skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Will 10% of the world's population perish? Most likely. There's already a population die-off in progress in many areas of the world as the birth rate continues to decline. People don't have to drop dead for the population to die off, they can simply not be born in sufficient numbers to replace the existing population.

There are two very different points being conflated here. What's the time scale for the reduction in population? 10% of the world's population disappearing today is very different from a gradual reduction over the course of decades. 10% of the world's population disappearing over 100 years is almost certainly a good thing at our current population level, when every indication is that sustainability just isn't possible with 8 billion people. At the very least, it'll force us to challenge existing economic models that are all predicated on endless growth.

And I don't see anyone saying that things will be easy. In fact, I think most acknowledge that the opposite is very much true. But a) on an individual level, there's not much you can do when income, consumption, and emissions are all Pareto distributed -- I can no more instigate a bank run on my own than I could affect carbon emissions -- and, b) the species has survived worse population declines than this before, on numerous occasions. The black plague in Europe and the Mongols tearing through Central Asia both come to mind. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed, for anyone.

As an average person who does his best to live sustainably, there's only so much I have the time and energy for. I live semi-rurally within an hour of a major population center and on the edge of a state park, so believe me, I get it. But if it gets bad enough, at some point it really is out of my control. There's only so much I can care when I have bills to pay and a life to live. I'd imagine most people are in a similar position.
> You're not literally arguing that LED light bulbs and EV cars somehow enabled cryptocurrency mining operations, are you?

I somewhat am. It's far more correlation than direct causation, but the added energy equivalent of an entire second world country such as Iceland doesn't just spring out of nowhere, especially when considering nearly zero-sum fossil fuel utilization. Assuming that fossil fuel mining/drilling/refining didn't massively increase over the same years (and statistically it hasn't, it mostly appears "constant"), much of the energy that things like cryptocurrency mining have used have by simple matter of fact come in part from efficiencies gained elsewhere in the overall energy ecosystem.

It's not entirely a zero sum game of course, because there has been an increase in renewable energy sources (hydro, solar, and wind especially), but it certainly awfully looks like it is still close enough to zero-sum or possibly even (pessimistically) negatively weighted sum, with regards to carbon output, when even given huge increases in renewable energy mixes across the world we didn't see net decreases in things like coal-fired power plants at the scale we should have. We keep collectively finding ways to use roughly all of the available fossil fuel energy extracted each year, despite focuses on renewables and despite efforts at using less energy overall in average households.

Is that a perverse outcome of well-intentioned policies? I'm not entirely sure. Cynically, it certainly feels like it.

Positive motivation would be great to have, you are correct. I don't think we have enough of it in current policies. (We needed carbon caps, not [just] credits/offsets. We needed carbon taxes to internalize to markets externalities they don't actually care to watch. We didn't get those things. We still seem unlikely to get those things.)

The best positive motivation I'm aware of that we're finally seeing "just in time" some of the effects of a greatly healed Ozone layer, which proves the concerns about Ozone depleting chemicals in 80s and 90s had the desired effect and the efforts to eradicate them were not hyperbolic and were definitely necessary (and that climate change would be much, much worse in most of the world had we not made those changes; though Australia and its strict sunscreen regimens can still tell us how much the remaining Ozone damage is a present threat in anthropogenic climate change).

I still sometimes worry that we needed (years ago) an attitude like that towards things like a possible ban on cryptocurrency energy usage if we actually wanted to bend the curve, but in the 2020s the fact that things like fighting for the Ozone succeeded "quietly" almost dastardly make it harder to fight for political will now because "people already did their part and sacrificed for 'nothing' and are exhausted".
Well, because as others have pointed out, languages like that have existed for at least a couple decades. Most of the 'nice parts' of Rust are really borrowings from the ML family of languages: Hindley-Milner type inference, algebraic data types, and pattern matching.

OCaml or StandardML, (or Haskell if you want to get funky ... I don't), F#, Scala, etc.

Hell, these days even Swift, or Kotlin, have these features. Which I'd call: modern static type systems.

And I understand even Java is getting some of them. Even TypeScript is a reasonable-ish solution with a pretty nifty type system, if you don't mind the (non-existent) threading model.

I like Rust, but its niche is: the above nice things and a clean syntax, but without the latency&pause costs of GC.
And that's what I use it for, when I need that kind of thing, for systems programming. And for that, the killer feature is the borrow checker which makes using the above features relatively painless, despite having no GC.

(Now one other advantage of the borrow checker is its application to concurrency -- making ownership of locks, and mutable state generally, easier to reason about. That's perhaps a killer feature that the other languages I mentioned don't really have)
I think the Asahi Linux project rekindles some of that excitement from the earlier days of Linux on PC-compatibles in the late '90s and early '00s.

Some people might not remember this, but hardware support for Linux was a real crapshoot back then, and it's only "mostly smooth" on PC today because we have a quarter century of work building out drivers and modules for the platform.

It's fun watching the breakneck pace at which they are going through the same processes with a brand new and proprietary consumer-oriented computing platform.
My journey as a software developer began in the 80's at MIT by writing 3D graphics code on a Symbolics Lisp Machine. Some fond memories:

https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-...

One big difference between then and now was that back then you wrote mainly from scratch and were in charge of most parts of your software, whereas today it is mainly about gluing various toolkits and frameworks together.
Most of them accept donations:

> If you want to support my work, you can donate to marcan’s Asahi Linux support fund on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon, which helps me out too! And if you’re looking forward to a Vulkan driver, check out Ella’s GitHub Sponsors page!

Lina also accepts donations on her streams. I think Alyssa is funded by her employer, but I'm not sure.
Linux has kernel panics, and they predate Rust. You can't just dereference NULLs or spray random memory and still "absolutely avoid crashes". If you let C code write past end of a vector, you will have an unstable system and data corruption.

Catching these bugs before they cause damage is an improvement to stability. In Rust you can compartmentalize panics. Instead of messing up the whole kernel or causing a machine-halting kernel panic, you can gracefully unwind one call and execute a fallback or return an error code from the one syscall that hit the bug. That is how you can continue running the kernel reliably instead of hoping to get lucky.

Then, there was a miscommunication between the Linux Rust project and Linus, about an issue that does not exist any more. An early draft had a handler that translated OOM to kernel panics as a kludge from use of Rust's standard library containers as a placeholder for proper containers being developed. Linus rightly criticized that this was a bad idea, but it was never meant to be the final setup. That code has been replaced now, and Rust in the kernel uses fallible allocation that does not abort nor panic. The issue does not exist in the no-alloc Rust dialect used in the kernel going forward.
I could be persuaded to trade a certain amount of power for ease of use
I’m not the person you’re replying to, but I disagree that it’s trivial. If I wanted to, say, send a personalized phishing email to every member of a thousand-person organization, based on whatever information was publicly available on their Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles, and the profiles of their peers, it would take me a long time to research and craft each one. Or let’s think bigger. Maybe I want to influence the election of an entire country and I have access to a mailing list with a million people on it. Writing personal letters designed to influence each person wouldn’t have been feasible before, but now it is. Or maybe you don’t use email or letters. Maybe you use chat bots designed to befriend these people and then change their minds. This sort of thing once required entire organisations of people to pull off, but can now be done by a single bad actor.

I’m probably still not thinking big enough here, either. People are going to find nefarious uses that I can’t even imagine right now, on scales that I find difficult to comprehend. I’m personally terrified.
Continuations of 250 prompts with LLaMA 30B fine-tuned on Open-Assistant data
This really reminded me of life before I went remote.
The Spack DSL for defining versions, options, etc. is declarative. That part of a package exposes options to the solver and very much allows reuse, in the sense that the same package can be built many different ways, and even with different dependencies. The whole system is parameterized in ways that Nix is not.

The imperative part of a Spack package is the build recipe, which AFAICT is not so different from bundling a bash script in a Nix derivation. Just like Nix, it's included in our configuration hash, so if you change the recipe you get a different installation of the software.
I expect AI is going to take the lead for societal concerns of unintended consequences. The advancement pace is way ahead of our ability to reason about the potential effects of what we are building.

We will have completed many iterations before we have even a moment to review the feedback loop. Thus, we will likely compound many mistakes before we realize it.

I have no idea how it will slow down. Someone just figured out how to reduce the cost of building a multi million dollar model to around $600. That was supposed to take another decade.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the picture looks like in this advancement. I think we are going to trip over many landmines in this new tech gold rush. I've written my own perspectives on that here - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
Have you been to Venice?
Governments can ban powerful devices, as they can ban guns, bombs, and such.
Proximeet (proximeet.co.uk) is a plugin that integrates with popular meeting tools like Zoom to help remote engineering teams conduct structured Scrum ceremonies and capture discussions and action items. By leveraging the power of AI, we can provide advanced features like sentiment analysis and reasoning, which help teams identify potential issues and stay on track. With our AI-powered platform, summarising team discussions/elaborations and noting down actionable tasks will be automated, freeing up team members.
Destructive pessimists are often formerly functional pessimistic. Once life throws enough hardballs at you, its easy to devolve into this state. Economic strife is one big reason. People who are unemployed or underemployed often realize they made some bad choices, but they also know they have been screwed by choices their society has made, which often seem quite arbitrary or even malicious.

This is the case with inflation, it changes the game of living "just because", and some people feel the pain and others not so much. Those who can't renegotiate for higher income are just going to be more negative, and that will percolate one way or another up to those who are better off.

Right now in the US we have the spectacle of big banks being bailed out for irresponsible management at the same time food assistance for poor people is being cut back (the expiration of pandemic-related SNAP expansion). Wealthy people are being rightsized while poor people literally starve. Threats to banks are considered a systemic risk, but hunger in the population isn't. I'd like to find an optimist to explain what is good about that to me, unfortunately I don't know any.
Interesting- thanks
Via https://twitter.com/neurosp1ke/status/1637436664120328192
The other difference is that tech is an actual important part of everyday business and life for everyone. 2001 was still really early for everything.
>when they came for their drug test

Your organization does drug tests, and you think this guy is the toxic one?
> The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down.

If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing was highway robbery to begin with.

Hurricane Electric (who I chose simply because they always put their price online--other colos should take note) is at $400/month for a cab & GigE. It doesn't take very many online servers to put that in a rounding error. In roughly 20 months, you win against the cloud even if you count CapEx.

And, do remember, the cloud companies all charge egress by the byte. Sure, most people don't care, until they become successful and suddenly wind up with a $10K bill in a month.

The "cloud" is useful two ways:
1) Pop up servers quickly

However, this is should be "I use servers and can transfer them to another provider quickly if I need to." Any provider should work as well as bare metal.

2) Lean heavily into specific services on in the cloud provider.

The goal here is that you are cheaper specifically because you don't have a fixed "baseline" that you are always utilizing. In this way, you are completely relying on the fact that the provider can shuffle things to be uber cheap.
None of that is standard though.

wasm-bindgen goes away after this. Objects just become usable directly. wasm-bindgen is a monstrously complex layer, and it doesn't allow wasm direct access to the DOM. It very cleverly installs a complex bridge that translates on the fly between js and wasm, making wasm think it has transparent access, but it's quite clear if you actually start debugging what's happening in the browser, there is a huge middle layer of code wasm-bindgen has built for you to present that illusion.

And again, none of it is standard. There I think may be a creative language or two who has built atop Rust's painstaking cross-serialization... but these techniques are far from standard.

The actual standard makes a raft of these ugly unsightly slow intermediary translation layers go away. It makes an actual standard for cross language communication. Not just rust<->js, but rust<->go or scheme<->f# or whatever else.
You're wrong. Even the Web client of Mastodon comes with two separate UIs, and that's not the only client officially provided by the Mastodon project.
The number of parameters stays the same, but the amount of information encodable by those parameters is not the same.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

They arguably are influenced by US government, which can be an issue depending on what sort of reporting the media outlet does.
You not just write it once and copy-paste it to every youtube comment section? I don't see why being able to generate it cheaply matters much, the number of words you write has nothing to do with the number of impressions.
Amazon is subsidizing base charges with network bandwidth charges.
429 could be because you are sending too fast … rate limiting different from quota…
I also got that text about the married couple and their money issues. Alpaca didn't impress me at all so far.
You could also fork Chrome.
Do they not have MDM?

Why were they running random apps on work phones anyhow?

Massive security and privacy vulnerability.

Also, BYOD is a terrible idea because comingling personal and work is a minefield for both the employee and the company.
I never thought of that. That would definitely put a spoil on common access to digital information in the long term. Perhaps it could even bifurcate the Web in the way that‘s been entertained before: a separate Web document environment and a separate Web application environment.
So, we hear alarms about humans causing
rapid climate change. Sorry, I don't
believe the claims, don't believe that a
meaningful case has been made, and have to
explain the alarms as driven by people
looking for money from political power,
media looking for eyeballs for ad revenue
(money), and convenient idiots
deliberately misled by the leaders.

Bluntly, so far there is no credible
evidence that human sources of greenhouse
gasses have caused, are causing, or will
cause significant temperature change of
the earth.

Efforts were made to say what effects CO2
(and other greenhouse gasses) would have
on temperature. The results were
summarized in a graph in

http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg

The results varied from no significant
changes in temperature to massive "hockey
stick" changes.

The times of the predicted changes came
and went years ago with no credible
evidence of significant changes. The
efforts that predicted significant changes
were all bad science, and I don't believe
that they were objective science.

At present the predictions of significant
changes have no credibility and look
convincingly like just a flim-flam scam
running after money and power.

In short, the efforts summarized in

http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg

show that we have no credible scientific
evidence that human sources of CO2 have
caused, are causing, or will cause
significant temperature change. The
alarmists about CO2 lost their
credibility.

If the CO2 does not cause significant
temperature change, then it will not cause
significant "climate change" or a "climate
crisis".
Tesla’s Cost-Cutting Targets at Tesla Pressure EV Rivals
Unions can improve pay and conditions, they can't really do anything about market forces.

Here in the UK the unions are medium-strong and haven't prevented self checkouts, ticket sellers being replaced with machines, etc.

What you need is strong labor laws. A universal three or six month notice period in favour of the employee would do wonders to prevent overhiring and overfiring.
https://archive.ph/zpFYR
I don't think that is ironic. I think it's a pretty damning indictment of how useless Meta really is as a concept and a product.
Kids' art has a fresh, innocent style that can be very uplifting and is hard for an older artist to replicate.
You can get paid 1000% depending on your job, so YMMV.
Yes, they use both. Celsius primarily, but still both. Ask them how hot their oven is, or the temperature of the pool.
Seems like we're headed into a world where only the most literal language may be used to describe anything. Goodbye simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and sarcasm. You will be missed.
Galloping Ghost in Chicago has about 45 pins, but 800+ arcade games
Correct, but interesting it is all of what you mentioned, except not “the state” and “law” becomes “bylaw”
South Korea is not half the size of Florida — it’s the other way around. FL is less than half the size of SK. Also it’s not an island nation — it’s on the Korean Peninsula. If you mean it’s an island nation in terms of connectivity then most nations in the world are islands too. Brazil for instance is culturally disconnected from its neighbors due to language.
I Left Google (2019)
I suddenly realize how I got sick after visiting Legoland in San Jose with my niece - there's a virtual reality "ride" there.
WASM isn't just for the browser though.
When I was mentioning electrodes, I made the assumption signal quality was the prime target, but you're right, I didn't address that directly. Of course there are other considerations as well, but signal quality is the main one.

I'm not sure where you are getting your "few bits/second" number. EEG chips can sample thousands of times per second, and it would also depend on how many channels you are running, and what you're looking for.

So the example OpenBCI board I linked to is an 8 channel device with 8,000 samples per second and 24 bits per sample - so 15m bits/second.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question.
> Apple hardware is "open" as far as they don't try to prevent other operating systems to be installed.

1. This is not true for "Apple hardware" as a rule.

2. Removing support for third-party OSes would be a shocking product regression for the Macbook.

3. If Apple's definition of "Open" excludes any transparent documentation or explanation, then they have provided precisely nothing.

You contradict yourself by praising Apple for keeping standard features while deriding Lenovo for doing the same thing. All of this ignores the Linux certification Lenovo offers on their products, their Linux support contracts and even the freely-provided firmware updates through fwupd (something Apple will never provide). Regardless of whether you characterize "open"-ness as non-hostility or constructive support, Lenovo is still the more open company by a country mile. And Lenovo doesn't even do that much to-boot.
I definitely was the opposite kid then ;P
> Second, imagine the same argument applied to a utility like electricity.

Isn’t that how electricity works? You purchase electricity directly from the producer, and buy additional plugins (literally) that work with the single source of electricity you’re purchasing.
If you do software development, how do you maintain context? I often have terminals open with useful history and logs, plus one or more IDEs, and of course plenty of browser tabs.

If I walk up to my machine after a long weekend, within 10 seconds I know where I left off because I can see what I had open and what I was working on.

Rebooting daily would require me to develop some additional kind of state management system (not that it would be a bad thing to learn).
Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI
I used a similar approach to get GPT-4 to edit my blog over the weekend :)

https://www.languagemodelpromptengineering.com/4
So much about this article makes no sense. Don't misunderstand me... It sounds like there were some shenanigans going on here, and I'm sympathetic with the guy who they attempted to silence. But all this talk about "first amendment rights" and whether a "ban on sending emails" is legal make the author come across as fairly naive about how the world works.

The first amendment does not give you carte blanche to say anything you want at any time with no consequences. It simply says that the government can't lock you up for it.
A Tilt Toward Safety Stopped a Scientist's Virus Research (2014)
> If it's the current institutions, then anything up to and excluding shooting people in their beds at the wrong house will still be "exemplary".

Hell, some institutions make killing an obviously innocent person part of the rite of passage, like the LA Sheriff gangs.
Yes, but it takes time (took OpenAI years) and significant effort. Who with enough expertise will do this and not keep the results closed in order to monetize them? It doesn’t seem like something an open source project could accomplish quickly enough to not keep lagging substantially behind the commercial solutions.