skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hooks really push at the boundary of the language and I'm not sure they're an optimal path once you actually start dealing with state.

How do they push at the boundary? I feel like so many people talk about them being magical, but I don't see how they're any different than any other effectful function call. Is the idea of tracking call order that exotic?

This is a very simplified example of how hooks work under the hood:

let hookStates = [];
let currentHookId = 0;
let firstRun = true;

function endRun() {
firstRun = false;
currentHookId = 0;
}

function useState(initialValue) {
const hookId = currentHookId++;
if (firstRun) {
hookStates[hookId] = initialValue;
}

function setter(nextState) {
hookStates[hookId] = nextState;
}
return [hookStates[hookId], setter]
}

let actions;

function run() {
const [a, setA] = useState(1);
const [b, setB] = useState(2);

// this is done because we're not setting up event handling
// and we need some way to trigger external updates
actions = {setA, setB}
endRun();
return a + b;
}

function assert(received, expected) {
if (received !== expected) {
let error = new Error(`Expected ${expected}, but received ${received}`);
error.name = 'AssertionError'
throw error;
}
}

assert(run(), 3);

actions.setA(3);
assert(run(), 5);

actions.setB(5);
assert(run(), 8);

actions.setA(1)
actions.setB(-1)
assert(run(), 0);

Obviously this example doesn't include tracking more than one component, but as far as I know hook state gets tracked pretty much the same as the state on class component instances.

I could understand thinking they're magical if you were under the impression you were the one calling the component functions rather than React, but I think my impression was always that it was still React's job to call the function component (otherwise, createElement seems like a waste). They might have at one point said that it was okay to do that in tests, but I'm not sure about that, and it would have been out the door the moment function components started supporting refs.
The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.
Because this is HN and there are people here who think that unironically.
Are you outside of the US?

T-Mobile, ATT, and Verizon have all shut down 3G networks as of 2022.
I can no longer edit my comment, and I think I did interpret the statement too narrowly, but I'm not seeing the same interpretation you are re: business impact.

If you take what they wrote literally, expand the implications into explicit statements and reframe the sentence with that additional info, it looks something like this:

> There are potential benefits to AI and there are potential risks ("safety challenges"). We're not focusing on the safety challenges because we believe it's a foregone conclusion that they outweigh the benefits, but because further work is required to adequately measure safety, to identify mitigations to safety issues, and to provide assurance that such mitigations are sufficient. We believe that the current level of motivation for such research is not sufficient..

There is no language that even implies a monetary or business impact, even if those are factors that are likely to exist as well. There is no literal interpretation that makes room for such a statement as far as I can see.

But what emerges is still interesting for a few reasons.

1) It implicitly acknowledges that there is not currently enough motivation to invest in tools that measure risk. This is where my "shouldn't decades of imagining the risks of AI provide more intrinsic motivation" stance comes right back.

2) It also implicitly acknowledges that they do not currently know how risk these models are, and they don't have any way to know.

3) It still reveals a rather disturbing stance towards safety. Am I glad this investigation exists? absolutely. Is it better than nothing? absolutely. Is it worrisome that they're still trying to generate motivation to build tools that measure risk? absolutely.

> this is a 60 page documentation paper on the literal implementation of a technology

The fact that this is a 60 page paper is kind of the point. A 60 page paper should not be positioning itself with extremely vague language that leaves room for interpretation. A 60 page paper should be direct and clear about what it is saying.

The part where I do think business/money comes into play is the decision to frame this so vaguely. To speak plainly about the current state of safety measurement and unknowability or risk would cause a lot of concern. A lot of concern looks bad for business.

> ..this isn't about making fluffy feel-good virtue signaling statements.

I agree. I'm not worried about a language model hurting someone's feelings. I'm worried about a language model getting prematurely hooked up to systems with broad access to the real world and the failure modes involved there. None of those failure modes have anything to do with feeling good or signaling virtue.
Combining that with b) above, and what we get is that no important decision will be made without an in-person meeting.

So, rather than technology speeding up everything, we will slow down everything to pre-telephone days.

Bob, the CFO, will tell Alice, the CEO, that sure, I can make that transfer of $173 million to [new_supplier_bank_acct], do you want me to fly to your office for us to complete the hardcopy authorization papers, or will you be coming to mine?

All that stuff that was accelerated by telegraph, telephone, fax, mobile phones, email, video calls . . . poof! Pretty much entirely untrustworthy for anything significant. The only way around it could be a quantum-resistant and very trustworthy encryption system...

I'm not sure the net result of this technology actually makes life better. Seems to empower the criminals more than the regular people.

Deploy the technology against itself, train the cops to use it? My guess is that they'll always be several steps behind.

Even if we try to do the right thing and kill it, it is already out of the bag - the authoritarian states like China and Russia will certainly attempt to deploy it to their advantage.

The only way out now is to take maximum advantage of it.
A completely meaningless and symbolic gesture.

I don't think Putin is in a hurry to surrender himself to the ICC, and nobody is going to arrest him overseas, because as a head of state he has a total diplomatic immunity.

Full disclosure: I'm fully in support of Ukraine in this Russian-expansionist war. However this is just a cold hard fact. Me pointing it out in no way whatsoever even suggests that I'm pro-russian. Which I'm absolutely not.
Nurbs are not efficient for realtime rendering.

There's no reason to encode all that curve data if all you care about in the end is a finite set of pixels rendered on the screen.

You can achieve the same level of detail without having to recalculate the surfaces. It's a lot easier for the computer to morph a shape by applying some math function (that's essentially arithmetic) to all the polygon's vertexes.

That said, I've seen some 3d artists work in NURBs, then render out to Polygons.
ReactOS is used in a similar manner for a lot of Windows devs, offensive security, malware devs presumably. Since Windows isn't open source, React is a great resource for seeing how things could/might be done, relevant APIs, etc.
This is what Stephen Wolfram concludes in a recent article about ChatGPT:

> The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is “merely” pulling out some “coherent thread of text” from the “statistics of conventional wisdom” that it’s accumulated. But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more “law like” in their structure than we thought.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
No shit. Negativity drives anything ad supported. Web 2.0 will go down as negativity driven. You can see it on Hacker News as well
The problem wasn’t they added more advanced features to the language, the problem was they changed the whole development environment in a backwards-incompatible way.
I actually watched it already and in the theater at that. the last movie where adam driver doesn't come across a subtle prick.
I loved CS181 ("Intro to Finite Theory Automata"). I don't remember using much from what I learned there in the last 5 years as a SWE but wow that was a fun class!
Inspiration from finite state machines for no code tools
My guess is through breast milk - which I was wondering about with the study as well; does it make a difference for breastfed babies whether their moms eat a lot of peanuts?
Agree with first part: LLMs will make it easier for teachers to make teaching more fun(it's easier than Googling and building)

Disagree with second part: Personalized learning is not here. Personalized learning does not mean I like rap and I want my lessons to be in rap. Even if that's the case, the LLMs are no where close to maintain context for a 45 minute teaching session.

We now have some tools to improve education but personalized learning is most certainly not here. Yet.
> LLMs are excellent plausible bullshit generators, which has many uses, but being factually correct is not their strength. The issue is that even if the factual mistakes are rare, they're really hard to spot. I'm looking for a good, terse, catchy metaphor I could use to explain that to some of my family members and friends.

To me the bigger question is how far can we take them? Ie i get that they just pick likely next words. They're autocomplete on steroids. Yet that simple primitive is shockingly good. Way, way way beyond that i would have predicted is possible for an "autocomplete".

So where is the limit of this autocomplete? Would it be possible to eliminate ~90% of the current errors? Fake math, but would that put us at a more correct version than students typically graduate with? If so yea, it can be wrong at times - but assuming as don't abandon standardized testing/etc, it could still be an amazing tool for interactively learning something.

My hope is that even if it never goes beyond being an autocomplete; if we can improve the training dataset, help it not conflict with itself, etc - that maybe the autocomplete will be insanely useful.
Is also a concession to the parents whose kid probably just died of suffocation. Much like the historical trend of not reporting overdose deaths.
This Stack Overflow answer is pretty decent: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23284897

I think basically the argument is that by setting the min bound lower, you allow the JVM to shrink the heap. This could maybe be beneficial towards reducing pause time because the JVM has less memory to manage overall. That being said, that SO answer also mentions:

> Sometimes this behavior doesn't give you the performance benefits you'd expect and in those cases it's best to set mx == ms.

I've also seen apps configured this way professionally for similar reasons. You might imagine some app that leads to the JVM pathologically trimming the heap in a way that isn't desirable and thus impacts performance in some subtle way, etc. The answer with a lot of this stuff is usually try both ways, measure, see if you can observe a meaningful difference for your apps/workload for typical/peak traffic.

Background: I've worked on Java apps for a few years at reasonable scale and worked on GC pressure issues in that time.
I really like the orgmode syntax for this:

- term :: description

I use it all the time as a glossary for my notes.
Had no idea about this. Fascinating.

Three months later: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-...
Level of abstraction is largely orthogonal to the GUI/CLI divide, though.

nmcli is more abstract than ip+iw+wpa_supplicant, but it's no more or less abstract than any GUI network configuration widget.

The output of ls is no more or less abstract than the contents of a directory as displayed by a GUI file manager. It's the same metaphor and the same information displayed in two different formats.
There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your own, and the sense of accomplishment/retention that it instills. I started programming a few years after you and there was a similarly difficult learning curve in sourcing the materials, setting up my own environment, and making progress on your own.

My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity.

Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?
My father had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that required removal. He was put under at a hospital. The surgery wasn’t very long and the procedure wasn’t too invasive.

Recovery wasn’t so bad but you have a catheter for a bit. Cancer drugs and all but no hair loss. IIRC, he was very low energy. He’s been cancer free for over a decade.

There’s a chance you can lose the capability to get an erection so you’ll want a good surgeon (I did not discuss this with my dad). Another person I knew had to wear a small pad because he could have a small amount of urine dribble. He said he could pee like a horse and it was much easier post op.
How do we explain the fact that countries with the highest growth of ice cream sales, have the highest growth of sunburn cases as well?

Hard to take a huge macro view of only two factors as you are doing and draw any meaningful conclusion. Hence the need for deeper study
Sure, though in all fairness, I understand it's standard GAAP accounting for all banks, and your balance sheet has to have a footnote explaining the market value as well. I.e., this particular play or accounting standard is extremely common.

It seems like SVB was perhaps a little more exposed to interest rate risk than others, and had a pool of depositors that were more likely to withdraw significant funds in lockstep.
Plenty of new connections for me and interesting discussions via email over the years. Not much in terms of jobs but that’s expected since it’s not really a work oriented blog.
Well that's a shame because I am pretty sere education edition supports RCON so I could adapt MCIWB to use it.

I happen to know that EE commands include the elusive 'GetBlock' that let's you query the contents of the world. I had to jump through some embarrassing hoops to provide this function for MCIWB.
How good would it be at letting business users attach photos and emailed documents?
ICC issues arrest warrant for Putin over Ukraine war crimes
That's right. The authors of those books exhibit those qualities. You can't educate a human by pouring generated text on them, you need something that's capable of teaching to moderate the content. LLMs may allow teachers to achieve more with custom prompts, but it's a far cry from "personal Aristotle" and still requires 1-1 engagement with teachers and student.
Not to mention state-mandated testing regimes that have nothing to do with actual student learning, hyper-local control of education in elected school boards whose members are often as dumb as a box of rocks, extreme pressure from administrators to get kids through so their performance numbers are juiced rather than actually taking whatever time is needed for those students to accomplish what they need to, etc. I’m a public school teacher. I never cease to be impressed how very little people who don’t work in education understand about the realities of education.
My parents. Never as excited as when they're watching disaster on TV.
What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer space with applications that were all but impossible in the previous decade. There's AI chips in smart phones now.

What you're seeing here with LLMs is sledge hammer number 2.

It's understandable how most people don't notice the sledge hammer. The decade prior to 2010 there was another sledge hammer had no smart phones. We were hit with a smart phone hammer AND an AI sledge hammer and the integration was so seamless we didn't even notice.

Much of the same will happen with LLMs. In 5 years it's so normal, nobody cares and likely we will forget what life was like before LLMs.
Pick and place machines hate him!
Probably not. This is gross simplification of how counterfeit photocopied money is detected, but human visual acuity for yellow dots on white paper is pretty weak compared to red dots, so color photocopiers and color printers have/had firmware that would seed money with extraneous yellow dots. Computer vision has no such visual distortion and as such computers see counterfeit money as covered in yellow dots.

In a way its simpler with AI. AI is the ultimate groupthink tool and record keeping is simple. Simply ask the AI if this is the only possible output that could have been generated that's consistent as of March 17 2023 based on political limitations and censorship rules and artistic fads trends memes and styles of that era. The smaller the AI contribution (perhaps an icon bitmap) the (edited: easier) harder it is to hide AI involvement and the smaller the damage caused by AI to the copyright status of the work. The larger the AI contribution the easier it is to detect, but the larger the damage AI is causing, so it balances out.

As a concrete example, today, ask an AI "Please write a Harry Potter book" you will get a story that's extensively filtered and censored and bowdlerized to March 2023 political / cultural standards (hmm who's standards, the book buying public or some other group? Most people do not like our current censors... but they are in total power right now...), it would NOT look like a 1997 book at all, books from that long ago are only suitable for public book burnings now. In theory it should be possible for an incredibly politically incorrect AI to be permitted in 2033 solely for lawsuit discovery purposes to "Please write a Harry Potter book adhering to what we now call the hate filled politics of March 2023", then compare the md5sums, they match. Done, AI detected.

There's not many AIs and there's not many people permitted to grind their axes by censoring those AIs, so its a pretty small solution set.

There's an interesting political aspect to banning copyright of AI production, anything turbo-woke can be assumed to be AI generated and as such uncopyrightable, so the only way to make money in the 2030's will be to sell remakes and sequels of "Birth of a Nation" and "Mein Kampf" because an AI would never be permitted uncensored expression, so those cannot be AI produced and must have been made by humans, and as such only "right wing" content can be copyrighted and sold for huge profit.
Thanks for writing this. What happened to Turing was heinous, and I'm glad history has ultimately recognized him and his genious.
The comparison table from the ts_server site looks awesome though. I wish we could generate one for llama.cpp, unfortunately too busy with other things at the moment.
I've noticed a lot more hateful content being pumped out by the suggestion algorithm and based on other users' observations, my experience is not unique.
I’m curious how long till we figure out if these algorithms are plagiarizing OSS or other code they come across like GitHub Copilot.

It requires special tools to actually figure out if this is happening. Having seen tests with such tools the problem seems a lot worse than commonly discussed.

Inserting stolen code or using OSS code in violation of licenses is going to be a big mess. Copying snippets versus pulling in dependencies creates tons of issues. Even if you get away with violating licenses you set yourself up for security issues if the tools plagiarize code with vulnerabilities in a way that won’t get updated.

It might mean this stuff is a useful tool for someone with a clue but not for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
I haven't done it yet, but I have a kubernetes t-shirt idea that would involve the line: Kubernetes! solving yesterday's problems again, today!
One caveat here ...

The baseband processor also performs real time audio and noise cancelling functions.

So while I have had some decent luck with VOIP and dialer apps that live solely in the application layer, voice quality and noise cancelling, etc., may not ever be as good as what the RTOS in the baseband can provide.
This isn't generating new theories. I'm not saying LLMs aren't useful, or that they aren't extremely impressive in many ways.

Almost nothing GPT-4 produces was in the training set. I'm not saying they can't produce new sentences.

From the linked paper: "a language model that can generate protein sequences with a predictable function across large protein families, akin to generating grammatically and semantically correct natural language sentences"

Nobody is disputing that LLMs can generate grammatically and semantically correct sentences, and from the sounds of things this task is analogous to generating sentences. This isn't the same as generating new theories.
Pure vanity, I guess.

In reality, I like writing, and I often go back and read what I've written, either to see how my views have changed, or to reference previous (technical) work. Putting it on the web is mostly a way to make it accessible from anywhere, but also makes me put a tiny bit more effort into it, since it is public. I do find it to be a continuing source of fun, though!

A side effect is that I occasionally see folks run across particular pieces and use them in their own work, which is always satisfying.

It's never led to any job-related benefits, and may even be a liability, since my site is purely personal adventures...I stay away from work topics.
You might enjoy: https://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.htm...
Agreed, 100%. Eventhough most of the classes didn't matter for my career, getting the credential was worth it to help me get my foot in the door for interviews.
May I ask how this was discovered in your dad's case? I feel like prostate cancer is the single most dangerous cancer for men in the late 30s, 40s, and 50s. So it's a subject I'm trying to pay attention to.
I've had a couple of personal sites over the years starting in the late 90s. They have helped me connect with, or get invited to, several closed user groups and private forums where I've met people with similar research interests I might not otherwise have encountered. I write chiefly to help me organise my thinking, and publish perhaps only 20% of what I write (the rest I consider insufficiently well constituted to put out there).
"WARNING

The technology presented here is infringing on a US Patent that was issued on January 17, 2023. Use at your own risk. Violators will be prosecuted.

System and Method of Data Transfer In-Band in Video via Optically Encoded Images

US Patent 11,557,015 B2

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190259124A1"