skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Protobuf is the worst serialization format and schema IDL, except for all the others.

The truth is, a lot of these critiques are valid. You could redesign protobuf from the ground up and improve it greatly. However, I think this article is bad. Firstly, it repeatedly implies that protobuf was designed by amateurs because of its design pitfalls, ignoring the fact that it's also clear that protobuf grew organically into what it is today rather than deliberately. Secondly, I do not feel it is giving enough credit to the idea that protobuf simply was not designed to be elegant in the first place. It's not a piece of modern art. It is not a Ferrari. It is a Ford F150.

What protobuf does have right is the stuff that's boring; it has a ton of language bindings that are mostly pretty efficient and complete. I'm not going to say it's all perfect, because it's not. But protobuf has an ecosystem that, say, Cap'n Proto does not. This matters more than the fact that protobuf is inelegant. Protobuf may be inelegant, but it does in fact get the job done for many of the use cases.

In my opinion, protobuf is actually good enough. It's not that ugly. Most programming languages you would use it from are more inelegant and incongruent than it is. I don't feel like modelling data or APIs in it is overly limited by this. Etc, etc. That said, if you want to make the most of protobuf, you'll want to make use of more than just protoc, and that's the benefit of having a rich ecosystem: there are plenty of good tools and libraries built around it. I'll admit that outside of Google, it's a bit harder to get going, but my experiences on side projects have made me feel that protobuf outside of Google is still a great idea. It is, in my opinion, significantly less of a pain in the ass than using OpenAPI based solutions or GraphQL, and much more flexible than language-specific tools like tRPC.

For a selection of what the ecosystem has to offer, I think this list is a good start.

https://github.com/grpc-ecosystem/awesome-grpc#protocol-buff...
That doesn’t help. You’re still making something that has a high variable cost into something that the user only is paying a fixed cost for.
There's a lot of software being written by one or two people where there's not review. I work on a few of these style systems. It's a judgement game.
> When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement.

Agreed. The worst part is when they nod and pretend they got it and then that really important thing that you thought you had communicated everyone that was akin to the sky being on fire is not being prioritized/funded/worked on.
that's a complicated question to answer. what I'd say is that more parameters makes the model more robust, but there are diminishing returns. optimizations are under way
The people that write the software for such things are engineers.
> published by G?rge Allen

Obviously, it says George.

(Knowing what an inscription means is actually an important real-world method of being able to read it!)

The "Z" used by Tolkien there appears to be his own invention. The whole inscription is something of a mess; a few things are put into runes by sound, but mostly a fairly strict letter-to-letter transcription is used. This is especially bad in "published", which prints an "S" followed by an "H", reflecting nothing about the actual word. (The sound in question would, in a real Anglo-Saxon text, be represented sc, not sh; Tolkien in his other documents used a mirror-reversed S rune instead.)
Welll....

Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

Previously discussed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730365
> What would you say your mental toolkit consists of?

Not much! In place of the ideal hard science stuff, for a while it's been Stack Overflow, tenacity, and a nose for useful solutions.

I feel if I had educated myself in rigor, I could implement that paper, prove solutions, and have an assortment of physical phenomena at my disposal.

All the books I have and not read speak to the need for knowledge, and while applications abound, words can only be consumed one long tape at a time.

> Where does classics and philosophy come into it?

It's your secret weapon: it's the quote or phrase or context that comes to mind, to flower one's thoughts amid numbers and process, that inspires and renews.

> What do you typically apply that toolkit to, and how does it help you?

Programming, of course! Mostly in pattern recognition for solving problems.

Whatever you decide, I hope you end up owning "something that is yours." It's hard to describe. It could be a business, or a codebase that is maintained a long time.
Strong agree, lack of confirmation that this is a planned and intended usage of next is one of the reasons I've been hesitant to recommend it. All of our backends are java, and no one on my projects want to change that. We don't want to risk adopting a framework that will deprecate client side only usage.
It absolutely does fetch because it has rendered. The route changes (or user clicks, whatever), a new component renders and it fetches the first time it renders. This is not a technicality, which is why the thing is called useEffect.

It does not fetch without rendering, once.
At this point ChatGPT is blowing our human ability to use language so far out of the water on so many levels, I'd argue we should start putting quotes around our human ability to "understand" language. GPT-4 has already eclipsed us when it comes to language
People have noticed.

It's a bit ironic that it's NPR calling out Rolling Stone. NPR willingly suppressed damaging news about political families just before an election.
What a terrible analogy. If you want to make it analogous to what I'm saying, then your third line would have to be true, and that doesn't make sense for the example you chose.
I think this is a terrible take. It is so intensely important that one can admit they were wrong when new information comes to light.
Apple will never have their tech run locally for AI anymore than they allow Siri to search the internet offline or while driving. Apple will only build the client as an html wrapping or inside an app but it will always run on apple servers
Have you ever written such software?
First Time Founder Fuck Ups – Perspective
LLaMA already runs on M2 and is comparable to gpt 3
FYI on a slightly older (but likely "still fast") laptop using a 6700hq on chrome & windows 10 (latest updates, latest drivers) I scribbled for a second on an otherwise blank "medium" map with the free draw tool, and the entire viewport went blank and fans ramped up to 100%.

A cool idea, but I'm still not really sold on apparently heavyweight apps in-browser as they seem to end up with a lot of similar issues.
Not related to the buyback but more generally to Readlang, how did you select the pricing?

I've noticed a sort of bimodal distribution of prices in language companies with the sleek/modern looking ones centering around 5$/month, and more traditional companies going for 20$/month for seemingly the same service (so the latter not presented as a luxury alternative to the former). Wondering if you did any A/B testing or generally what your methodology was if you don't mind sharing.
Not impossible that the gap will be bridged in the other direction, by GPT-N or a cousin requiring much less VRAM ....
I never said anything about the user only paying a fixed cost
They under estimate chip makers plans to embed AI in silicon.

Chips intended for launch in 5-6 years are in planning stages right now. Apple, nVidia, and Intel could bring serious hurt to software companies in the next 5-10.

Open source purists will weep but really most people do not care, and tech should not merely serve the dedicated.
Yeah, I stopped reading at "by far, the biggest problem with protobuffers is their terrible type-system" for similar reasons. What did the author want, ASN.1? Cause that gives you a full type system, except that's not what I want.

Edit: kentonv's rebuttal says this too. "This article appears to be written by a programming language design theorist who, unfortunately, does not understand (or, perhaps, does not value) practical software engineering." And when my angry hat is on, this is also how I would generalize programming language design theorists.
> Do you want an exact date and time? I'm sure it happens multiple times a day even.

You should read "when in human history" in larger time scales than minutes, hours, and days. Furthermore, you should read it not as binary (no progress or all progress), but the general arc is technological progression.
Adams County is in the US, and I don't see much wrong with referring to a sheriff's office as "police". Of course, I don't know what audience the headline writer had in mind. "Ohio" might suggest a state agency, and "Adams County" would lead to confusion, since there are several.
That doesn’t make them any less true? I think you’re confusing selection bias with the fact that something happened.

Say a news outlet says “X happened and it’s bad”. Another news outlet says “X happened and it’s good.” Both have their respective slant. Fine. But BOTH say X happened. Stuff that’s not newsworthy doesn’t go into news. You can’t just dismiss facts with prejudice as in “Don’t look up”.
Alternatively

https://old.reddit.com/r/all/.compact

But what about pagination
TF2 hats were a dumb cash grab, but at least they were purely cosmetic. The orange box (TF2 + HL2 + Portal) was such a fantastic deal at the time, 3 AAA games for the price of one.
I don't know. You could ask him. Look up @rabite. The dude is exiled from the banking system so I doubt he'd be too eager to give up his properties in Ukraine.
I think that your first few points are fair, but I was a little confused about #4.

I had never heard of this, and it seemed important, some cursory research turned up many twitter posts from individuals amplifying your version of events.

I also found a write up on the situation from TechDirt[0]. The article is fairly good and well sourced, but it paints a substantially different picture than what you describe.

[0]https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/extraordinarily-confused...
Which has nothing to do with what they OP was talking about, but nice derail.
Yeah the parent comment kinda reads like "optimizing matrix multiplication isn't hard if someone abstracts away all the hard parts for me"
Some did but never made it back to tell about it (cue scary music)
I included Tianjin because it has significant autonomy and ability to gain funds thanks to being a Provincial Level city. Not having to deal with the overhead of provincial politics helps! Imo Guangzhou and Shenzhen are anomalies due to how closely integrated Guangdong has been to HK (and thus able to get much more FDI and build a stronger economy than Nanjing for example).

Generally speaking, the median Thai person does tend to have a better life than the median Chinese person, simply because poverty eradication has been a pretty significant plank of both the Junta and the elected politicans, plus the massive amount of FDI coming in from SK+Japan after the whole 2013-2017 trade war.

But then again, comparing a Billion+ country that gives significant administrative autonomy to provinces with a unitary country with a population comparable of Zhejiang might be unfair. At least on a developmental and economic level, Thailand would be comparable to Jiangsu or Zhejiang.
The UK is a heavily binge drinking and alcoholic country: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151102-why-do-the-briti...

> I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early 20s. Why us?

> Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes steadier during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again.

> Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine – each year.
Seems like someone built a Slackbot that lets you deploy DevOps code from Slack.

"Hey everyone,
We built this Slackbot on top of ChatGPT. Today, DevOps knowledge is fragmented across your team chats, wiki docs and outdated shell scripts. That's why we built PromptOps - to manage and troubleshoot your DevOps infrastructure, right within Slack.

Try it out in the public Slack playground (no downloads required) : https://join.slack.com/t/promptops/shared_invite/zt-1rl40rt9...
We'd love to hear your feedback!"

Thoughts?

What do you think?
> It could be that working in the store for a day is a good way to get candid and unfiltered input from those workers and managers.

Yeah, nah.

Can you imagine any low level AppleStore worker giving Steve Jobs "candid and unfiltered input"???

If that's what you're after, you don't send in a very public top-of-the-org-chart face. At least not in any place with at-will (or right-to-work, whichever it is?) employment laws, where they could fire you on the spot for no reason at all. (Most likely not the CEO doing the firing, but the workers direct or one up or regional manager - who'd just been shown up as worthy of "candid and unfiltered input")
my point was more around how you need apple fitness + subscription to do relatively trivial things like show your health metrics on a TV (which you also need an apple TV for).
This is an older paper, but DeepMind alleges in their Chinchilla paper that far better performance can be extracted with fewer parameters; quote

"We find that current large language models are significantly under-trained, a consequence of the recent focus on scaling language models whilst keeping the amount of training data constant."

It's difficult to evaluate a LLM's performance as it's all qualitative, but Meta's LLaMA has been doing quite well, at even 13B parameters.
ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!

But not the other way around rite Steve!
How to type-check JavaScript with the function x()
> Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings

Competition, ambition?

(I love Le Guin's work, FWIW)
Certain Siri features (and other AI features like photo subject identification) already run locally.
You can already run stuff like it on mobiles, for example alpaca.cpp with Llama models run fine on the CPU on any device that has a few gigs of RAM. Getting to even larger models using weight quantization, distilling etc it's not 5 years, it's 5 weeks or maybe 5 months at most..

Btw transformers are really simple and the optimisations making them run fast on CPUs have come a long way. I don't know the M1/M2 benchmarks for this, but many CPUs for edge devices have NN accelerators on the silicon that can run this, it's the pairing of the accelerator and gigs of RAM that is the key.
Thanks, that's correct. I bet most lawyers who handled important 1A cases wanted their clients to rot in hell.
Did you find the salary trade off worth it though? PHP devs earn much less than others
It's my understanding the the performance difference is very small between the M1 and M2. So small that Apple is still selling new M1 Macs today.

The M2 added more GPU cores and an advanced media decoder.
Not enough Rust in it?
Siri was supposed to become locally processed but sometimes can’t even set a timer because of a connection time-out. Or she’ll use her fancy ML speech recognition model to turn “set a timer for 3 minutes 10 seconds” into “search for trinity tensor”.

So much for an “unfathomable moat”.
> Nobody has ever successfully launched a rocket to orbit on their first try

This is just false. See Orbital Sciences Pegasus first flight, right off the top of my head. There are others.
Olympian and national record-holder on his reasons for cheating
*Satoshi Nakamoto enters the chat*
The predator class sure want crypto to die, don't they?
This _might_ not be Amazon.

But it sure as hell sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would have happened at Amazon.

(And, as a plot twist, those same engineers went back to their coding jobs earning 8 or 10 times what the fulfilment staff make, and started on a project using machine vision to algorithmically detect "rote task violations" and have the computer fire people for them...)
Yes. About the least-skilled position in retail is working the POS. Even with a touch screen, it takes practice. It makes a big difference if the operator knows where all the buttons are as opposed to having to hunt and peck. Yes, the machine tells you how much change to make, but picking up the right number of coins by touch instead of by picking up a bunch of them and counting them out into the other hand, that makes a difference. Picking up single bills out of the cash tray without fumbling takes some touch. Knowing all the sizes (short, tall, grande, venti, trenta?) and all the drinks. If you are at a store where they don't print drink labels, you have to know the order in which to announce a drink (size, modifiers, drink-type, but make sure the modifiers are in the right order) and the shorthand for the sharpie markup of the cups.

There's skills you need. None of it is that hard. But it is not easy to do it at speed without practice.
And when it finds zero day kits to backdoor various financial institutions will it ensure it's continued funding?
Alpaca already works in just 4GB of RAM. This stuff is moving incredibly fast.
Anyone who wants a great single-volume reference for this kind of thing should check out The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology by Rossell Hope Robbins. Extraordinary collection.

You can browse a copy here:
https://archive.org/details/the-encyclopedia-of-witchcraft-a...
For me worst part is just like in article that I have to explain to people first and only then I can start.
Thanks very much for the thoughts. Do not believe to have heard of ILT before and found the visual, among other things, to be insightful; great website as well.
Why compare it? It's not like it's needed in the first place.

It's like asking "Tumor is bad compared to what?"
it was
> Tomatoes didn't even exist at all in Italy until the "Columbian Exchange" in the 15th/16th Century.

The same holds true across the Pacific:

> Chili peppers spread to Asia through their introduction by Portuguese traders, who—aware of their trade value and resemblance to the spiciness of black pepper—promoted their commerce in the Asian spice trade routes.[10][14][15] They were introduced in India by the Portuguese towards the end of the 16th century.[16] In 21st-century Asian cuisine, chili peppers are commonly used across many regions.[17][18]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A...

All the 'traditionally' hot dishes of India and Thailand that have chili peppers are post-1492. I think that after a few hundred years it's okay to call the cuisine 'traditional'.

See Mann's book for some more on this:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
I used to have much the same view as the author. My view changed after reading what Christian theologians and philosophers actually wrote on the topic, as opposed to what I had just kind of figured they must have written.

When I read Aquinas on the soul, I realized:

- Aquinas means something quite different by "soul" than I had assumed.

- According to Aquinas's definition, I already believed in souls. (If you think that there's an important ontological difference between a turtle and turtle puree in a blender, you believe in Aquinas's souls.)

- Aquinas claims that rational souls are immortal because they can know and participate in a realm of eternal truths, so there must be some part of the soul that is already there, and hence eternal.

- Take that argument or leave it, but it is no more or less wacky than any other mainstream position in the philosophy of mathematics, where there are many problems for which there are simply no non-wacky possible solutions.

Correct or not, I found Aquinas's position surprisingly down-to-earth and was disappointed not to see it discussed.
Solution 1: You can give a classname to your component and prefix every CSS rule with this classname. e.g. <CustomSelect>, which translates to <div className="custom-select">, which you can style by prefixing every rule with .custom-select. You put that in the index.css inside your folder CustomSelect to be easily editable when you need it.

Solution 2: Otherwise you could try to use CSS modules (Vite supports them out-of-the-box I think).

Solution 3: Otherwise you could try one of the many "CSS-in-JS" libraries like styled-components.

Personally I'm using the solution 1, did for more than a decade, works fine, scales well, nothing to install and learn, just old straightforward CSS.
> I know what some may be thinking

Switch to vi? :)
Bard launched in the UK too
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
"SEC investigations are civil, not criminal. The SEC can charge individuals and entities for violating the federal securities laws and seek remedies such as monetary penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, injunctions, and restrictions on an individual’s ability to work in the securities industry or to serve as an officer or director of a public company, but the SEC cannot put people in jail. Enforcement may refer potential criminal cases to criminal law enforcement authorities for investigation or coordinate SEC investigations with criminal investigations involving the same conduct. If a person is convicted of a criminal violation of the securities laws, a court may sentence that person to serve time in jail."

Source: https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_invest...
> pay someone on TaskRabbit to solve the captcha for it

Why, when you can use any number of automated captcha solving solutions?
> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins.

Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both because the power draw makes them obvious to local grid operators and the immense waste heat makes them obvious to anyone with aerial surveillance imagery. Governments have plenty of funds to spend on ASICs and cruise missiles to hard-fork the network whenever they feel like it.

At least the goldbugs are correct that there's only a finite amount of gold in the Earth's crust. Bitcoin's limits, by comparison, are entirely arbitrary.

(Of course, both of these ignore that fact that inflation is not solely caused by increases to the money supply, so it's unclear what trying to hard-cap the money supply actually achieves.)
Mass phishing attacks. Humans no longer need to study an org's content to try to trick them. AI will generate a large pile of fake emails trying different angles and send them to different employees roughly simultaneously.

Similar for individuals, the human hacker only needs to gain access to their device or data from somewhere else, and the bot mines the content to generate trojan content. The human hacker can step back from the content forging business to focus on technology.

It's like hunting birds with a shotgun versus a rifle.
Thanks for the thoughts, this is nice to hear.