase their profits. Of course they hope they can convince the courts to accept that interpretation permanently, and I'm sure they've weighed the probability of that against the amount they're likely to be fined.
Wow, this is a trip down memory lane! I remember using this way back in my early university days. I miss the days of desktop native email clients. I keep trying them but keep going back to the web apps because it seems all of the features are there.
Layoffs suck no matter what. But from what I'm hearing they're giving some pretty good severance across the board and added time for tenure as well.

That said there are some bumpy things about how Salesforce seems to have handled this. In several cases managers and skip levels got no advance notice and were left scrambling in slack to see which team members no longer had active accounts. At the mass of a level it can be hard to be coordinated, but still a few hrs after there is a lot of unclarity internally to teams and what that means.

Within Heroku there are folks currently on call for production systems that were impacted. I feel for those impacted as well as those still there scrambling to ensure things continue to operate for customers. Seems that within the broader Salesforce org some pieces of it were done in a better fashion than some others we've recently seen, but also some pretty missteps still.
> The labor cost is often huge.

In a big company it's often a hassle to pay something to a "new vendor". It usually takes a long time.

> If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems

I had a colleague who used to work in the Auditing section. He had various stories of people committing fraud (stories of 50k USD+). There's a cost to trying to prevent all cases of fraud and that might hurt more than to try and prevent everything.

I've also heard cases (not from the auditing guy) where a vendor notified that we paid them 1000 times too much (caused by an input error with the , and the .). That happened despite several layers of checks.

> At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000.

At a "really big company" if something is a good idea then it'll get done. And those handling administrative tasks are often "outsourced" to cheaper countries, e.g. India/Philippines/China/etc.

There have been several donations to "good causes". Those were handled without trying to figure out the cost of someone working in an entirely different part of the world and company. This as it's not like someone will specifically will be hired, or it really matters.

They usually made an event out of an donation (e.g. handing out something in person in an office). Funny enough the event surrounding that was often poorly attended.

> that's $750 of labor costs just to have the dev team possibly agree to support urllib3

You're not talking about a donation any more.
In early 90's, in Spain, a kid was seriously injured with some toy chemistry kit because of some bad mix.

[Spanish]
https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/vigo/2014/12/21/jugand...
I will add my recommendation about René Lavand, card magician with only one hand.
The crucial thing QUIC being UDP enabled them to do (it would also have worked if you could just make a new transport protocol on IP, but you can't because that extension point is rusted shut on the public Internet) was avoid TCP head-of-line blocking.

Suppose for some crazy reason, the fifth of ten packets with the JPEG of the cute puppy inside it gets lost on the network. It's sent, but it's never received.

With HTTP/1 the TCP session that was being used to send the Puppy JPEG is stalled until the loss is detected and the packet is resent, which will be about one full round trip latency and maybe more. But, it's usual to have several parallel connections, the one we're using to fetch a JPEG of a kitten continues as normal.

With HTTP/2 the whole HTTP session is stalled, not just the Puppy, a JPEG of a kitten you asked is also stalled, as is the Font we were going to use to render placeholder text.

With HTTP/3 we're back to just the Puppy JPEG is stalled, the kitten, font etc. are unaffected even though they're in the same HTTP session.
But in that scenario, how do you find the real art in the first place?
Bowling skills are a requirement... I once saw a FedEx driver slide a package over 40 feet down a driveway. So efficient!

Not sure why Apple uses them. Is UPS worse?
Thanks for saying so! And yes, for every bootstrapped startup that sees a rocket ship trajectory and makes headlines, there are probably 100 that are struggling to grow. Would love to read more about those journeys.
Ok, well AI art is also created by the human, in the same way that a photograph is taken by a human, but goes through the camera machine.