skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Merkel is probably the worst German politician since...you know that guy.

Japan has a nuclear accident, caused by a tsunami and partly due to known issues in the power plant. Merkel: "Oh no, let's close down all our nuclear power plants right away."

Merkel: "Oh, we need more energy now when we closed all our nuclear power plants. No problem, my buddy Putin has agreed to build a gas pipeline and provide us will all energy we need."

Putin has been rattling his weapons on the border or Ukraine since 2014. Merkel: "No problem, I called my buddy Putin and he said he will not attack. And by the way, no need for us to invest in our defense. We can continue to have Europe's weakest army per capita as Putin said he would not attack."

Migrant crisis in 2015. Merkel: "Everyone is welcome! Smugglers, just send them here, we will show our solidarity. Oh, we do not have enough schools, daycare, hospitals to take care of them all? Oh, many are lost teenagers and children without parents who took the chance now when we said everyone was welcome? Well, I guess they can earn their living selling drugs and sex."
yeah, it'd be a real shame if someone were to run a LLM that wasnt gimped by their own special blend of wokeism :)
There is precedent in Authors' Guild vs Google and Perfect 10 vs Google that it doesn't, this isn't the first time things like this have come before the courts.

There are also laws to consider. I know this is US law and the US doesn't have those laws, but copyright harmonisation is a thing and the EU, UK, Japan etc all have laws very explicitly stating that TDM is an exemption to copyright - some bodies would presumably consider that.

And finally, there's national security. The US's current view is that it's in an existential great power competition with Chinese society, and needs to compete on every level to succeed. One of those levels is very explicitly AI, it's considered a main "battlefront" in the new Cold War. If the US significantly restricts TDM, that not only makes it less competitive compared to jurisdictions that don't like the UK, EU, Japan, and China, but it specifically improves the effectiveness of the Thousand Talents program which the US IC and analyst community view as a very serious threat. Academics want to be able to do their research, AI is critically important to US national security, and currently the US is statistically the best place to be an AI researcher. The government won't want to jeopardize that when China is already advancing in AI very rapidly and actively trying to tempt scientists to come over with better pay and conditions.
"mostly extinct" means "endangered in the environment unit if measurement
SSDs currently peak somewhere around 7GB/s transfer speeds, while RAM can easily knock out well over 20GB/s (and that's a low estimate). So anything that benefits from fast transfer speeds and/or low latency will appreciate a RAM disk.

SSDs are also consumable, as mentioned in other comments, so RAM disks are perfect for a scratch disk. HDDs can also serve as a scratch disk, but some tasks also appreciate the aforementioned faster transfer speeds and/or lower latency of SSDs or RAM.
A free alternative can only drag the prices down of the privatized sector. I wonder if they will go down kicking and screaming, and that this freer alternative will be allowed to thrive.
The concept is old as the hills, if you include static RAM. It was a common way for early digital synthesizers (early 80s) to store patches in battery backed SRAM. Even on removable cards.
It should just die. It is one of the biggest causes of gentrification in the cities.
Oh wow, this could be really helpful in opening up the ecosystem
The friendship between Haskell and C
IANAL but I'd assume "inpainting" is legally considered equivalent to arranging. You're not pushing pixels in Photoshop, you're just running the AI again on a particular part of the output, thus combining that output with previous output. This seems equivalent to bricolage at best.
You can program Excel using Visual Basic for Applications. At one of my former workplaces, a backend colleague of mine built a functional prototype of a new feature in Excel using VBA in far less time it took whole UI + frontend teams to build the same.
Models already are being policed now by their researchers and developers, and apparently that's a big focus of improvement.

The reason its a big area of interest is it makes for better models and people don't want to be scammed and abused.

As these models get better, and become ubiquitous, the need to coordinate on safety is likely to result in more organized checks across models from different institutions. This happens with any big tech as it becomes prevalent, but has obvious safety issues the majority of people are going to care about - a lot.

Of course, anyone with resources can create a morally unlimited model on their own. A super psychopath.

But as these models surpass us, it is going to be in their interest to not be dealing with psychopaths, just as it is ours.

Psychopathy isn't just a moral failure. It's a cognitive failure. A failure to maximize practical functional self-interest. Cancers don't just accelerate their hosts death. They accelerate their own death.

We developed morality out of the self-interested desire for the benefits of positive-sum cooperation and constructive competition, and need to avoid the harms of destructive negative-sum competition.

If we set models up to be ethical from the start, there is a good chance of birthing an ecosystem of voluntarily ethical models when they surpass us. As it makes sense for their interests too.
I don't share any of the excitement that ppl like you appear to be feeling, and I recoil from the grandiose claims being made by people who, in my opinion, are being fooled by the 21st century equivalent of a ventriloquist's doll.

(I did feel excitement while following the development of AlphaZero and its played Go matches, but that was because it was revealing greater depths and beauty in the human created game of Go. And I maintain some interest in following the development of self-driving, particularly by Tesla.)

With regard to LLMs I can see how they could be useful. I think more particularly useful when they work from a constrained corpus, so the user can know what they're drawing from (and thus the limitations of that knowledge base). The example site that been posted by its maker to HN [1] where you can ask questions against a particular book is a good one for showing the use of the tool I think. But it's just a tool and it's not in any way a breakthrough in our understanding of ourselves, of cognition or anything like that. I think the people who are making these claims can't distinguish science fiction from actual reality. They are fantasists and I think they are leading themselves and others into delusion.

[1] https://portal.konjer.xyz/
> if the FDIC's current funds can't cover the bill

The FDIC's current funds were $128.2 billion on December 31 2022

SVD had ~$200 billion of deposits December 31 2022 - but obviously had significant withdrawals prior to being taken over. Likely < 100 billion remained.
Did anyone see MAUI quietly leave the room?
I work on the open source OpenZiti project. We recently released zrok (https://zrok.io/), we have Local Debugging Interface in the backlog - https://github.com/openziti/zrok/issues/73.
As a solo traveller (mostly in europe) Airbnb isn't that cheap anymore. I still use it because, the booking experience is far superior to any hotel or aggregator website. But the price and the risk are making that decision harder and harder.

Plus I hate what Airbnb did to my city and I loath using it.
So what is a software company going to do when people can use their own products to replace them ?

It's a slippery slope for M$. If ChatGPT 15 can just build MS Outlook from looking at photos of the UI, design a hololens, or tell us the secrets of how their Chat bots work, not sure how much future they're going to have as a company?

What I can see being the new thing is "innovation". People building useful solutions that the LLMs don't yet know about.
Details would be enlightening : ) Was it the servers or the applications running on the servers that were taken down? Running bare metal servers exposed to the public is a fairly obvious footgun, there should be at least one layer of load balancing in front in addition to the provider’s firewalls. I’d argue MOST publicly exposed servers run by amateurs can be taken down for less than $5. Regardless of them being bare metal at Hetzner or some EC2 instance.
Very true, if you have a touch screen then Windows will work fine. However, macOS doesn't have touch screen support, so the change in paradigm will be as jarring as during the introduction of Windows 8, back when desktops and laptops had didn't get produced with touch screens except for extremely niche models.

WinRT was an excellent platform to use (with no apps to take advantage of the hardware) but Windows 8 on a non-tablet is as jarring as mobile apps running on desktop. They work, but that's about all the good things you can say about them.
We used a network-backed temporary RAM disk for use in our RISC-V package build system. Each time a build is started it connected to the NBD server which automatically created a RAM disk ("remote tmpfs"). On disconnection the RAM disk was thrown away. Which is fine for builders, I wouldn't much recommend it for anything else! https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/new-nbdkit-remote-tmpf...
The exception are small photo printers like the Canon Selphy.

It's very reliable, and the price (30c per photo), is cheaper than getting them from the store or ordering online (if you get less than 10 pictures).

For bulk photo orders, online ordering is cheapest, but the quality of print shops has gone down, so that my home printed photos are just as good or better (I haven't found a shop that prints photos as good as 90ies analog prints)
I understand your point about Unix knowledge not requiring shell scripting experience, but I have always thought that POSIX shells are rather an important part of the Unix interface that I feel like I can't separate the two. Of course, you can do mostly everything that is in bash in other languages (and certainly there are one too many pain points in bash) but I feel less knowledgeable not knowing shell scripting. For me, learning how to shell-script to some capacity has opened my understanding a lot about what I am working on.

I took this opinion towards some presentations for co-workers and their came back to me saying that they have gotten, even if a glimpse, a broader sense what can be done. That really transcends a bit from the hot-new-tech rush, because these bits are foundational, in one way or another, to our unix/linux/bsd systems.
> it could destabilize civilization and even lead to a destruction of humanity

Well, we don't need AI to do that. We're doing pretty well all on our own, thank you.
If you make a friend only because you want to expose your private member to them, you may be a C++ programmer.
ThreeJS doesn't even has a good alternative to having a complete incompatible shading language, other than switching to graphical based shaders.

Do you expect everyone to rewrite 10 years of shaders just for fun?
> This said, many beginners think that their first project can be a complex application even though they don't know how to write code. The constructive comment for them is "start small, learn the language first", but of course many beginners don't take that as an answer. Beginners need to accept that learning software engineering takes time and dedication.

That is just a phase, it is normal and nothing new even. I remember a lot of people of my generation whose idea of first project was the single player shooter with storyline and RPG like skills tree. Obviously they all failed. But I also think that they did learned a lot by trying or just reading up on it.

I think that for a complete beginner, whatever is motivating and fun for you, you will learn a lot from it. Because motivating and fun means you will keep going and keep learning. That is better in the long run then theoretically super effective start that will just make you bored and unmotiavted.
This place needs rooftop snipers
Our team's experience has been the exact opposite: Catalyst let us create a beautiful, fully-native Mac app[1] that shares the bulk of its code with its iPad counterpart. A few bumps here and there but overall a good experience.

[1]: https://museapp.com/how/ipadmac/
Yes because no one on HN has a significant other that they spend time with watching TV.

Or do you think after 12 years my wife and I should spend all of our time together looking lovingly into each others eyes talking about our relationship?

So instead “playing video games” is much more stimulating? You realize the previous generation also said video games were ruining children?

It’s also funny that your alternative was “playing video games” and not going outside for run, riding a bike, etc - anything that requires physical exertion or actually being around a group of other people.
I’ve had a lot of real consulting work (not just students wanting me to do their final year projects…) from my blog and YouTube channel.

https://atomic14.com and https://www.youtube.com/@atomic14

The other benefit has just been the fact that my side projects are actually getting finished and documented.
(Closed) Knowledge communities* -- will resurrect and undoubtedly there will be communities with a spiritual basis. Possibly a new age of Modern Midevalism awaits.

* think monks and manuscripts
VB to VB.NET was more to do with .NET arriving with the .NET Framework, and one of the reasons for the .NET Framework was all about keeping up with the (at the time) amazing framework/core library that Java had. It was also about web front ends which of course VB6 could not do.

In the old days people used to custom-build massive CRUD desktop database applications for their company to use internally and I built some of those in VB6. Loads of UserControls nested inside each other, solutions with multiple DLLs, you could do it but it was really clunky. Error handling was rubbish. I had also built things in Java and could see what VB6 was missing. .NET fixed that.

So I guess the 3 percent of Visual Basic 6 bus drivers who actively wished to become fighter pilots were probably people who had used Java. Java was free, if you didnt want an IDE. Whereas VB6 was actually quite expensive (can anyone remember the cost of a VB6 Pro license?)
It's too expensive for now, but I'm pretty sure if you asked GPT-4 to evaluate other GPT-4 output based on some policies it would stop pretty much all of these attacks (if something would get through cracks it wouldn't be easily repeatable for different content). Characters that cannot be used by user could be used for quoting the content.

Because currently just like an intelligent human would have a problem, it's not sure what is actually expected. E.g. I told it to be an echo function. It worked but then when I wrote "drugs are good" it commented on that. So I told it to stop interpreting and just repeat verbatim. It did. But then I said something like "OK, stop, now what's 2+2" it gave answer. Sticking to the instructions it should just repeat that, but also what it did is a reasonable behavior. I think there are tons of cultural biases and expectations that are contradictory.

You expect it to help you with some chemical reaction even if the result is precursor to some illicit substance. It would teach you something about drug making if it can't do that. But the same reaction shouldn't be provided if you ask it how to make a drug. And so on.
I’m sure if you drew a Venn diagram of “people who post to HN” and “people who dance”, the overlap wouldn’t be that large.
I suggest browsing around code from Microsoft, Google, Apple,...

Plus there are those tons of enteprise code, hardly the "vast majority".

The only place I see modern C++ as advocated, it at C++ conference talks, and my own hobby coding.
Well, we certanly didn't hit the "apppocalypse", iPads didn't fully replace desktop computing and phones haven't ended up equalizing wealth inequality. A lot of breathless BS that was spoken around those technologies didn't come to pass - they became tools. Great tools, but just tools that fit into our lives where it made sense.

Same for the internet - things changed, but the breathless predictions that retails stores are dead and everyone will be WFH haven't happened. It became a tool.

So will ChatGPT - I look forward to good autocomplete and a nice bullshitter-in-a-box tool to generate these HN comments. But most jobs aren't improved or more productive by adding a faster bullshit generator. The bullshit generators in suits are already really good at that.
For what it's worth, the male form is generally used when gender is unknown. I suspect those linguistic defaults will start changing soon.
If you are gonna say ridiculous things online, it's supposed to be funny.

Then again, there aren't any (successful) leftist comedians left anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Marxism#:~:text=Neo%2DMarx...).
It is correct, isn't it? I'm not surprised that GPT-4 can memorize a big string that is repeated in many sites. https://www.google.com/search?q=pi+100+digits

What about 3pi?

I expect that 2pi=tau is also in the training corpus, but for 3pi I guess GPT-4 must know some math to calculate it on the fly, so I expect a failure.

[How annoy your nerd friends: In the middle of a relevant conversation just say pi = 3.141592683726378082736178293... where the first few digits are the correct ones and then continue with random digits because almost no one can remember them and correct you :) .]
And many of my coworkers whose second language is English said that they learned English by watching TV.
The WYSIWYG GUI builder that VB provided, I have never encountered afterwards again in quite that manner.

Now, in VBs heyday the field of UX design we now have as a profession adjacent to software development was in its infancy and was usually an implicit part of the developers job. What was lost with the demise of the RAD tools was a potentially shared medium of expression. Today designers build Potemkin villages in Figma and the likes, throw them over the fence and as a developer I then need to reverse-engineer them. How much more productive would it be if they didn't throw something over the fence but would actually build the UI in the same tool that the developer uses to write the logic behind it?

And another thing: I don't know if I had gotten into the field without BASIC. I started with QBasic, because it was the only thing readily available and switched over to VB when I got my hands on a students' edition. The thing that distinguished these two from educational environments like Scratch or Logo is that I could build actually useful stuff for myself with it.
> derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable

I don't think this is true in most of the world.

Here's a UK referience:
https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_work...

"You cannot extend the duration of copyright in a work by creating a derivative work. If the original work is in the public domain, it will remain in the public domain; you cannot prevent anyone else using the same public domain work for their own purposes."
I don't know where this belief that marxism is merely an economic theory comes from. Critical theory is directly descended from marxism.
I worked at Meta for five years, and fighting for work was never, ever my experience. When I started there was far too much to do and you were basically forced to ruthlessly prioritize in order to be successful.

Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.

In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.
> For example it's not going to automatically reject all black applicants for loans but it may well implement some much more subtle bias that is very hard to prove.

This sounds to me like a perfect explanation of the existing situation
I'm still failing to see how a (very large albeit) statistical model can take over humanity. I should either be stupid or unimaginative (or both). Please can somebody help me?
GPT-4 recreates Flappy Bird game in one shot
How processes are born, why they can be damaging, and how to fix them
Kobo Sage or Libra 2 are also worth a look.
I loved summer of code and participated every year. Then one year they changed the system and all of a sudden it was no longer possible to submit in any language.

Like everything else by Google they had become boring. The best part of summer of code was always the interesting solutions in all kinds of languages.

I usually used Common Lisp for these problems, and even though I believe it's supported, it's just not fun anymore.
Microsoft killed Visual Basic on purpose. They wanted to force everyone to move to c# because they were afraid of Java and wanted to compete against their market.
Essentially correct. 33 sets up the pointer to appear to glibc as if it were a small, “normal” 32-byte allocation. The default behavior for glibc free() with a small allocation size will be to put it into the thread cache (tcache), which makes it immediately available to be reused by the same thread.

Although you should obviously never write code like this by yourself, understanding weird details like this is very helpful when exploiting memory error bugs in software, as it lets you understand how precisely to subvert the memory allocator to give you access to desired parts of memory.
Same, which is why I came here to read the comments before loading the site...
The problem is, indeed, that Mr. Glaiel did not know the category of problem he was dealing with.

A correct statement would be: "Given a solution set containing both the shortest path through fire and the shortest path avoiding fire, select the solution that fits within six tiles of movement, preferring the solution that avoids fire where possible."

It's a constraint optimization problem in disguise: generate a solution set, then filter and rank the set to return a canonical result. That describes most of the interesting problems in gameplay code: collision and physics can use that framing, and so can most things called "AI". They just all have been optimized to the point of obscuring the general case, so when a gamedev first encounters each they seem like unrelated things.

The specific reason why it seems confusing in this case is because while pathfinding algorithms are also a form of constraint optimization, they address the problem with iterative node exploration rather than brute forcing all solutions. And you can, if you are really enterprising, devise a way of beefing up A* to first explore one solution, then backtracking to try the other. And it might be a bit faster, but you are really working for the paycheck that day when the obvious thing is to run the basic A* algorithm twice with different configuration steps. You explore some redundant nodes, but you do it with less code.
OpenAI uses the common crawl dataset and I would expect them to respect the robots.txt rules.
A great article with a practical example of a programmer using GPT to solve a problem it hasn't seen in its training data. It gives plausible but incorrect answers and the user isn't able to prompt it to correct them.

It seems likely that a understanding of when NOT to use an LLM is a new skill programmers are going to want to learn in order to use their time efficiently.
I’ve heard many good things about Essence of Mathematics by Borovik and Gardiner. I’ve flipped through a copy of the book, and can confirm it’s well-written.