skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I have long suspected that computers help a ton in a few ways, but are net harmful in a bunch of other (more common) situations"

I think this is key. Those of us who love tech tend to ignore how rigid it is. A database schema is rigid. We've gotten better at building tools that let us change a schema, but it is still rigid. The fact that computer programmers think a "green field" project is more fun than a legacy system should be a warning to us, that even those of us who love tech still hate how rigid and tedious each system is. And moving data around a large corporation means doing ETL work, which is almost anti-productivity: given the rigidity of each schema, and given multiple databases, we need to spend more and more time translating from one schema to another.

Or to put this another way, those of us who love tech tend to forget that corporations used to be run by armies of secretaries, and those secretaries allowed corporate systems to be highly flexible. A human secretary could:

1. pull meaningful data from an incomplete form

2. recognize high priority items without needing to be trained around rigid prioritization algorithms

3. easily understand a word even when it was misspelled (realize that "Albert Klien" referred to the customer "Albert Klein")

4. build commonsense hot caches (maintain easy access to the folders holding data for the most important clients) without needing complex programming. Or for lawyers, bookmark the most commonly cited precedents for the work the lawyer did. (Whereas several startups, in 2023, are still working to bring NLP techniques to precedent search.)

5. help customers navigate both internal and 3rd party bureaucracies

When we gave up on secretaries, we lost a lot of flexibility that we have only slowly and expensively been winning back with technology. Perhaps the cost of giving up on secretaries was underestimated?

And then of course, there are the ways that computers clearly damage productivity: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; all distractions that burn up hours that people are at the office.
They're dead and buried under rubble, but before that at least they saved a little money on rent. Sounds like a pretty bad trade-off to me.
TIL about the DO_NOT_TRACK envvar [0]; maybe Go's telemetry dust up could also support this?

[0]: https://consoledonottrack.com/
about 4 months. Granted by a lagging metric

> Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 25 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations.

> About 162,900 openings for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers are projected each year, on average, over the decade. Many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
> The point is not that this didn't happen because, after careful deliberation, it was found that this wasn't possible.

That is indeed the difference between the two that I explained to you. It is why nuclear power generation isn't strictly necessary since there are alternative ways of generating electricity.

> With nuclear, we don't seem to be capable of making such an informed decision, balancing the risks with the rewards. Instead, we demand that the risk be zero. This is obviously irrational.

There are plenty of countries that have nuclear power plants and all countries in the world use nuclear radiation in some way or another for other purposes than electricity production so I don't agree with your assessment.

> Do you also count the cleanup costs of all the other technology that was destroyed by the earthquake and Tsunami against that technology. Or do you do that only with nuclear?

It seems only logical to do that for other dangerous substances as well. If a dangerous chemical was leaked as a result and this needed to be cleaned up then that's on the dangerous chemical. Depending on how it was stored, you could shift the blame more towards the people that made the decision to store it like that or to external factors like an earthquake. Context obviously matters.

> The $100 billion cost you claim against nuclear was caused by the Tsunami, not by nuclear power, and of course the number is massively inflated due to the overreaction to the accident. So thank you for further proving my point of the massive cost of irrational overreaction to nuclear.

Decontamination costs $35 billion, costs for interim storage of radioactive material $14 billion and costs of decommissioning reactors $69 billion and this gives us $118 billion. [0] What exactly is inflated about these numbers? And what about them isn't related to the nuclear power plant? I left out vague costs such as "victim compensation".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup
I believed Chinese investors were buying real estate abroad in order to hide their assets from the Chinese government- if that's the case, why is the Chinese government mad about foreign property purchase rules?
> can you give me examples where fire codes are over-zealous?

There's a small movement to eradicate the requirement for midrise buildings to have 2 stairways. Advocates point to European regulations and claim that a single stairway is just as safe as 2.

Double stairways, they say, makes construction more expensive and results in awkward, undesirable apartment layouts.

https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...
> This is why if you take away the profit from renting, people who want to rent will be out of luck.

Or you have social (government owned) rental housing.
There is no such thing as objective journalism. Or rather, objectivity and neutrality are 2 separate concepts, and you can’t avoid engaging in side-choosing and still report on news.
Is this an alternative to helm-swish?
Many of the most important ML toolchains run natively on Apple Silicon, including PyTorch [0] and TensorFlow. For example the PyTorch folks have this to say about it [0]:

> Every Apple silicon Mac has a unified memory architecture, providing the GPU with direct access to the full memory store. This makes Mac a great platform for machine learning, enabling users to train larger networks or batch sizes locally. This reduces costs associated with cloud-based development or the need for additional local GPUs. The Unified Memory architecture also reduces data retrieval latency, improving end-to-end performance.

Plenty of other reports out there [1]:

>We ran a sweep of 8 different configurations of our training script and show that the Apple M1 offers impressive performance within reach of much more expensive and less energy efficient accelerators such as the Nvidia V100 for smaller architectures and datasets.

If one is looking for a great bang for the buck and a big savings in energy use, the GPUs in Apple Silicon are a compelling option. Plenty of Apple haters (presumably yourself) like to ignore what has been achieved with this technology, but that doesn't make it any less real.

[0] https://pytorch.org/blog/introducing-accelerated-pytorch-tra...

[1] https://wandb.ai/vanpelt/m1-benchmark/reports/Can-Apple-s-M1...
The temporal mechanics is fascinating.
They tried and kind of succeeded in making their own COVID vaccine as well
Planning IPv6 on GCP
I don't find this persuasive at all.
That’s all fine but I think what we really need is to hold officers liable for not following the rules. With the advent of body cams this is just barely beginning to happen in the USA, but they still have incredible leeway. Officers should be required to carry liability insurance and if they break the rules their insurance pays the victims and their insurance goes up. It will quickly become too expensive for bad cops to keep working, and switching departments won’t save them.
Online help for all apps will be pro-active.

Routine letters will be auto-generated, including letters to politicians. This will level the playing field for immigrants.

Customer service will improve radically: chatbots will actually understand what you're trying to do, and be better able to do it. Fingers crossed, voice phone tree IVR systems will finally go away.

Screensavers (including TV backgrounds) will be generative visual content and be inspiring, dynamic, any kind of content and it'll match the user and setting.

Project management tools (e.g. Jira) will capture requirements (plain English) and warn if a project is diverging or failing to meet the requirements. Obviously, this will start with the easy stuff and move to the complex stuff.

From circuits to architecture to the labels of products to logos, we'll create much more complex, interesting and varied designs with the aid of AI to both generate the designs and check that they meet requirements, including aesthetic judgments. In many cases, AI will simply issue warnings that something maybe wrong and for a human to check. Today, we use symmetry as a way to "scale up" a design - in the future, we'll use AI to generate non-repeating patterns that are nonetheless "beautiful."

The dark stuff will happen SO quickly, that governments will be forced to react, where today we pay lip service. For example, AI capital allocation will wildly reinforce the Pareto distribution (google it) requiring new and more aggressive capital reallocation structures (including taxation).

analytics reports and spreadsheets will be created by voice - you say what you want, then make adjustments. At the same time, external data sources will be able to be "pulled in" and ETL'd, also by voice.
The issue is that it doesn't just recreate things it was trained on, it generates novel content. There is no reason that novel pathways of "thought" (or whatever makes one comfortable) aren't emergent in a model under optimization & regularization.

This is what the "lossy compression" and "stochastic parrot" layperson models do not capture. Nonetheless, people will lap them up. They want a more comfortable understanding that lets them avoid having to question their pseudo-belief in souls and the duality of mind and body. Few in the public seem to want to confront the idea of the mind as an emergent phenomenon from interactions of neurons in the brain.

It is not simply regurgitating training data like everyone seems to want it to.
Nice, simple, and to the point.

One usability issue - the currency selector is hidden behind a gear icon on the last Total line, whereas you see the currency in previous lines without the ability to change it. I would move it somewhere much more obvious.
Whether it's "proven" to do so probably depends on what kind of proof you're looking for.

But there are plenty of news articles and youtube videos that show it doing ridiculous unsafe things (including running into a truck that was driving perpendicular to the road). So I highly doubt it's as good as a normal driver, in fact I'd be shocked if it is.
Fair enough, I didn't know that. This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen.

The question is: Is it really DRM if they provide access to google for free? After all, this is the loophole that these addons use. They pretend to be a crawler, or they block some kind of javascript the bots don't parse.
Because they're being marketed as a tool, and not as a substantially overengineered implementation of MadLibs.
Ports is explicitly async and therefore only viable for a significantly limited subset of purposes.

This has been discussed at length elsewhere in this thread, on elm related discussion boards, and in multiple articles.

Ports is the -preferred- way to interface with javascript, certainly, and when its inherent limitations aren't a deal breaker, its being preferred is entirely sensible.

It is not, however, an escape hatch in any meaningful way, hence why people were extremely upset when the actual escape hatch was disabled by maintainer fiat.
> Likely going to be a wave of research/innovation "regularizing" LLM output to conform to some semblance of reality or at least existing knowledge

This is a much more worrying possiblity, as there are many people who have at this point chosen to abandoned reality for "their truth" and push ideas that objective facts are inferior to "lived experiences". This is a much bigger concern around AI in my mind.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Selling it as "free up the parents to do other things" is not going to fly. But enhancing the baby's experience or learning is fine.

An AI-powered rocker that plays soothing music till the baby sleeps would be great. People already use rockers, it's very accepted.

I would never have trusted a computer to be in charge of my infants. Even trusting another human adult is pretty tough already.
It will be interesting to see what insights such efforts spawn. For the most part LLMs specifically, and deep networks more generally, are still black boxes. If we don't understand (at a deep level) how they work, getting them to "conform to some semblance of reality" feels like a hard problem. Maybe just as hard as language understanding generally.
Exactly. We’ve seen people go from “I don’t want to do this because I don’t want to force my users” to “Guys let’s do it AGPL it’s the way to go”.

Restricting your usage tracking to your users is fine until you start shouting to them directly on their phones.
There is really no other way to think of them, in terms of reliability, than lying bastards. I mean, ChatGPT is very fun and quite useful, but think of it. Anybody that has played with it for even an hour has been confidently lied to by it, multiple times. If you keep friends around that treat you like that, you need a better friend picker! (Maybe an AI could help.)
While I agree with everything you've said, I also see that steady, incremental progress is being made, and that as we identify problems, we're able to fix it. I also see lots of money being thrown at this and enough people finding genuine niche uses for this that I see it continuing on. Wikipedia was trash at first, as were so many other technologies. But there was usually a way to slowly improve it over time, early adopters to keep the cash flowing, identifiable problems with conventional solutions, etc.
Most of their stuff is on YouTube.

https://m.youtube.com/@TheODINinc

Or just search their lead person: Josiah Zayner
The Chiefs won the Superbowl, 38 to 35.
How do we educate "non-technical" people about the issues with LLMs hallucinating responses? I feel like there's a big incentive for investors and businesses to keep people misinformed (not unlike with ads, privacy or crypto).

Have you found a good, succinct and not too technical way of explaining this to, say, your non-techie family members?
The verbs here are a bit alarmist - descended from 2200 to 800 feet over 45 seconds sounds less horrible - though this should have been reported even if just to NASA.
I think I thought new users weren't autodead. But they are. I just have showdead on.
Can't say I'm not happy to hear Rich Hickey talk again.
Instead of having a thousand tiny pension corps we could just... have one big one. Some kind of Social Security system, perhaps.

And yeah social security is running a deficit and will have to reduce payments by a whole 25% or 30% in another 20 years... unless we just remove the payment caps. Wow.

Like at the end of the day the resources are present in american society to take care of the elderly in retirement. We are not physically running out of green bean casserole. It's just a question of allocation. At the end of the day the money needs to be allocated and just like day 1 of the social security program, there's going to be a lot of people who don't have time to pay into a system before drawing out. The resources will need to be allocated to pay for the wageslavery of the last 30 years.

Boomers are going to get theirs regardless, they will make sure of that, but, they're intent on pulling the ladder up behind them like they've done on every other major social issue.

Boomers don't care if Xers or Millenials don't have anything saved up, they got theirs and they got social security on top. But if things don't change, there's gonna be an awful lot of starving grandparents again when X and Millenials hit retirement, cause we don't and they're making sure we won't have social security either.
Why is everyone using GPT incorrectly?
These language models are not intelligence. They are not a store of knowledge. You've got companies like Google with a complete record of the entirety of human knowledge... and they're replacing it with Bob. Bob doesn't know everything and he can't do math but by god will he give it a go. He'll always give an answer even if he doesn't know. Is that a great idea? No.

With GPT they have a model that can understand human language. It's not an AI, it's not thinking, it can just understand language. But that's something huge in itself. I just asked ChatGPT to write me a love poem in a Shakespearean style, from a man to a lobster. And it did it. It did it well. That's a ridiculously good piece of software.

But now everyone is going crazy. They're ripping up functioning software and replacing it with the model because it can talk. Just because it can talk doesn't mean it can do things. It doesn't even know what a number is. Even if they were correct and it was now a sentient organism that can think and feel... that doesn't make it better than database. You could be the smartest organism in the universe but a biologically inspired brain is never going to be able to losslessly store 150b pages of content. So why are they trying to replace a database with Bob?

The correct way to use GPT is as a language model. It understands language. So use it to understand. Re-write Siri so that when I ask my phone to find me where I can buy tickets to the london zoo... it understands it. It doesn't try and bing it, it doesn't start playing "London zoo" by "the sheebles" on Spotify, it just does what I asked. If it can't do what I asked then tell me that. Then tell the developers so that they can know what to add next.

Re-write autopilot so that I can talk to my car. "Car, it's too hot in here." "Sorry about that steve, I'll turn the temperature down. By the way, the engine oil is getting a bit low. Do you know which oil you need to buy?" "STEVE WATCH OUT THERE'S A KID RUNNING INTO THE ROAD"

Imagine how good it would be if your existing software actually understood you and you could tell it what to do in normal language. But instead we get Bob, who doesn't know what a child is and keeps telling you that Mexico is a short drive away, take the next left at the cliff.
> Bigscreen needs to take the time and money to develop an Android or PC webcam solution.

I don't really know if it's possible to get the accuracy out of a simple webcam that the IR blaster/FaceID hardware can get. Sure you can do facial comparisons to unlock the phone, but that doesn't give you as detailed geometry as the Face ID hardware does.
Because the term AI linked with chatting bot misleads people into thinking it's something like AGI or Iron Man's JARVIS.
Since GPT always needs to be "up-to-date", and search usually requires near real-time accuracy, there needs to be some sort of reconciliation on queries so that if the query seems to be asking for something real time, it will leverage search results to ad-hoc improve the response.

Or.. it should let us know the "last index date" so we the users can make a determination if we want to ask a knowledge based question or a more real-time question.
Domain names turned out to be a weak point susceptible to attack by the statists. To route around this weakness, an array of names is used.

However, there is still the matter of having an account to get to these names. Which was the original reason the statists went after them in the first place. The users themselves will thus become the next target, just like in the days of Napster.
That's an awful lot of time spent talking about your Emacs config...
Why Are Layoffs Contagious?
Lots of comments think health could be transformed for the better.

I wish AI would help detect, eradicate and replace toxic artificial materials around us. It only impacts health in the second-order or more. And they would need to be significantly incorporated down the supply-chain. But it is necessary.
In finance a bubble means an economic cycle where asset prices rise faster than their actual value. It is a term of art/analogy but it does not map 1:1 with physical bubbles such as soap bubbles. It does not mean that the underlying asset has no actual value.

The housing example is a great one. The 2008 housing bubble was due (in part) to overvalued houses. Those houses still have value though (they weren't scam houses that only existed on paper).
No one uses Boot.

The choice is between Leiningen and deps.edn AKA the official Clojure CLI. Personally, I switched to deps.edn back in 2020 and haven't looked back. I like that it's simpler/does less out of the box and I also use the Git dependency feature all the time (you can reference a git sha as a dependency, not just Maven coordinates).

Something like 90% of it is just listing dependencies (the same packages as it's all just Maven anyway) and for the remaining 10% of configuration there's plenty of resources available for both. They can also interop to some extent.

Other ecosystems have it much worse than Clojure in this regard.
I would strongly advise everyone to max out their ESPP contributions (you can contribute a maximum of 15% of your salary, up to the IRS mandated $25,000 limit). Why? Because it's a amazing investment that, if you sell stock immediately on reception, is risk free. I'm going to assume you know how ESPPs work, google them if you don't.

Let's do the math: consider a typical ESPP (yours may vary) with a 3 month purchasing period, 15% discount, and no lookback policy. Assume you are contributing $5000 this purchasing period.

$5000 buys n units of stock at at a price of m dollars with a 15% discount: 5000 = .85mn

Immediately sell each unit of stock for m dollars for a total return of mn dollars: 5000 = .85mn => mn = 5000 / .85 = $5882.35

You made $882.35 in "profit". Not bad at all, but not much in the grand scheme of things either. But! That's a return rate of 882.35 / 5000 = 18% in just 3 months. If you could turn around and reinvest that money in the ESPP 3 more times (4 investment periods, each 3 months long, for a total investment period of a year), you would get a yearly return of (1 + 18%)^4 = 94%. 94%! Risk free!

If that seems to good to be true, the catch is in the first paragraph. An ESPP might provide 94% yearly returns, but the amount you can invest is relatively small. But it's free money, and I encourage everyone who can to take it.

Edit: some people have rightfully pointed out that "risk free" is an exaggeration due to the possibility of significant price swings in the time between the stock purchase on your behalf and you selling the stock. You may also be unable to sell immediately due to black-out periods. Also, this isn't financial advice and I'm not an expert.
Historically, breaking up large companies has been good for innovation (AT&T for example) so I wouldn't assume a field of weaker American competitors, but I'll grant that perhaps social media has network effects that make for a different dynamic.
Do we have building codes in the US?

Does anybody know what they are?

Does anybody know if builders are required to follow them?
In the UK riot police get pepper sprayed during their training from what I’ve heard. Likewise for Taser officers.

From what I read, it’s the same in the US.