skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You write this while in most Western countries..

..many people who fail (lose a job, divorce, illness, accident) become drug addicted, homeless, mentally ill and are left to their own devices.

..people are still referred to as “Black Americans” and “Asian Americans” instead of just “Americans” (similar in other countries) although they have lived there for generations, while there simply aren’t many non-Asian looking foreigners living in Japan for a long time.

..a barrage of articles on this site reports tens of thousands of workers being laid off, who worked hard and still got no job security.

I give Japan its fair share of criticism, but your take is easily dismissed as naive.
I assume you’re referring to US law here. Is there a handy place where these permitted restrictions are listed and described?
Discussed in 2018:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273390 (63 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273530 (288 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297514 (19 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18313131 (89 comments)
Perun on YouTube has some really great, in-depth content on military and economics, largely around the Ukraine-Russian war. He dispels a lot of the shallow talking points and shows you the complexity of the situations.
Yeah, I think "we can't actually tell which bits of our model are derived from your work which we copied without your permission onto our system for training purposes probably makes AI companies more vulnerable rather than less. Other platforms like search and social media have successfully defended themselves by showing willingness to promptly remove copyrighted material, let copyright holders opt out of indexing or even negotiating stuff like ContentID so copyright holders get paid each time their work is used.
There’s nothing saying a CoC has to be the standard progressive gibberish.

There's nothing saying a CoC has to be standard supernatural gibberish either.
Hm, one of the largest pension funds in the UK is Scottish Widows.
If the only understanding of the rules is what has been tried/untried, that is definitionally a statistical model.

A valid rules model does not require to see all possible rules be played to understand the legality of a move.

So the LLM under study here could be at most, an invalid rules model. But an invalid rules model is indistinguishable from a statistical model, and the authors give no evidence for why we should believe it to be the former instead of the latter.
> This letter, if it's real

Just to call out that this is very real. It’s from the tcifund domain itself and there’s a previous letter written in November[1] where they share the same sentiments.

[1] https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...
Where does it say he is using InstructGPT?
Your diatribe seems based on a projection.

The implication I glean of namdnay's point is that woes could be alleviated by immigration, and the responding user suggests that it's not a silver bullet. That's different than saying "everything is going to shit because of immigration".

Also, being critical of immigration policy is not tantamount to criticizing the immigrants themselves. That's another projection.

There are surely advantages to immigration, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest it has zero potential downsides especially with higher rates as other policies and structures don't necessarily shift in tandem to accommodate it.

For example, wage suppression - it's just simple supply and demand, which should be uncontroversial. But maybe one that might speak to some people more: everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint, and no one moves here to consume less. The things we enjoy and take for granted are what make it a better life. So any conceit of potentially lowering waste/emissions qua consumer choice is wholly undermined by the fact that it is a matter of policy to increase consumption - with more bodies - to boost the GDP. Rates of global emissions are growing not just through growing economies like China (which is probably the largest factor of the last 20 years), but immigration.
> Please understand that none of them bought their system. They were sold a small leased system that was barely adequate. So, they end-up with something like a $150 to $200 per month lease payment,

So these neighbors are paying the full cost of their 3kw to 5kw systems every 2 to 3 years? Sounds like they're right to be pissed if they didn't knowingly opt in to being early adopters in 2008, but the problem isn't the solar panels.

Even with that, they're still only paying a little above retail for their electricity. If the bill is causing hardship then maybe the solution is to stop using an order of magnitude more electricity than is necessary on luxuries?
The port to 8088 is really interesting. I can't find the minimum system requirements for the original Wolf 3D, but didn't it require a 386? (I'm pretty sure it used a 32 bit DOS extender).
It’s even less practical than computer science because the theory they teach is only relevant to law professors. It has absolutely no connection to what lawyers do day to day. Big O, database normal forms, etc. at least have some connection.

The first year of law school is somewhat useful to teach the shibboleths. Beyond that it’s pure rent seeking by the ever rapacious BigEd.
In Praise of Habit Trackers
But in today's non-programmer post-covid world, ELF is seasonal, COFF is year round.

edit: COFF phoneticly eqivalent to cough.
Your claim is trivially disprovable.

Ask ChatGPT over for a family dinner.
Disease is definitely a good point, some varieties have disappeared or severely contracted in range due to diseases and pests.
List of prizes known as the Nobel or the highest honors of a field
That correlation is due to people doing the cost benefit analysis. Do I want to deal with the costs of raising a child in an apartment? Do I want my child to bear the costs of having to change schools? Do I want my child and I to bear the costs of losing income while still paying lots of education/auto/home debt?

Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.

Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.

Who knows?
True, but in this case it is and that’s perfectly fine. CoCs are meaningless anyway.
Very neat!

I can definitely see that adding a couple of these to ones password manager would be hugely valuable!
Well, if the model has a 100% grasp of the rules, why call it a model?
Hmm. I just brought that into a tech stack for a client. A 28% reduction in head count surely doesn’t bode well for the future of Prisma.
I appreciate your honesty but you are dooming civilisation
> You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get paid for that thing.

If the copyright on a given work of art is still active, those pictures were taken and are distributed with the permission of the copyright holder (or they're just pirated). That's one of the reasons it's much easier to find images of classic art (for which the copyright has expired) than it is to find images of contemporary art.

> You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works.

What exactly do you think copyright is, and would you be surprised to learn that libraries have purchased the books on their shelves?
The same could be applied to AI-generated work.
I've been doing this for 5+ years at this point. Your post reminds me that I need to finally, at some point, just build a new home server. This E3-1230v1 on DDR3 is getting a little old.
declining population doesn't mean there will be no young people at all, just slow decline with less and less people including less old people not replaced by anyone

pensions don't need young population at all, you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension
Even if what you say is true, the person using it is still asking for what they want. Some of these prompts get unique enough that it's unlikely somebody else is going to make another one like it.
Seems like Google leadership is freaking out.

Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company.

I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. A truly revolutionary step would have been to buck the layoffs trend. But of course not.

Sundar doesn’t seem exceptionally promising. It seems like he is an ok leader when things are going well but not so good in tougher times.
> I'd imagine you could get it down to < 500MB (even if you packaged miniconda with it).

I don't know where that imagined number came from. This tool appears to be using Stable Diffusion, and the base Stable Diffusion model is 4 or 5 gigabytes by itself. I think there are some other models that are necessary to use the base Stable Diffusion model, and while they are smaller, they still add to the total size.
https://archive.is/VV2b3
Why does it draw a different picture for a word written in reverse?
If the AI "independently" comes up with a 1:1 copy of some piece of copyrighted code, would this be a copyright violation or not?

There's a reason why some programmers don't even look at proprietary source code leaks as to not accidentally introduce copyright violations into their own code.
I used prisma a couple of years ago, not sure how many employees they had then, but beyond 1-3 people working on it I would be completely shocked. To know there are 168 employees working on it up until recently boggles the mind.
What he is saying is that in any society the elite are isolated, this isn’t something unique to billionaires. You think Chavez in Venezuela or Xi in China is still a man of the people?

Perhaps this is a good thing. You can’t make emotional decisions when you are responsible for millions of people potentially. You literally wouldn’t be able to have leaders if leaders were emotionally involved in tens of thousands of peoples hard lives.
thank you. either they were incompentent before or they are incompetent now. you can't have it both ways
> So that’s an easy way of making a lot of people either unable to contribute, or in breach of the CoC?

The average CoC we’re all more familiar with does the exact same thing, so I don’t think this is a valid criticism.
I think it's more than you realize because it was more than I realized. It only takes getting burned by a cloud provider once to get the execs to notice, then they talk about lock-in, and the good ones try to avoid it. Plus, remember people move companies and take their knowledge with them. It's the kind of thing that gets talked about in CIO circles [0], so it's more than a tiny minority.

0. https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/target-cio-mike-mcnamara... (Disclaimer: I work for Target but not currently on cloud stuff, though did previously)
I use my old GTX1060 for transcoding and it does a decent job. Upload speed could be another factor, as well as pointed out elsewhere making sure there is direct internet access to the Plex server so it doesn't use a middle server via Plex themselves.
My experience as well - I now just disable it on new phones. I think they only thing worse - or a close second - is the Apple TV interface.
I use Dokku on a powerful Hetzner server for my rails apps. Am I missing out on something? My stuff has not too many users < 1000 and those are mainly from EU and US. How would you host this?
They behave quite poorly, because the keywords used by the models are layman language not technical art or color correction/color grading-speak

Hopefully in a couple of years when things have matured more there will be more models capable of handling said requests

The most precise models are actually anime models because the users have got high standards for telling the machine what they expect of it and the databases are quite well annotated (booru tags)
> So you assert that parent doesn’t have an internal model of chess?

I think it's an interesting question, I find it more likely we have an imperfect ability to perceive the whole chess board, whatever the hell that might mean.

In any case it's irrelevant to an LLM which has perfect information from the input set.

So perhaps we rephrase the question, I think the parent, if given a list of individual chess moves (in whatever notation pleases them), should be able to tell if a given move is valid or not for the given piece. If the parent failed to do that, I would say they do not have a valid model of chess, ya.
I think this is indeed some dangerous development for AI, if such lawsuits are successful.

I don't really see why humans are treated different than a computer, for this case. A human also learns from lots of copyrighted material. It's not possible that whatever a human has seen or has heard, will have no influence whatsoever on the human brain. So by the argument here, everything what a human does, ever, is always derived work from everything he/she has ever seen in his life.

So, then another argument is, of course there needs to be some line. It's only derived work or breaks copyright if it is really similar enough. But if this is now the argument, where is the problem? We can just apply the same to the AI. Of course, this is somewhat ambiguous, where to draw the line, but it's just the same as for humans.

Another argument is, the AI has in total seen much more visual data or text, than any human ever could in his/her life, so that is how the AI is in any case different. But I don't really see, why is this relevant? Some humans are reading more books than others. So those who have read more books are in danger, at some point to have read too much books? Where is that line?

Another argument is, stochastic gradient descent works different than the human brain learning algorithm. I don't really see how the details of these technical difference are relevant here.

Another argument is, the human learning is much more efficient in terms of data. But I don't understand how this is relevant here. Isn't this actually an argument in favor of the AI regarding this topic?

Future research on AI might make the AI, its behavior and its learning, more similar to humans. But if we now have a law which says it cannot use public copyrighted data to learn, then the AI has a huge disadvantage to humans, because humans use such data all the time to learn.
One-in-five new cars sold in California in 2022 was a zero-emission vehicle
The only reason why TSMC is expanding outside Taiwan is because protectionism is back.
Americans don't want to admit it though.

Hilariously it will make Taiwan more vulnerable because it makes defending the island less necessary.
During the cold war the enduring question was: is America willing to commit mass suicide to protect Western Europe if the USSR invades? Thankfully we never got a definitive answer on that.
The certainty about these results reminds me of the house of cards we now understand was build in the social sciences over many years of shoddy, unreplicable work referencing other shoddy, unreplicable work.

For example, the authors are careful, in the article above, to characterise the "probing" technique that they used as a "heuristic" and they even clearly say that there is no formal proof of its correctness:

It’s believed that the higher accuracy these classifiers can get, the better the activations have learned about these real-world properties, i.e., the existence of these concepts in the model.

"It's believed".

The results reported in this article are conjecture, backed by belief, interpreting the unobservable state of a black-box model. It should be no surprise that the authors found what they clearly set out to find. And yet, already, there are multiple comments here on HN asserting that, hey, problem solved, we know that GPT's build world models. It is known.
I care about the topic, and I don't think we are too far away in our opinions. Apologies for being rude, I just don't think you are approaching this from a fundamental enough point of view, but a naive point of view where you think that this game has rules you can use to win. No, you have to change the game entirely.
Can confirm this is happening as well. I keep deleting it but it keeps coming back. Oh well, I might write a script to delete it automatically.
Copyright law should simply be discarded for something that makes more sense. I think something like laws about attribution where feasible, making strictly false attribution unlawful, and easy ways to support the actual artists in question (i.e. tax reform) are better ways forward.
I would say it is a fact that medical billing has little relationship to actual costs of care. You should do some research on it.

It's also a fact that the real cutting-edge R&D is invariably funded by taxpayers, while pharmaceutical companies spend their budgets creating patentable variants, often cherry-picking studies to show marginal improvements over existing drugs. You should do some research on that, too.
you can, you can have your pension in savings investments without anyone's else financial contribution

it's just that most of the world is using archaic thorough/continuous model for pension system which is basically pyramid scheme everyone would avoid if it were used in any other area, but somehow is acceptable for pensions

if you really worry about pensions, you could start with children contributing to their parents pension and nobody contributing to childless people, that should solve declining population very fast, your can combine it with raising retirement age and raising fees everyone pays towards their own retirement
> You cannot out-do google by inventing "smarter" search.

Pretty sure you can, because Google search sucks balls. (First and foremost because it ignores context. E.g., searching for programming API documentation is tuned entirely differently compared to searching for movie recommendations.)

That said, Google is not in the search business, because there is no such thing. Google is in the context advertising business.
Perhaps "Black Holes and Time Warps" by Kip Thorne.
I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about random-poem.com

Result seems to follow the same general template:

Random, a word so wild and free

A concept that's hard to define, you'll see

A jumble of thoughts, a chaotic mix

A dance of the unexpected, a tricky fix

Poem, a word that sings with grace

A tapestry of words, woven in a space

A story told, a message conveyed

A feeling captured, emotions displayed

Together, random and poem unite

A pairing of the unexpected and the write

A journey of discovery, a path to explore

A story waiting to be told, an open door

So let the words flow, let them be true

Let randomness guide, and see what comes through

For in the chaos, beauty can be found

In the randomness, a poem is bound.
The red pippin apple looks amazing
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a professionally-set work using spaces around em dashes. The two popular conventions are space–en-dash–space (“a – b”) and em-dash (“a—b”). I only recall ever encountering space–em-dash–space a few times (one of which was within the last few days, and the previous was probably years ago), in amateur work. THIN SPACE would certainly make me much more amenable to it, but frankly that suggests a font problem (and I do certainly know of fonts where the em dash spacing is awful and if forced to use that font I would insert THIN SPACE (or very occasionally NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE) every time).
Mixing US culture with Western.
What does the 'single' profile do in btrfs?

I thought it was equivalent to RAID-0 mode, but apparently it isn't, because they are separate options and btrfs switched from RAID-0 mode to 'single' mode by default, although the 'mkfs.btrfs' man page doesn't explain what's the difference between them nor why btrfs did that. It has helpful diagrams for the RAID modes, but not 'single' mode.

So how does btrfs allocate data among disks with this profile? This is not explained anywhere I could find. Is it just like concatenating a bunch of disks together?

If so, yes, you would expect corrupting a single disk would completely corrupt a corresponding percentage of the files, but almost nothing on others, assuming the files were 1) written perfectly in order (i.e. were not fragmented) and 2) they were filling all of the disks. In this scenario, completely corrupting one of N disks would correspondingly completely corrupt 1/Nth of files (approximately speaking).

If you were using RAID-0 mode, however, it would be different: it would corrupt almost all (large enough) files, but only 1/Nth of their contents.

The results, however, could vary a lot depending on how file data actually ends up being allocated on disk, of course.

That said, note that the results of this experiment can be completely misleading due to most of the data still being cached in RAM. I would say that to conduct this experiment more meaningfully you should:

1. "umount" the filesystem after having written all data to it.

2. Corrupt the disk.

3. Run "echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" (a couple of times, just in case). This should get rid of the still-cached blocks in RAM, just in case. Or better yet, just reboot your machine :)

4. Mount the filesystem and check for corruption.

At least, that's what you should do if you were performing this test on ZFS, otherwise corrupting the disks would not affect ZFS's cache and you wouldn't necessarily observe the effects of corruption when accessing the corrupted files normally (i.e. not as part of a scrub).

Admittedly, in btrfs this might not be necessary because btrfs' cached file data might be exactly the same as the underlying disks' cached blocks. This is not true with ZFS, however, as ZFS's caches and the Linux kernel one don't share data (at least, not the vast majority of it).

It would also be helpful to know the distribution of file sizes that were copied into the filesystem, otherwise the "successfully read the entire file" vs "got an error reading the entire file" statistics are not as helpful as it might seem at first sight (e.g. if there is a significant percentage of very small files).
I might buy this argument for privately owned company, but for public traded company, wouldn’t they acting against their interest saddle the society with the costs (as the public, or in other words, society, is their owner)

I understand the follow up argument about a majority of people might not hold ownership in any public company at all, but that feels like a separate topic.
(In)Security of the “Pass” password manager
Treating half the population as undeserving of a career is "extremely minor"?
I do think that ORMs are a bad abstraction. SQL is a good abstraction. Devs love it when they can be lazy and have something slightly convenient without thinking about it’s downsides
This is not as trivial as you make it sound. You would need to know the amount of functions you want to have provisioned at all times, if you need more, cold starts will occur. In addition this creates base costs, which would not exist otherwise.