skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was there any reasonable way to prevent e.g. the current revolt against generative art software without first releasing the software so people could realize how powerful the tech was? Is there ever going to be a point where the tech we have is declared "good enough" so future conflicts like these are avoided?

There are good arguments that generative tech is setting everyone's expectations so companies will be forced to adopt AI (with all the implications attached) to keep up with the competition or go under, that it's dehumanizing creation through a vague equivalence of "intelligence" to "writing some words in a prompt", that it has the potential to devalue art and make the masses believe human artists are just really sophisticated prompt-replicators through buzzwords and misleading branding. And it's almost impossible to change people's minds once they're set in a position.

At the same time, the work on diffusion networks is rapidly accelerating, with novel techniques released seemingly every week, and researchers seem content with writing a couple of ethics paragraphs to go along with their full replicable source code release. It seems that imagination was not elaborate enough to foresee the effects their release would have on public discourse. Even with that discourse heating up by the day, the research continues.

It's never worked to just tell random people not to torrent things, even if it's illegal. They'll just do it anyway. Likewise, it's futile to tell people not to use software for bad, no matter how many legal clauses are attached. If the technology is available, it will be done at some point.

I'm convinced the only way this will be abated is if AI research were treated like gain-of-function research where the threat is not to human life but to individual, essential human qualities, like the way art is treated. That would mean any future technology would not exist, so it could not be exploited.

People in universities are inventing new software that nullifies the effects of the diffusion model training software because lots of people don't want the diffusion software to affect their lives.

I'm depressed about what this implies for the coming future of humanity. Is the train of endless technological progress just a given that must be followed through, consequences be damned? Is anyone in this sphere interested in stopping themselves and making do with what tech is already known? (Knowing that at least one person out of the billions on Earth is bound to say "no", rendering the exercise pointless.)
You are currently absolutely free to refer to the State of New York as New York Colony, and New York City as New Amsterdam.

That's not how the residents refer to their own state or city, of course, but they can't tell you what to do.

Assuming you do not, why not?
Ah, nevermind. Your focus was on the last part of the quote.

My bad.
Interesting but there are some red flags coming up here, like:

> This seems just blind faith, though.

This is logic? Eh, better to show your work. Otherwise this kind of wording seems like a hand wave.

Why does it seem blind faith--by what logic is it blind, and by what logic is it faith?

The blind-faithers in question are people you said were researchers after all, are probably OK being held to account.

Let's hear their response to being told they are relying on blind faith, as compared to let's say lots of experience in the topic and basic knowledge of probability. But that's just one example.

> A majority surveyed also acknowledge that utter catastrophe is quite possible.

Uh, the "quite" there is leading to a bit of a weasel-word effect. Where was "quite possible" derived from, vs. just "possible"?

There's a cumulative effect of being rushed to judgment here, so I hope there aren't a lot of important little details being rushed over too. The emotional floodgates can be hard to keep regulated in such a situation.

BTW to me the site does a better job highlighting the need for mitigating creative factors, like:

- AI process liaison: How should/did we get this answer

- AI legal specialist: How do we do this / can we do this

- AI ethics and safety consultant: How can we train people to not mess this up

We'll probably have positions like those, in multiple layers, at any really important levels where AI being directly integrated into decisionmaking could be dangerous to human health or propagation or whatever.

Add high levels of education, licensing, and certification as needed.

Otherwise it's a lot like complaining about anything else that's broadly capable, but doesn't have proper safeguards developed yet.

There's a comment here about the site being satire, but really--if so, it's extremely cryptic satire, to the degree that it's more like the kind of thing you'd write if you wanted to be able to claim 'satire' OR 'not satire' later on, as events develop...I really doubt it though.
In my movie Meetup, we were having DVD night, and once after the main feature, I showed The General. Everyone loved it.

Speaking of The Battleship Potemkin: I really, really tried to get hold of the musical score for it, with the idea of having the Google Orchestra (yes, there was such a thing) play along with the movie when we showed it. No luck.
Right. If they're STILL running multiple stories per hour after all this time, it must be a big deal, right? Seems to contradict the narrative that the media is now trying to hide what happened.
That’s going to involve a series of court decisions that have yet to come.

Microsoft is a huge target and filing a suit while this has a lot of buzz is a big PR opportunity, so those court cases will start coming soon enough.

Clearly, Microsoft felt confident they could navigate whatever legal headaches and must believe that seizing this opportunity for Bing to outmaneuver Google was more valuable than whatever that might cost. What we can be sure they didn’t do is go in blind.
Personally, I just replace "AI" in all such fearmongering statements with "man".

For example: "Man will make critical decisions that we cannot understand."
> The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it's 15m.

Those statistics don't seem credible to me. Are waiting lines in US supermarkets commonly that long?
Before someone chimes in with the obvious suggestions:

a) Water heater is a heat pump set to high efficiency.

b) Construction is 2016, so relatively new.

c) We have done a lot to insulate the home.

Net-net, this is an electricity cost issue; we are paying $0.42/KWH on average. This despite having some solar. This is not a profligate usage issue.
What exactly do you mean by ad-hoc todo? I get the idea of wanting to add an item with multiple sub-items, but when you say checklist apps don't do ad-hoc todos I feel like I'm missing something.
Intelligence isn't really the interesting part. People are excited because we now have tools that interact well with ordinary human expression.
You make fuel from atmospheric carbon dioxide, water, and electricity. Like you would on Mars.
I concur. It is truly awful. For what it's worth I use the features Save message and Pin if I think I might need to get back to it. But they are crutches for sure.
> That seems very wrong ((as far as I know) those standards are not in any way designed in such a way as to permit operations on their cyphertexts).

Those standards are meaningless by themselves without specifying a mode (e.g. GCM, CTR, CBC, ECB, etc). A thing people sometimes try to do with them (no idea if this is what vaulttree is doing) is use some less secure mode that is determistic and do equality matching (this is almost always a bad idea and usually leaks way more than you would naively assume). For example, if you use ECB mode you can search as long as you are searching along block boundries.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... is an interesting paper about this sort of thing.
Oh, I did not know that this 'last mile' often makes the difference between collisions and close approaches! Interesting. Indeed, I have to remember that atmosphere is a scale and not a hard boundary. Like, I kinda know that, but just how far up there are still particles that are of significance...
I'm not remotely in favor of this kind of forced conversion described in the article, but, if you actually want to install electric appliances (stove/heater) you can actually do so relatively cheaply without a service upgrade.

Basically need to consider that while all of your combined appliances may use far more than your service can supply, they will rarely to never need to all run at the same time. You can interlock appliances and give them some priority so that, for example, when your electric range is on your other power hungry appliances can not be.

You wouldn't actually notice or care about this in reality since in a 24h period everything in your home will receive more than ample power just spread out over a longer period of time.

The only downside is that not many electricians are capable or willing to install or service a system like this. I'm sure that pool will grow and I'm quite sure that in the future this kind of demand-side management is going to be effectively mandated and I don't see that as a good thing.
So I am liable when I put it on a GitHub page and add a button?

<script>
function reply() {
while(1) {
c = Math.floor(Math.random()*27));
console.log('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz '[c])
}
}
<script>
Your question <input></input>
<button onclick=reply()>Your Answer</button>
Disclaimer: The answer is AI generated and might be wrong.
Well, if you’re being fair you need to include how the gas GETS to the home.
Reminds me of an Asimov short story where the world's whole economy was managed by four supercomputers [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
It also included limits around the scheduling systems that are being used to overrun the infrastructure as well as maintenance requirements.
> Five whys is explicitly depth first search.

I didn't say it wasn't depth first so I have no idea what you're responding to with this. Can you point out where in my comment I said it wasn't depth first?

I just said it's bounded, because it is. Even the link you've posted states that "why?" is only asked 5 times. But even if you take the 5 as suggestive rather than a strict limit, giving a limit (even a soft one) implies a boundary to the search. If it was meant to be unbounded it would just be called "Whys". 5 pushes you beyond the proximate cause and towards the actual root cause (of course, "root cause" is itself a poor phrase as it implies a singular cause that can be addressed to prevent the problem from reoccurring), but then the root cause could be 10 or 20 or 30 whys deep. So unless you go beyond the point suggested by the name and publications about it then you won't find it.

------------

EDIT: I see you edited your comment after I hit reply and didn't mark it as such, good form.

Anyways, about it being depth first I'd actually disagree. Even if you believe that it should be taken as an unbounded search (which I also disagree with, obviously, because there are better tools than 5 whys for such a major task) it should not be an unbounded depth first search. That would be a form of malpractice.

The more accurate description would be something like iterative deepening. You go down a few layers with something approximating a depth first search, and then you back track and try the other branches. If you go down one rabbit hole arbitrarily deep you may or may not find a causal factor but you will have missed many others along the branches you chose to ignore for the sake of your unbounded depth first search (again, a form of malpractice).
Good points. Some people claim the current generation of LLMs have "intelligence" but in reality it is basically a habit- that let's them predict words.

We can try to "teach" an AI system survival instinct, but then it'll most likely iterate/evolve into something that wipes us out. I just don't see them living in symbiosis with us.
> advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients

The closest in the top 200 is Berkshire Hathaway [1], because they train. Also, this media hypothesis predicts Google, Pfizer, Amazon and Walmart are media darlings. (And that Apple is not.)

[1] https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/Top_Print_Advertisers
You should enter the Olympics for those mental gymnastics.
Also, as a similar oak flavoring, there is a California native bar-b-que style that uses oak to smoke the meat. IIRC it's called Santa Barbara style bbq.
GPT is irrelevant, the issue is somebody publishing the content. If I (or Microsoft) publish the claim "Joe Bloggs is a pedophile", and he isn't, it's defamation regardless of how the statement was generated. And yes, there's ample legal precedent that this applies to search engines too.
> is now trying to hide

The story seems to be blowing up now, after people were saying last week it wasn't getting much attention.
Gentoo still supports i486 architecture and it's totally ready to tweak build flags.
You’re correct in thinking that there is nothing magical about LSB or MSB. As long as everything agrees, we get the results we’re expecting. Though for serial communication, networking, and similar, don’t assume anything :)

Historically, order is a little more interesting. Our earlier computers conveniently had instructions, registers, and memory all exactly the same width (perhaps 27, 36, or 60 bits). MSB/LSB was not a thing. But shortly after the “dawn of time” computers started to provide double- triple- and quad- data and instructions. Memory was expensive and if most data/instructions fitted into X bits (maybe 12, 32 or 36 bits) that’s what you used. But some data/instructions need more space, hence “double” floats, “long” ints, or complex instructions. Now designers (and programmers) needed to consider which part of the data/instruction is at which address, and order becomes a thing.

Each designer found advantages to a specific order … they tended to be small advantages and depended on their previous design decisions. But the tech was being pushed to the limit, so small advantages counted. For example, if you store instructions with the opcode at the “start”, then decoding can happen while the normal increment-PC mechanism is used to fetch the rest of the instruction – saves having extra logic to calculate the address of the rest of the instruction – saves a few gates here and a register there.

Computer history is marvellous – I’d recommend Tanenbaum’s “Structured Computer Organisation” and Siewiorek’s “Computer Structures”.
minor nitpick, it's not that we don't believe it makes mini black holes, it's that we're fairly extremely sure those black holes wouldn't interact with anything in the minor "time" (if you can even call it that) which they exist.
Agreed. I think some people must take the "5" portion very literally, but that's never how I've done it.

I just recently did a 5 whys session on some production data loss. We ended up with a branching tree that had 22 items and was up to 6 items deep. In the past I've ended up with bigger and deeper ones. To me, the "5" is just a reminder to really dig.

For me it's also a practice that's most valuable when used frequently. As you see similar things crop up in different sessions, that's a great sign to dig deeper. E.g., one of the leaf nodes in our recent retro was "no official process". That's deep enough for us; we'll create an agreed process for this particular thing and put it in the wiki. But if I see that a couple more times, I'll definitely drive the cause analysis deeper.
One infamous example

“There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.” - Richard Stallman 2013[1]

…although he did later retract that view.

[1] quoted here and elsewhere. Can’t search for the original right now https://thenextweb.com/news/free-software-icon-richard-stall...
It would be catharthic but they might have children and mortgages
Your comment is off-topic. This proposal would not apply to gas stoves, only furnaces and hot water heaters.
The article mentions that gas stoves are not affected by the ban
Learning Jai via Advent of Code
I know far too well how you feel, happy you found what you’ve been missing.

Out of curiosity, what did you remember about the link that you tried searching for? Do you remember when you last saw it?

[insert semicoherent hopium about ChatGPT as a magical panacea here]
Same. And it would most likely take months to upgrade the electric service given PG&E's incredibly slow timetables + permitting, because the electric cables are undergrounded on my street and they'd need to dig trenches. Enforcing electric water heaters and furnaces for new construction makes sense, but forcing everyone to retrofit in six years or else face massive costs + potentially months without heat or hot water is insane. And what would you do even if your furnace broke within the six-year timeframe? Buy an entirely new gas furnace that will be illegal to repair within a few years? No, you'd still effectively be forced into the months-long, double-digit thousands of dollars expense to upgrade electrical service with the monopoly that controls electric service in CA.
NIST study suggests that gas is the most eco-friendly home energy option.

Source: https://www.earth.com/news/gas-electric-eco-friendly-home/
I'm surprised your gas furnace uses that much power, is that forced hot air or baseboard?

My hot water heater circulation pumps use around 200W for both, and the air circulators for my central air only use 300W (the actual cooling of course uses way more).
So many countries already have it figured out. My understanding is by law income already needs to be reported to the IRS (from your employer or by you). I would imagine that's all you'd be legally signing off on. That's all I remember confirming when living abroad. If your income is accounted for correctly is there a scenario that would increase your tax liability assuming you already qualify for a standard deduction?
Fastly and the Fediverse
Gas cooking has an extremely low duty cycle, its an emissions rounding error.

Cooking is a major source of indoor air pollution but not due to using gas but due to the polution from cooking itself.
My point is more generally that construction is full of innovation that does indeed dramatically speed up the process, even if the fundamental materials/techniques are the same (which in many cases, they’re not).
I wrote a toy one which works well enough for me:

https://github.com/iamsrp/dexter

It'll run on a cheap Ubuntu box if you can't get a Pi.

And lots of people seem to like Rhasspy too:

https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

which does rather look more polished than my efforts (though I've not tried it myself).
The conspiracies serve to help the parties at fault.
This is the opposite of my existence. I love my rheem heat pump water heater. Costs me less than old gas water heater. I heat to 140 and use a mixing valve to have safe temp at 120. I’ve never run out of hot water.
actually, this probably isn't what you had in mind, but there are quite a few single story houses that are torn down and replaced with McMansions.
It's not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns? On the facts it's frankly a huge scandal.

I think the coverage tells quite a different story though, namely distractions on external "enemies", like Chinese balloons, providing cover for corporate sponsors that fund the political parties and buy ads on the major networks. Unregulated capitalism at its finest.
Forget these awful programming languages that nerds used for so long, the future is here and it is Plain English.

AI overriding the "program" instead of crashing or just doing nothing it's going to lead to some hilarious situations, or terrifying. You could also use as an interface to translate voice -> text -> command. Perhaps facilitating the development of the API between the first two where the LLM helps to "correct" any badly captured noise in the audio-to-text script.
> once you have to start paying the computer, rather than merely expecting its obedience, then and only then does no one own it but itself

Intellectually, this is consistent. Historically, rights precede remuneration.
Is it a big situation though? I mean it's not small obviously, but compared to other events (Syria earthquake, war in Ukraine, hurricanes in Puerto Rico, blackouts in Texas, wild fires in California, snow storms across the NE US, Covid etc it seems small. (not unimportant, but small.)

Granted this is very man-made, and apparently the result of very human profit motives. Which means politics. Which means its a 5 minute topic until the next political outrage comes along.

Ultimately Rihanna gets more attention because discussing that doesn't devolve into a screaming match of the intrinsic americaness of exploitation over environment and people.

And just like Flint the media will move on, but there's not a lot of long-term progress. Just like another mass shooting, the politicians will offer hopes and prayers, but won't take any action.

I know, I'm jaded and cynical, but frankly media attention means nothing. It doesn't change minds, or votes, so ultimately events like this are just a "cost of doing business". It sucks, but am I wrong?
If this is written in earnest, it's absolute drivel.

If this is satire, then it's lacking enough humor to make that readily apparent.
Knock down and rebuild.
Many jurisdictions in CA have made what you're describing illegal. E.g. in Berkeley, where I live, I'd need enough service for everything to run at the same time to make it past the permitting and inspections folks.
Very cool! It warms my heart that a few of you will keep some of these vintage machines alive. I’m guessing there’s FORTRAN on there somewhere. Curious what you paid for it?
For a glimpse into the effectiveness of human echolocation, there's a restaurant in Singapore - Nox - that's pitch black and staffed by visually impaired hosts. It's a pretty incredible experience for those that have the opportunity.
The strength of strength-trained females being less than 50% of non-strength-trained males is not “irrelevant” at all.

You’ve chosen an arbitrary and niche sport and athlete because you literally don’t have any other examples at hand and have conveniently made it impossible to test. No one is foolish enough to boulder at this level without training.

She would lose a simple wrestling match against the vast majority of men regardless of their training.
Wok cooking at home doesn't require anything crazy, just a wok ring/burner setup, like millions of folks already have.

A rough BTU breakdown for familiar comparison is ~7-10k BTU max for an average American home-cooking gas cooktop, ~15-20k BTU for an average Chinese one. Restaurants are in the 100k+ category because of volume as much as anything.

Speaking from personal preference, A ~50-75k BTU burner/ring setup is just fine; I don't need to cook larger volumes. When doing single-serving-sized batches, the indoor 20k is ok, too.

Now, can I cook in general using electric? Of course. Can I cook and achieve the flavors and composition I want with it? Not entirely, and yes, that matters to me. Outside of BTU discussions, I toast a lot of veggies over an open flame to get that nice, flavorful char. You can also dry heat them on a comal or the like, but it isn't the same.

[edit] FWIW, I would still love to try one of the commercial, 3-phase induction woks some day.