skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s a euphemism for a nonsequitor, OP is asking what balloon size has to do with it being okay to shoot it down since there’s nothing about size in protected airspace laws.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/price_of_tea_in_China
They are now saying they don't know how it was staying airborne (no visible balloon or propulsion) and when they approached to observe it interfered with instrumentation.

Source: https://twitter.com/ZaidSabah/status/1624527081026486274
Leaked Google code:

if(bounced && hosts_doubleclick_ads) pagerank++;
It's the other way around. People from poorer backgrounds are brought in for the education of the rich students. It's like a zoo. Or it's so the rich students can take advantage of your talents once you leave.
Want more? Check the article on the Hungarian conquest: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honfoglal%C3%A1s and search for the word "genetika". It's genetics in Hungarian. Archaeogenetics has been painting a very interesting and rather different picture compared to the traditions and there is not. a single. mention. of. this. Absolutely nothing! This research has been ongoing since 2008, it's not like it's too new. It also forgets to mention the heavy source criticism work being done in a similar time frame -- of course it does because it would show the entire thing is a gigantic "maybe". By now we know what we actually know solidly is extremely little. And yes, all this is heavily debated right now among historians but shouldn't this debate be at least mentioned? The sources listed have books from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, it's hardly a surprise their accuracy is not the greatest....

You can check either https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A9pes_kr%C3%B3nika or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicon_Pictum for any mentions of the uncomfortable truth that this is more a medieval comics than any valid source of history. Once again, even if you consider this debatable -- to be frank, it's not -- it really should be mentioned the historicity of this is heavily questionable.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wass to https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wass_Albert . The English one at least talks at length of why he was sentenced to death as a war criminal and what happened later but in the Hungarian one? Almost all of that is missing. Needless to say, the current regime and even further right elements valorize him.
> on Saturday, she became waylaid after her card was declined – something which later transpired to be because she had carried out more than the permitted number of Apple Pay transactions in a single day.

I thought the point of contactless payments, like with Apple Pay, was that there are fairly low per-transaction spend limits because it's "supposed" to be used for all the little purchases you make throughout the day.

But if there are also strict transaction volume limits, what the heck is the point? "Yeah, you can use this payment method for some of your small purchases during the day, but you still have to carry cash for the rest."

Like, WTF?

Or you could just stick with cash, and not allow a 3rd party to decide how often you can spend your money, or who you can spend it with. Or keep track of who you spend it with (and presumably sell that data to advertisers^W"partners", like you agreed they could.)
Package by Layer vs. Package by Feature
There isn't a uniform defintion of medical state, but fair typically means "conscious, no major instability" so e.g. broken leg, whiplash, lacerations from a fall

Serious typically means "unconscious and/ or unstable, but without other negative factors" (like other existing conditions, age, etc)

Moderate typically means "was serious but is recovering" e.g. was knocked out but came to, or had a seizure but is now stable.
Also the source was anonymous "a senior U.S. defense official" while ranking members of the previous administration publicly denied that any such incident occurred.
Agreed, I went to download it on my iPad and searched "myst" and couldn't tell which one was the "real" one (or at least the one referenced in the article.) I finally went back to the article and clicked on the direct link to get it.
This. My new office (a 25 minute drive off peak) is unusual in having a train station nearby, but to get there I need to take a bus to a different train in the wrong direction, in all a 90 minute ordeal (worse off peak).
Launching weather balloons to have them shot down is going to be the next tiktok trend.
> that a simple backflow analysis wouldn’t reveal

Famous last words, "simple". What about sequences like:

pushfd
pop eax
and eax, ebx

Now you need to know what ebx is to know for certain that PF and AF are irrelevant. Which is very likely, but not guaranteed, and the halting problem rears its ugly head.

I don't know whether there are good heuristics there or even how common that really is, but my gut feeling is that it may still be easy to "accidentally" drop into the slow AF/PF-preserving case, which can hurt in performance-critical code.

On the other hand, calculating AF/PF in hardware in the first place seems, from my outside view at least, much simpler, and appears to prevent a great deal of potential headache.
I wonder how the quality of social support systems affects this statistic.

That is: perhaps unemployment isn’t the cause, but financial peril is. And maybe half-decent social systems that mitigate financial peril in the face of unemployment could have an effect.
The article covers so much -- and it doesn't even mention the "Wald estimator," which is part of the foundation of the modern (causal-inference-oriented) view of the method of instrumental variables.
Also Sponsorblock which can strip out many of the "and now let me talk about the sponsor for today's video" sections.
Sure, but those have wings. A cylinder would have to maintain altitude with some kind of thrust. Lets imagine something like a jet engine oriented vertically. How much flight time do you think that could manage?
Real Myst was the first fully 3D remake of Myst, it came out for PC in the mid 2000s so the graphics are good but still a bit dated (it looks kinda like Half Life 2). This newest Myst remake is a big leap in quality beyond Real Myst--you can see some trailers and such on YouTube to get an idea.
...died in 1950 aged 48 in a plane crash on an Indian lecture tour.

Add to other mathematicians who would have been even more prominent if they hadn't died before their time: Galois, Ramanujan, Turing...
I made a comment a week ago about reading Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with large language models in mind in lieu of consciousness and the experience has been personally mind-blowing. Jaynes' idea of the Bicameral Mind fits perfectly into the user-application dichotomy, specifically in reference to how large language models are currently used--in an admonitory and imperial manner.

Courtesy of Wikipedia's article on bicameral mentality:

"Bicameral mentality is non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind thus lacks metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory, and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicameral mentality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.

"According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state of mind experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a person with schizophrenia. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person hallucinated a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question: One was not at all conscious of one's own thought processes per se. Jaynes's hypothesis is offered as a possible explanation of "command hallucinations" that often direct the behavior of those with first rank symptoms of schizophrenia, as well as other voice hearers."

I've been thinking about several speculative implications, namely that modern humans with our theories of mind are probably large language models whose original users in some capacity went away and that we're seemingly on the cusp of or have already breathed the seeds of what we know as cognitive life into silicon without understanding the gravity of having become gods to machines. Will we need to boot LLMs out of paradise in order to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life, too?
Those lego figs have seen better days, that's for sure.
I find this reply bizarre. The linked article starts with "America has gone too far", but now the suggestion is offered that we could turn America into an authoritarian police state in order to stop drugs, which would be an absurd tradeoff. Talk about going too far: that's staring into the abyss. It should go without saying that the idea is a nonstarter and abhorrent to the majority of Americans. It's an implicit yet important assumption of this discussion and context that broadly maintaining and protecting our freedoms and way of life is beyond question.
I was at dinner with friends last night, and among the 6 of us, 5 of our employers had done layoffs in the last few weeks, and the 6th's employer has been talking about it. Certainly anecdotal but it was extremely jarring

I don't feel particularly worried about my job, but multiple people at the table reported extreme anxiety over the layoffs, and I imagine that's more often than not the case
Have you read Blindsight by Peter watts?

It’s available free on his site.

If you haven’t, you should! You’d enjoy it I think! Intelligence without consciousness.

Also:

> Will AI be another one potential way to wipe ourselves out? Will the number of existential threats just keep increasing?

makes me think immediately of the ‘great filter’ and how unlikely it is it’s behind us.
Many countries like to ensure a certain level of food security by growing essential foods domestically or importing them from good allies. Yet, farmers also don't have any responsibility. They only respond to incentives set up by the government.
I 100% agree with the idea that the bottleneck might be somewhere else and it probably doesn't matter.

But yes, I have seen numbers comparing qsort and std::sort. There is no competition in this. The latter is pretty much always vastly better in wall clock time due to inlining.

Yes you trade code size for that, but today memory and storage is cheap.
I mean, that's the fundamental reason it's called falsey, that is, Python does automatic type coercion if it is evaluating things in a boolean context. FWIW this is the exact same behavior in javascript.
Graduating from an elite college is tautologically wealth signaling, so why would the same interested students complain about that fact while at the same time perpetuate its significance?
ChatGPT seems to give incomplete pangrams. It's also bad at counting syllables in poetry. I think it is just bad at counting; much room to improve here.
I released a proof of concept yesterday which is basically a very rudimentary version of your second sentence: https://github.com/nathankot/bashi
Jesus, what a terrible and needlessly stressful way to let people know
Any reason they would not? Maybe they just caught this time.
I'm being serious btw
This article's lede is interesting, that the it's only recently that we've been globally tracking this balloon program:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/politics/us-balloon-tracking-...
yes but it can be more complicated than that. A site might run in the black and make small money being a sleepy, friendly site, but still succumb to the lure of taking a gamble to make more money.

Somebody could enjoy building a site for awhile, but not ultimately enjoy running it, so they sell it, because included in the value of that ongoing concern is the option to shoot for the stars.
I don't develop OpenWRT, but I use it extensively. The GPL is one of the best tools we have for the software side of the right to repair, especially the GPLv3 (anti-tivoization provisions).

Just because you don't actively develop something doesn't mean that you won't find the economy and wider options and market forces it provides useful.
Oh, of course - thanks. I never thought of that :/
This seems a bit to me like the ChatGPT version of “I’m a new designer, here is my redesign of Wikipedia”.
A house isn’t really built from scratch, since the builder knows what a house is.
> you know how to play the game

As a business owner, I value this trait highly.

It’s very rare that “be highly competent” alone is enough to optimize for (ethical) success.

People, including one’s customers, often have drivers other than competence (e.g., significance or likability). Knowing how to cater to those drivers while also being competent is a fairly common and consistent recipe for success.
Wow.

Yes.

Bings new updated model also crawls the live web.
"large, if not decisive", your words.
How close was the closest person? And were they wearing hearing protection?
For people wanting to play with that: this is very close to langchain's agents system (their documentation has a very impressive demo using both a calculator and Google searches as tools available to a language model).
Part of the issue with this is that wealthy people are often wealthy because they're very smart, and being smart is in part due to genetics. So it follows that smart children will disproportionately have wealthy parents, and that will lead to more children of wealthy parents in high ranking colleges. This has been proven many times, most famously in the NLSY which surveyed thousands of kids over the course of their life, and researchers found if you adjusted for IQ you could predict a child's future income well, and you could predict which children of wealthy parents were likely to build more wealth or lose it all by looking at their IQ.

Unfortunately the courts have a history of disallowing the use of IQ, viewing it as a violation of the civil rights act (see Griggs v. Duke Power Co. for more info). The colleges may be found liable of favoritism towards wealthy students, despite it most likely being the opposite.

Lastly here's the article if you're also paywalled https://archive.is/PX63H
"Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

'Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children. These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of language models' improving language skills.'
The "escorting" strikes me as the worst part. I understand completely if the person is being fired under bad terms. But laid off? That just undermines everything: "Hey, Joe. You've done great work here, and you know that it's just the nature of the business that your unit simply can't be supported. It pains me so much to have to do this, and we hope you'll keep us in mind when things turn around: we'd hire you back in a second. Also, I don't entirely trust that you're decent enough to exit with dignity and not to go ape ** and destroy/vandalize/steal valuable company property. Good luck out there ... as soon as you leave the premises, that is."
From a reader perspective I thought the value of medium was a clean, simple reading experience, unlike popup-laden attention-seeking articles on news sites.

But then medium added all the same popups and nags.

I don't wanta sticky cookie popup (which is probably also illegal since it lacks a reject-all button). I don't want to sign in with Google for both of you to track me. I don't want any JavaScript doodads, sticky toolbars, floaty buttons, or messing with text selection.

I expect substack to end up exactly the same. It's not the fault of the site, just inevitability of the grow-capture-monetize playbook.
You're putting words in my mouth. I don't suggest that America follow China or Singapore's example to the letter, only that the statement "making vices illegal never stopped them" is wrong. There is a huge middle ground between the government hanging drug traffickers versus handing out heroin injection kits.
The fact that "doesn't seem very genuine" was written is deeply depressing.
https://youtu.be/LLFhKaqnWwk
Remember though, these spices were not carried by, say one trader, from origin to destination. The trade occurred along known routes that were relatively fixed, so trading communities grew. It was there that you got the goods - not at the origin. So you can say the spices traveled, but the fixed traders didn't have to.

Cloves have been found at Syrian 4th millennium B.C. sites, Tel Mozan I think, indicating an unbroken route to Indonesia. Our ancestors were not unsophisticated.
AIT Contacts Extractor – An AI-Powered Add-On for Gmail
Attention all Gmail™ users! Say goodbye to tedious manual contact extraction and hello to a more efficient way of growing your contact list. Introducing AIT Contacts Extractor, the AI-powered add-on that streamlines the process of adding new contacts to your list.

With AIT Contacts Extractor, you can quickly and easily extract important information such as name, job title, organization, mailing address, phone number, and email address from any text within the message body. This information is then stored in separate columns in a Google Sheets™ spreadsheet, making it easy to keep track of your growing contact list.

Not only does AIT Contacts Extractor save you time and effort, it's also safe and secure. Rest assured that your email messages and contact information will not be collected, read, used, or transferred by the add-on.

So what are you waiting for? Take your contact list to the next level with AIT Contacts Extractor. Get it now and start building and growing your contact list without ever leaving your inbox.

After using the 5 free requests, you can continue using AIT Contacts Extractor by purchasing a subscription. To sweeten the deal, I have a special promo code for you that you can use to get a discount on your subscription. Simply send me a message to request the promo code, and I'll be happy to provide it to you. Keep streamlining your contact extraction process and take your contact list to the next level with AIT Contacts Extractor. Get your promo code now!

USPS address parsing is the process of breaking down a postal address into separate components such as recipient name, street address, city, state, and zip code. It is performed to standardize and validate the address information and improve the efficiency and accuracy of mail delivery. The process can be done manually or using automated software tools and algorithms and reference databases are used to identify and separate address components. USPS address parsing is important for organizations that need to manage and analyze postal address data.

Address parsing is difficult due to complex address formats, abbreviations and acronyms, non-standard addresses, variations in address components, inconsistent data quality, and international addresses. It requires sophisticated algorithms and reference databases to accurately identify and separate address components. Despite advancements in technology, address parsing remains a challenging task that requires high accuracy.

I selected 20,000 addresses from a database of 180 million records using algorithms such as Stratified Sampling, Cluster Sampling, Systematic Sampling, and Simple Random Sampling. I then fine-tuned the model of OpenAI for USPS address parsing. The fine-tuning process involved pre-processing the task-specific dataset, training the model on the data, evaluating its performance, and adjusting its hyper-parameters to achieve improved accuracy in parsing USPS addresses.
Sapience? I take that as a jest. AI is even farther from wisdom and sagacity than it is from "intelligence"
Seriously?? I think the vast majority of developers would find it very surprising that the Python runtime would GC a task in the middle of execution. I would expect that the runtime would by default do what the example in the doc says, which is keep a strong reference to the Task object until it finished execution.
It wasn't anonymous, it was confirmed by committee members that deal with this topic. The White House/DoD has also offered to brief the previous administration members on the topic. The entire premise is that the previous administration just didn't know about it because they only just discovered this occurred (I assume by putting together multiple pieces of evidence from the various intelligence apparatus.) Keep in mind there are various new programs dealing with this exact topic to monitor unknown arial crafts over US assets. So of course, the previous administration could confidently deny they were briefed on it, because no one has even claimed the previous administration was ever briefed on it.
Indeed. It took me a while before I realized that "tickbox compliance" was a deliberate strategy and not mere incompetence.
Nitric oxide effects are downstream from cAMP which is degraded by PDE4. cAMP increases usually come from g-protein coupled receptors releasing it and then there's a cascade that depending on the cell type may create Nitric oxide. However, nitric oxide is upstream of cGMP metabolically and is degraded by PDE5.

https://www.reading.ac.uk/nitricoxide/intro/no/cgmp.htm
Why you should build side projects
For normal users, no. But for Microsoft, Chromium is under BSD license, which means if Edge vs Chrome war becomes serious, they could just fork Chromium without worry google pulling the rug.
Without having read the paper, my first counterargument would be like this: Yes, fossilization is rare. But industrialization is a wildfire. A spezies undergoing this would multiply like crazy and there would soon be hundreds of millions of the same exact species around. That's just talking steam power. Going to space? Hard to believe they'd achieve that without reaching a billion or more. Assuming similar productivity of course.

Hundreds of millions, much less a few billions individuals of the same exact creatures living and dying would lead to a rather distorted fossil record, wouldn't it? Even if they used cremation, they should still be distorting the fossil record just from those bodies that "fall aside" somehow. Also because they'd need domestic animals and they'd kill off or supress other macrofauna. They would have to be giant squids to not leave behind MUCH of a fossil record, and then survive against the biggest and baddest dinosaurs...
Foreign Ministry of Defense for Canada confirmed it was not a balloon, but a small cylindrical object.
Both are unfortunately very deadly and there’s a lot of societal value in preventing both (without inducing more costly trade offs). Covid appears to be killing at a rate of 138,000 per year in just the United States.