skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"All models are wrong, some are useful". You could also look at them as a highly compressed PGM representing every possible conversation you could have in every language the model knows that has been trimmed to only the highly probable paths through training. In that view word prediction is really navigating nodes and this would explain their ability to enforce global constraints as well as they do :) There isn't going to be one "correct" way to view them and different perspectives might offer different insights.
"Privacy's final frontier"
- Nina Farahany

I just listened to Sean Carrol's Mindscape episode: "Nita Farahany on Ethics, Law, and Neurotechnology"

I highly recommend a listen, or you can read the full transcript. [0]

Regulating this field seems like something most political parties could get behind.

It's possible that we could actually stay ahead of this one.

[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...
> The problem here is everyone relying on Docker to foot an expensive bill for free forever.

Tragedy of the commons at its finest.
> The murder of Caesar marked the beginning of a long and protracted civil war

I don't see how you can look at the events leading up to the murder of Julius Caesar as anything but a civil war. He literally led roman armies into battle against roman armies controlled by opposing political interests.

> The death of Caesar did not provoke the end of the Republic

The amount of political power concentrated in the single dictator-for-life changed dramatically after this. If you want to call a system in which one person has dictatorial power a republic because they will lose that dictatorial power via assassination or revolt if they are awful enough at their job for long enough (e.g. Nero) then basically anything is a republic.
It's always fun to read about tungsten, I guess with the high density and weird texture the literal meaning in Swedish makes sense: tung=heavy and sten=rock so heavy rock. :)

Edit: autocorrect.
Can't quite call it life changing, but I bought a smaller cube as a Christmas present (half joking, half novelty. Dumb shit you buy your brother type stuff.).
Well, when it arrived the joke was on me because it was genuinely such an interesting object. I regretted having to give it away.

Then for some reason, by the time I got around to buying myself one, they'd become a "cool" thing online and the price exploded. Oh well.
> But because everyone is already pointing at gcr.io

Did people forget about Google Code repositories already?
> imaginary American property

Well, your country is consuming it, it doesn’t seem very imaginary…
Sleep deprivation prevents memories from forming, that's my theory on why people have more than one kid. They actually don't form memories for most of the first year or so. The only memories they have are the pictures they took of the happy moments.

Nobody takes a video of their kid screaming their lungs out at 3am with snot running from every orifice because their favourite toy fell off the bed or the pillow is the wrong colour.
> because everyone is already familiar with at least one curly braced language.

so, logically, they must have learned how to use {} in the first place, probably with few problems.

i have taught god-knows how many people c and c++ (used to be a commercial trainer for those languages) and i can assure you that very, very few, if any, had problems with {}.
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass (2017)
yup just literally talked a client out of a nice little mobile project by telling him my rate. lets say I had AI by my side - I'd be quoting the same rate, but number of hours would be lower. project might be a go then.
Worth noting Dell, whose XPS laptops (at least) offer Ubuntu 22.04 as a configuration option.

I've had pretty good experiences with Dell and Linux, albeit I dual boot and usually get Windows from the factory.
An 83 year old developer's first reaction to the ChatGPT API
> We need to accept that "reproducibility" isn't quite working...

I guess it doesn't sell Nix as strongly as it could..

But, it's hardly for a lack of enthusiasm on Nix user's part. -- Rather, I've seen a few "what's nix good for anyway" comments, and this results in many lengthy replies extolling nix.
They were incompetent because they didn’t have enough As. I exclusively use AAAAAAAAAAAA Plumbers
so, you recommend cobol?
I find there is a perfect middle ground here (applies to multiple languages like this.)

Nix + LLM.

Especially if using GPT4 for quality. You get all of the usefulness of Nix, but created or edited using plain English.

And then of course at the end you output the nix as an artifact to live in version control.
Occam's Razor says that's just an ordinary contemporary tech user/worker, who has no concept that they might not want to do it that way.

But if it happens to be OpenAI strutting in front of Google, like, "We can even hand you all our hot leads, and still beat you," that'd be something.
Edge has been getting worse and worse. I switched to Firefox and Vivaldi instead. Chrome, just in case I need it.
Well, it’s not though.
Oh, I am not a good reader this morning.
The change just means that the stamp of approval is not the journal name, which is fine. If you think about it, that system is a bizarre and lazy way to attribute value to a piece of work. The book publishing model figures out which books are great without caring at all about who publishes something (for the most part)
Why would governments be opposed to free mass surveillance. Microsoft is one of the biggest cronies in Washington.
Publishing reviews along with a paper sounds amazing to me, that’s a part you never get to see in journals when you’re not a participating reviewer. I’d love to have some reference points of expert opinion and critique come with each paper.

I can understand the fears about submission quality. People do prefer submitting to ‘elite’ journals with low acceptance rates, because getting accepted becomes a validation. I wonder if publishing the reviews might take care of that anyway, if the audience will tend to read only the papers with high reviews.

Maybe they could have the best of both by publishing a curated set of the top 10% of papers by review scores in a best-of version of the journal, and still publish everything in the main journal. The move to consider publishing everything makes sense in this new world where all papers are on Arxiv, and they frequently make rounds in the press and social media before getting reviewed. I would welcome the eLife changes if it helps quell the trend of completely unreviewed papers vying for attention.
ChatCoach – GTP-4 enabled life coaching
Just threw this together, trying to get some feedback on what i can do to improve / add more value?
Oberon and Oberon+ are very interesting and are certainly a step forward from Pascal. Wish Oberon+ had moved forward a few more steps, like making everything an expression, for example, or more lax variable declaration rules (which probably require scoping rules changes).

If only the FPC compiler supported it and allowed combining units in Oberon with Pascal ones in one project!

The language specs: https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The...
Can you explain this example?
> May the gods have mercy on our souls if we ever train an LLM on toxic Twitter and Reddit comments and it becomes superintelligent.

Some guy fine-tuned one of the big language models on all of 4chan. He made a YouTube video about it. I could go dig up a link, but really the preceding two sentences are all you'll need to find it.

It said the kind of things you'd expect. Weirdly, it scored better on some "honesty" metric -- maybe because it developed a blunt style, or maybe because ML metrics -- though papers are published over 1% improvements -- are often noisy as hell.
Maybe not "GNU" enough for them but I'm writing this on a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 I bought pre-installed with Fedora. I have also bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu.
> I am a woman when writing this sentence but a man after I'm done.

This actually proves my point even better than I already had. If you can just make it up and say you are whatever gender whenever you want, then the idea of transitioning between them isn't actually a real thing, it's just all in your head and more importantly - the idea that anybody else should respect it is absurd.

Also, you have declared that you can't define what constitutes different genders, nor have any idea of how many genders there are. So, it's all make believe.
> Let's call them "distortions" instead and not get stuck on vocabulary.

Let's not. What you're describing are known as pseudo-hallucinations. i.e. The floor looks wavy and like it's moving, that sort of thing. A hallucination is seeing something (and is always visual) that isn't there, such as a person or object. Delusion is believing these are real and endorsing as real, but delusion often occurs without hallucination, such as believing someone is in the room without visually perceiving them. Delusion is somewhat related to fantasy, it all depends on whether it is believed to be real. Aural hallucinations are, of course, hearing things that aren't there.
otoh the rise of ATMs seems to have increased the number of bank tellers
To counter those occasional asteroids that bizarrely, coincidentally seem to blast through the exact spot where the lander lands — how about adding the ability to take off again once having landed?
https://archive.ph/riDXl
My goal is not so much to get a GNU/Linux laptop as it is to avoid Microsoft Windows. Most laptops come with a Windows license, which costs me money and gives aid and comfort to the enemy. It is easier to find a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled than to find one with no OS whatsoever.

Given you are wiping out the OS, "Linux" and "no preinstalled software" are synonymous, but "Linux" is a better keyword.
LLMs currently have no continuous learning feedback loop, yes we can train prompts and make them temporarily smarter...

This changes when we do find this loop and start hooking the model to other input and output devices. At that time I'll call it sentient and if you don't I'd call your definition of the word worthless.
Yes. In a lot of ways Edge is a better Chrome that doesn't force you to make your Browser Syncing account the same as your default Google Account.

But they keep adding invasive features without asking. There's supposed to be a setting for Discover but it's not actually there.
Sleep hygiene was #1 for me. If I'm not sleeping or having sex, I get out of the bed.

I never go to bed if I'm not tired and if it takes too long for me to fall asleep I get back up, trying to force sleep will just cause physical pain. I usually have a ~30 minute nonsense trivia podcast playing for me to fall asleep to. If I can hear it ending, I get up and do something else.

#2 was switching to a job that's less stressful. If my day-job requires me to juggle 20 things at the same time, it's impossible for me to wind down enough to sleep - or at least I couldn't figure out a way. For a co-worker journaling worked, basically they offloaded their brain to a physical notebook and that gave enough peace of mind to relax and fall asleep.
It’s a fun/NP-hard problem, this take on it ended up being useful: https://github.com/stephaniemhutson/BoxPackingAPI/blob/maste...

https://medium.com/the-chain/solving-the-box-selection-algor...
10 years ago it would take a month of workdays. I have to imagine it's much worse now.

https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/23/to-read-all-privacy-poli...
I wrote on this topic a while ago; experimenting I found out you can basically change the repos names and keep the stars; this wouldn't work if you use the repo as issue tracker or PR tracker, since the history would all be broken, but if it's pretty much just the code it's easy to swap the star count between two repos:

https://francisco.io/blog/transferring-github-stars/
finding that amount of gold bars is incredibly hard. People usually respond "comex & london" has gold bars? I dare say 30% are fake, numerous occasions where gold bars stored in the vault are fake.
I also find curly braces/parens/etc annoying to type, but recently had my mind blown when I saw a typing tutor program that recommended using left-shift to create those characters.

For 35+ years I’ve been using right-shift for things on the right side of the board, cranking my hand and stretching my fingers and complaining about programming languages with poor typing ergonomics.

It’s taking forever to break the habit, but so far it feels so much better.
> You meant "expand massively" i think.

Nope, I meant what I said.

> There wont be any unprecedented mass layoffs

Baghdad Bob strikes again.
Well, it is cloud ready.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...
Large egg producers create bird flu panic, send regulators after small competitors. Small farms take the USDA insurance payout by torching their farms. Large egg farms profit increases 10x [1].

[1] https://calmainefoods.gcs-web.com/static-files/b0cebe03-d49f...
> How about a treesitter-based editor extension that converts between begin/end and {/}, as if they were ligatures? Actually this might not even need treesitter.

See emacs prettify-symbols-mode (https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/46529/configuring-...)
> Was it always like that?

Since at least the '80s, and probably way further back than that.
Stop making up laws. You'll do much more good dismantling existing ones. And non-social signals like # of commits, # of pull requests cannot be faked? We need signals among the noise.

Sometimes signals are noise we just need to calibrate.
I recently had a similar experience with a new pillow. For as long as I could remember, I couldn't find a comfortable pillow. It got to the point where I just ditched them and slept without one. The closest to something suitable had been foam knee pillows, or sometimes a blanket rolled up in a weird position. A couple of months ago I saw a sale on Tempur pillows and walked into the store on a whim. Decided to give one of them a try and got one. Luckily, this one seemed to do the trick! I was surprised at how big a difference it made both with falling asleep and staying asleep better throughout the night.
Yes! It was distrust towards Microsoft that kept .NET from growing to be a universal language and kept Java in the game, to be honest. The language / framework, per se, is to be celebrated as a great leap forward borne out of the good kind of competition.
many programmers (most?) spend hours a day coding and see it as the best part of their day?
John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL
Gut Reaction: If, at age 27, your self-esteem issues are that bad...maybe you should consider joining a convent.
I'd guess a good solution could be to get rid of your TV
Updated the title. Add added the following note.

Note: There was a typo in the title - Instead of ChatGPT, it was ChapGPT . I have corrected the title, but the URL remains the same because Cool URIs don't change
I don’t think governments recognizes ecological entities. There would have to be some legal trust or something that sought the money, which could be in trust for ecological wellbeing.
> and you can’t turn it off!

At least on windows 11 pro workstation, this is a right click and a preference setting or two away. The start menu can be moved to the left corner where it has long been with a taskbar setting. I did this as recently as yesterday with media dated February 2023.
Does modern ai simplify the simulation of an economy? As, ai is much more capable of learning complex games now than it was 8 years ago.

Economists could publish their models and anyone could adjust the assumptions to test the stability of the conclusion. Anyone could watch the agents go about their days and see if the decisions relate to reality. Almost allowing economists to run experiments.

The simulations would probably need to be narrow rather than the entire economy.

Is this worth pursuing or is it intractable?
4. sunlight
very nice, but watch out for you OpenAI bill :)
I am also a strong supporter of them, but I wrote them immediately and said that this plan of theirs was both very illegal and insulting to artists, writers and creators throughout the world.

The only reason we have professional or semi-professional artists and writers is because they're able to sell copies one way or another. The EFF and the IA would like to believe the writers and publishers are outrageously wealthy and able to sustain the kind of bleeding and pseudo-piracy they endorse. The reality is that most are barely getting by. It's sad to watch the richy riches of Silicon Valley steal from the artists and writers.
Doctors aren’t typically incentivized to treat things with lifestyle changes. For better or worse, that’s something you need to self advocate for.
> The parallels between what happened in Rome 2000 years ago and what is happening in the U.S. today

such as please? trump as tiberius i can kind of see. biden is claudius?
I have lots of tungsten carbide scrap. Apart from recycling, what are other good idea ?
This is useful advice for rejection generally. There are too many potential reasons for an individual to be rejected to hyper fixate on one of them.
I think this post is way over-the-top for many kinds of startups.

If you're trying to build something like an AI business document writer or AI search tool or generic infrastructure for AI or anything that Google or Amazon or Microsoft might consider a big-business and really care about, yeah, you're going to have a tough road ahead competing with them when they can throw nearly unlimited cash and developers at copying anything you do and making it better.

But if you're aiming to build something that's not a big business by their standards, you're probably ok.

Also, don't forget to mention customer service. These are new products: people aren't sure about them. Even a startup with poor customer service can provide a lot better genuine help to people than silicon valley giants do on their best day.
The interesting bit of simulating an economy for a game is not the tradeoff of realism vs computer resources, but realism vs fun.

A game where AI actors are making prices come very close to costs, as they make the most profitable trades, and demand makes actors switch to alternative goods whenever their preference is priced too high, will turn into a spreadsheet. Not unlike in real life, the work will be just identifying where you have left actual inefficiencies, and end up with an algorithm that exploits it. Not so much fun.

Most games that involve trading leave giant holes in the economic model on purpose: The parts of the economy that they copy are the parts that make the game more engaging. It's not that in, say, Railroad Tycoon 2 you couldn't build a more realistic economic model: It's just that the more realistic model would be less fun to play with. Same as in boardgames. Many people love playing Power Grid, and like its market mechanic, but it's 100% attached to a very unrealistic turn order for purchases, which attempts to balance out who is receiving more income. It builds a tradeoff between being the leader or falling behind, which would in no way occur in a more realistic model. Then the winners would just keep winning no matter what, and some people might as well accept defeat in the first turn of the game. This is not just speculation: People in the game industry have playtested games with a stronger economic model all the time, and the more realistic the model, the harder it is to make the game fun.

So the real question is, what parts of an economic model are necessary to make the game realistic enough to be engaging, and which parts harm your game?
I understand that in the novel series that sort of setup was encouraged by institutions (there is a vague mention of taxes), and in The United States this is setup is disincentivized by institutions. However if greater than two parent households was a genuinely preferable way to live I would expect more people to choose that lifestyle now.
The whole Oberon system is great fun. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.html

It's a single-user workstation, developed from the CPU on up, compiler & language, OS with unique GUI, all documented in a book, and you can run it online in a browser via a JS emulator for the CPU: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

People used it at ETH as their main system to run the University!
The text density-based Go crawler
Introducing the text density-based Go crawler.
This is adorable but not at all informative
URL - https://github.com/LandWhale2/TD-Spider
what has this to do with "hieroglyphs"?
This was my reply to the recently flagged article showing a graph of the decline in percentage for Windows' desktop share of the market. I think it was flagged due to questionable consideration of mobile OS's.

But it did visually show a marked decline over the most recent year and a half or so, which may be a realistic indicator even if not pefectly accurate numerically.

Looks like the downturn accelerated to its current more-rapid decline right after the release of the latest Windows 11 22H2 version in late 2022.

This would have been the time the true enthusiasts, who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy, could finally be giving up for good.

And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for more older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach.

So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough.

Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview.

As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN.

But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users.

Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either.

reply
> Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon.

It doesn't help Microsoft apparently also managed to make dual boot more difficulty. Some years ago it was quite seamless, you could rely on automatic partition and it just worked. Today windows messes with the Linux bootloader after install, and to make it work I have to resort to advanced partition mode.
yes - and in another way, too. a lot of the demand for programmers is driven by successive waves of new technology adoption and investment - and AI is looking to be a motherload that should keep us going for awhile.
Long time reader but first time poster, had to share a story.

A decade ago was riding a bus in China, and they had a PSA type ad playing on the screens (paraphrased) "making sure when you're buying gold you distinguish investment (real) gold bars and decorative (fake) gold bars".

I thought "wow, how bad of a problem it must be to need such a PSA".