skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a bit of AI fatigue around this wave of tools, but also understand why they are garnering so much attention. Many of the innovation hype categories of the past decade have appeared stuck in the 'early days but just wait...' phase. Self-driving cars, drone delivery, crypto as a currency, crypto as a(n) _____, plant-based meats, virtual reality, etc. While there has been great progress in each of these areas, not one has yet matched market demand with current capabilities in a way that enables it to become a 'game changer.'

To the general public, ChatGPT and the Image Generators 'just appeared,' and appeared in a very impressive and usable form. Of course there were many waves of ML advances leading up to these models, but for many people these tools are their first opportunity to play with ML models in a meaningful way that is easy to incorporate into daily life and with very little barrier to entry.

While impressive and there are many applications, my questions surrounding the new AI tools relate to the volume of information they are capable of producing and our capacity to consume it. Tools can be used to synthesize the information, tools can act on it, but there is already too much 'noise.' There is a market for entertainment tailored to exact preferences, but it won't provide the shared cultural connection mass media provides. In the workplace, e-mails and documents can be quickly drafted. This is a valuable use case, but it augments and increases productivity. It will lower the bar necessary for certain jobs, and it will increase productivity expectations, but it will become a tool like Excel rather than a replacement like a factory robot (for now).

The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231 - Never show half-finished things to others. <- ChatGPT managed it's release perfectly in this regard.
>Every time "learning machines" are able to do a new thing, there's a "wait, it is just mechanical, _real_ intelligence is the goalpost".

Just because people shift the goalposts doesn't mean that the new position of the goalposts isn't closer to being correct than the old position. You can criticise the people for being inconsistent or failing to anticipate certain developments, but that doesn't tell you anything about where the goalposts should be.
SpaceX accuses Ukraine of ‘weaponising’ Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites
I helped set one of these up at the NM Bureau of Geology in 2015. Everybody loved it.
There’s an opportunity for a SaaS that will provide a boilerplate layoff template, all you have to do is put in your % impacted and severance terms.
There's a huge requirement for good power management, tying buffer stores to generation. I have a start-up idea in this area...
The community on twitter - where most of alt.net moved - is fantastic. It's the main reason I still use twitter. Surprised that people use reddit for coding and stack overflow for discussion.

Unfortunately there is also the side you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are stuck in the mud, and also a lot of people who are just fed up with baseless religious hate from the Python/Javascript crowd and who have never bothered trying those languages (and thus know that it's just projection) and lash out.

The thing is - just look at the work MS do. For years JSON serialisation sucked so we all used NewtonSoft. Now the framework handles JSON properly. So there's hope yet for things such the Date API learning from Noda - and when it does it's miles ahead of any language where people are dumb enough to use an int32 linked to an arbitrary epoch (from one specific OS variant) to represent date/time.
On the other hand at least they’re not using cute pet names to refer to fired personnel, so that’s better.
Please explain how the old twitter innovated by your definition
I think you hit on some good points. It seems like in common language, AI has taken the meaning “general purpose”, rather than satisfying some criterion of the futurist definition.

Personally, I care very little about whether the machine is intelligent or not. If it actually happens in my lifetime, I believe it will be unmistakable.

I am interested in how people solve problems. If you built and trained a model that solves a challenging task, THAT is something I find noteworthy and what I want to read about.

Apparently utility is boring, and “just ML” now. There’s tons of academic papers I see fly under the radar probably because they solve specific problems that the average person doesn’t know exists. Much of ML doesn’t foray into “popular science” enough to hold general public interest.
Good on them for offering proper severance. At my company, we got 2wks and nothing else. Not even a thoughtful letter from the CEO. Nothing. (And this was a sizable tech company in the middle of an IPO).
I'm already using NixOS on my private laptop (sticking with macOS for work), but Nix on other OS's keeps tempting me. We're working on an application that needs to pull a whole bunch of "weird" dependencies, from all over the place: a specific version of Python, PyPI, apt/homebrew, binary-only proprietary software, etc. So far the answer has always been Docker and a specific release of Debian/Ubuntu, but keeping the code running on the host OS is always desirable, because there are occasionally features that need to work with host hardware, like audio.

My problem with Nix is, just like Rust, while it provides a very high ROI, the barrier to entry seems very steep; and unlike Rust, the documentation still leaves a lot to wish for. I'd go all-in on it right now, but I'm (rightfully, I guess?) scared of Nix-unique problems that will take 10x the effort to address than the mess that we're currently dealing with.
I think the point is that we have been “meaningfully closing” the gap rapidly, and at this point it is only a matter of time, the end can be seen, even if currently not completely written out in some equations.

It does seem like on HN, the audience is heavily weighted towards software developers that are not biologist, and often cannot see the forest for the trees. They know enough about AI programming to dismiss the hype, and not enough about biology, and miss that this is pretty amazing.

The understanding of the human ‘parts’ are being chipped away, just as quickly as we have had breakthroughs in AI. These fields are starting to converge and inform each other. I’m saying this is happening fast enough that the end game is in sight, humans are just made of parts, an engineering problem that will be solved.

Free will and consciousness are overrated, we think of ourselves as having some mystically exceptional consciousness, which clouds the credit we give advancements in AI. ‘AI will never be able to equal a human’, when humans just want lunch, and our ‘free will’ is based on how much sleep we got. DNA is a program; it builds the brain that is just responding to inputs. Read some Robert Sapolsky, human reactions are just hormones, chemicals, responding to inputs. We will eventually have an AI that mimics a human because humans aren’t that special. Even if the function of every single molecule in the body, or every equation in AI, is all fully mapped out, enough is to stop claiming 'specialness'.
AI is the new blockchain. Fortunately for AI, it will have its use, it will just be more mundane than everyone thinks it will be, which is better than the crypto stuff.

Or who knows, may be there will be an application for block chains too.
https://bisq.network

https://hodlhodl.com

https://www.peachbitcoin.com

There might be more, which I'm not aware of.
https://archive.md/XvDOE
I agree, just nitpicking: Usually is not the bank who keeps the money, but the government. In 2001 the "dollars in the bank" account were exchanged to a government bonds to be paid 10 or 20 years later. I don't remember the details because I had too few and I changed them immediately to pesos. (IIRC I used my pesos to buy stuff, but the transformation dollars-in-bank -> bonds -> pesos -> dollars-in-cash had a 20% or 30% hair cut.)
Severance: A single payout equal to four months' base salary, and payments will be made according to local processes and timing requirements.

Equity: We’re accelerating vesting through 2023-03-15 and removing the vesting cliff for team members who have been granted equity and have been with us for under six months.

Healthcare: Based on location and current benefit options previously selected by team members, healthcare premiums will be covered for up to six months, where possible. Modern Health for mental health support will continue for all team members for six months.

Hardware: Team members can keep their hardware and home office equipment subject to our security protocols.

Career support: We will provide outplacement services with a third-party vendor, including coaching, resume building and guidance, and job-seeking support.
Same here, except it was a doctor! He said just make an appointment on my website like a patient would. So I sat there in the waiting room for a while, entered and then did the transaction. He said during his student years he was basically "printing bitcoins". As one of the first in the game he must have had a fuckton.
The saddest part is reading the twitter comments on the scientist's post.
Are layoffs like a fashion statement, now? "Look, we're cool, too!"

why is everyone doing this at the same time?
First, he's saying that there's some monolithic "Asian culture" that in general is about escapism. That's a big claim.

Second, you may have a misconception about what those religions say. Buddhism, for example, is entirely about becoming fully immersed in one's present reality. If one discovers that it's not the solid, external entity that one thought it was, that's not "escaping" it. In fact, their claim is that the constant distractedness of the untrained mind is the real escapism.
ChatCEO
Looking at the comments, you can iterate this, and eventually you will get a better approximation than both a/b and c/d. But sure enough, after a single iteration, (a+c)/(b+d) is not always better.
RIP to the OG. Did my first transactions (in person, with cash, at a coffee shop) there.

For anybody that still is looking for this type of service, check out AgoraDesk.
It’s cloud storage for photos - hardly a category defining product comparable to search, maps, docs, or android - and it absolutely comes with Android.

How many iPhone users skip apple photos and install google photos like they do with maps?
That sounds like real life.
I didn't say the CIA recruited him to infiltrate anything. No one is saying he's a secret agent. I'm just saying it's possible that there is a history of cooperation of some form or another since he was a young activist and through an extraordinary career, which has led him to be "trusted completely since."

I don't believe it because I don't know, but I don't think it's insane to consider or that the existence of a relationship is impossible on face value because he was merely a young activist in the 70s.
How many is that in absolute numbers?
I have an external BDXL burner sitting on top of my Mac Studio. It’s a real shame they couldn’t find space internally for such a thing.
Isn't vice trying to sell their publication ... so they are trying to boost engagement with clickbait ?
Its called ChatGPT and its free.
My aunt died of covid. Luckily she was vaccinated and triple-boostered, or it could have been worse.
To order everything all at once and upfront and to ask for the bill immediately sounds rather depressing to me.

I go out to restaurants to enjoy and have fun, I don't project-manage what everyone should order in advance. The experience is more enjoyable if things are spontaneous depending on how the meal has gone so far. A case in point is desserts and there is a reason the traditional way is to order desserts after the meal: It let you order based on how you feel after you have eaten!
I've found team cohesion better than ever by just going into the office once a fortnight or so to have some after work drinks.

Seems to work out better as people have a few weeks of gossip and rants to offload vs seeing everyone daily.
Great audio book series.
This concern is way overblown. Over the past month the average transaction fee has hovered around a dollar, at level at which it's entirely reasonable to perform international money changing as the people you replied to were doing.

If you transact on Lightning network, it's much cheaper still.
Yes, so much this. This seems to be the same type of hype as blockchain was a couple years ago when everyone said that will solve all our problems.
> I'm kinda worried AI will get a scam/shitty product connotation

I think we're already there. A legion of AI based startups seem to be coming out daily (https://www.futuretools.io/) that offer little more than gimmicks.
Doesn't load on Brave.
I installed it on my laptop (Linux Mint) and mobile. It works. But how does one shut it down? Closing the UI doesn't kill the service.
Same-race reviews reduce inequality in Airbnb bookings
To be honest, I see some positivity in that.

> Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us.

We shouldn't believe any form of media straight away. We only do so because we think faking it is hard and why should one do. Being able to produce it cheaply could make people more attentative and skeptical of things around them. Blogspam sucks mostly out of consumers belief that this is something that was written by a person who deeply cares about them. Average internet consumer consumes shitty internet not because he is ignorant, but because he or she doesn't know enough to care.

But maybe I'm to optimistic, I just think people are not aware of stuff around them
It's impossible to parse these percentages when the article doesn't state the total amount of employees a company has.

According to their website, they have (had) 2,159 employees, so this affects ~151 people.
It looks like a lot of people present there are wearing fake masks.
https://archive.ph/I0SKS
> To broadly be able to predict human speech you need to broadly be able to predict the human mind

This is a non sequitur. The human mind does a whole lot more than string words together. Being able to predict which word would logically follow another does not require the ability to predict anything other than just that.
Unlike normal search engines which give you SEO tuned spam about 50% of the time. Are you sure it's a step in the wrong direction?

> every single "AI" search I have tried has given me incorrect, invented answers.

Really? Every single one? Not a single AI (ChatGPT, presumably) query you've tried has given you anything except incorrect information? What kind of things have you been querying for?
Timescaledb is based on Postgres, always bet on Postgres...
For a period I was replacing my vscode icon with a dark one, but every app update (which is fairly frequent) would clobber it.

https://github.com/dhanishgajjar/vscode-icons
(1) and (2) are separate. The IRS/state department of revenue won't care, and they won't tell your employer. Say you live in HCOL, actually live in LCOL, and at the year claim a refund from HCOL and file properly with LCOL.

You can just say plans changed and you moved in the case of an audit. You could tell your employer the same thing. Much harder to dock someone's salary once they've started working.
Even if ChatGPT could only make us 10% better at solving the "easy" things but on a global scale, that is already a colossal benefit to society.
No Orangutan were harmed in bringing you this delicious burger.
Check the errors coming back on your poll/commit. The kafka stack should tell you when you can retry items. If it is in the middle of something sometimes it does not always fail nicely but you can retry and it is usually fine. Usually I see that sort of behavior if the whole cluster just 'goes away' (reboots, upgrades, etc). It will yeet out a network error and then just stop doing anything. You have to watch for it and recreate your kafka object (sometimes, sometimes retry is fine). If they are bouncing the whole cluster on you each broker can take a decent amount of time before they are alive again. So if you have 3 and they restart all 3 in quick succession all at once you will see some nasty behavior out of the kafka stack. You can fiddle your retries and timeouts. However, if that is lower than it takes for the cluster to come back you can end up with what looks like a busted kafka stream. I have seen it take anywhere from 3-10 mins for a single broker to restart sometimes (other times it is like 10 seconds). So depending on the upgrade/patch script that can be a decent outage. It goes really sideways if the cluster has a lot of volume to replicate between topics on each broker (your replica factor).
Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit? Companies will pay at least $1,000 to offload the negative PR of copying others’ layoff emails verbatim. No brainer.
Yes, but not in the form of chatbots.

Among other things, a LLM can be seen as a store which you query and get results from. A chatbot is cute because it formats output text to look like conversation, and the recent applications are nice because the query (now known as prompt) can be complicated and long, and can influence the format and length of the results.

But the cool stuff is being able to link the relatively small amount of text you input as a query, into many other chunks of texts that are semantically similar (waves hands around like helicopter blades). So, an LLM is a sort of "knowledge" store, that can be used for expanding queries, and search results, to make it more likely that a good result seems similar to the input query.

What do I mean by similar? well, the first iteration of this idea is vector similarity (e.g. https://github.com/facebookresearch/DPR). The second iteration is to store the results into the model itself, so that the search operation is performed by the model itself.

This second iteration will lead, IMHO, to a different sort of search engine. Not one over "all the pages" as, in theory at least, google and the like currently work. Instead, it will be restricted to the "well learnt pages", those which, because of volume of repetition, structure of text, or just availability to the training algorithm, get picked up and encoded into the weights.

To make an analogy, is like asking a human who are the Knights of the Round Table and getting back the usual "Percival, Lanceelot and Galahad", but just because the other thousand knights mentioned in some works are not popular enough for that given human to know them.

This is a different sort of search engine than we are used to, one which might be more useful for many (most?) applications. The biases and dangers of it are things we are only starting to imagine.
So good. And the cast. From memory, the third act doesn't quite live up to the first two, but I struggle to imagine how it could've.
Zooms layoff note earlier this week referenced employees as “Zoomies”.
unlike other companies Gitlab is _still_ not profitable

https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git...

Fiscal Year 2022 Highlights:

Total revenue of $252.7 million
GAAP operating margin of (51)%; Non-GAAP operating margin of (39)%

hence cutting costs before borrowing money becomes too expensive (0% interest rates are gone)
Given that the example is a biology department, it is inevitable to evoke Lysenkoism. But unfortunately it is not limited to biology nor education. Large corporations are pulling slides from the US democratic party manifest in mandatory trainings. I have no idea how they think it is appropriate.
If some person A decides to pay person B in crypto money instead of dollars or pesos, because it's more convenient/cheaper/faster, how is that harming you? That's their business. Nobody is forcing you to use crypto.
how perfect. #WONTFIX
I typically find it takes about 3 minutes of sitting in a meeting with them to discover that.
Can you share which C++ library is used? Thanks.
> which made it too expensive to use as a means-of-exchange.

But wouldn't this have happened over time anyway as transaction size and network volume increased? The exponential increases in electricity usage to mine BTC would have to be paid for somehow?
It was a nightmare on Coinbase back in the day. I signed up with "Joe Sixpack" but my ID card had my full name "Joe Andrew Thomas Sixpack" - KYC check fails.
Will teach you the scientific background behind your current learning strategies so you can explain them better to yourself and your friends? - Yes

Will it give you better strategies to learn? - Maybe.

Will it make you reflect on your learning style? - Yes. Maybe this will help you learn better, which is obviously an insane return on investment over your lifetime.
This comment is so common here I decided to do a quick search here on HN:

- written in go: 1331 results

- written in rust: 1043 results

- written in python: 763 results

- written in javascript: 525 results

Not intended to be scientific and there are false positives but you get my point. Personally I appreciate not having to visit the repository to find out. A tool being written in a language I know and enjoy is a benefit.
AI/ML in general seems good for situations when being wrong, indeed very wrong, occasionally is ok. So yes to AI driven recommendation engines, no to AI driven cars.
Mostly it's because you can't copy and paste stuff from blogs or Stack Overflow.
But if the current employee turned around and asked for double their wage their current employer would say no - they have leverage in that they can walk away and it would cause a lot of hardship for the company in the short term, but it's amazing how little the company is willing to part with to ensure that that employee stays.
How would people steal code if they're on a corporate laptop and a VPN that blocks & tracks?
We programmers enjoy writing code. We derive satisfaction when a code is perfect and elegant. But its going to end very soon. Artists are freaking out because things that takes them days to create now only take 2 seconds. We are next.

The writing is on the wall. Programming as we know it is going to end. We should be embracing these tools and should start moving from software developers to software architects role.
Ooh, they also didn't use the word "impacted." Kudos to them.
Science is incidental. The purpose is to select candidates that will produce ammunition in the form of research (e.g. various marginalization studies) for your side, and exclude candidates that might produce research useful to your opponents. This has been the case for a while in social sciences [1], now it's taking over all fields, and being made explicit and open [2,3,4]. The result of "just stick to your research, they won't bother STEM" attitudes.

[1] The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

[2] Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication. - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

[3] Science Must Not Be Used to Foster White Supremacy - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-must-not-...

[4] Study: Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...