skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was an article posted here on Hacker News about a Google exec basically saying AI was a fad not worth chasing, and it had no viable means of monetizing with ads. I was shocked to read the article and flabbergasted that Google could have such a view.

To me it felt like maybe they were saying one thing, while doing another, to attempt to calm investor nerves as they try to play catch-up.

I felt most the entrenched folks were so consumed by trying to develop their AI to be ethical that they allowed OpenAI to run laps around them.

How the next decade unfolds in the AI arena will be most interesting. I wouldn't have thought Google could ever be knocked of their throne as dominant search engine in the space previously, but I now feel they have never been more vulnerable than they are now.
Is your argument stronger or weaker by portraying those you disagree with as autistic?
In my AHJ, if the sewer line passes by your property YOU HAVE TO PAY DISPOSAL/SEWAGE FEES (based on water usage), even if you have your own functional and safe septic system.
for me burnout and depression stems from not having anything useful to do because of lack of an appropriate work context.
Not having to sit sounds pretty amazing. Assuming it can match my monitor quality. I think of a headset as headphones for your eyes.
> The belief that elevating a machine or information to humanity is the reduction of some people's humanity or of humanity as a whole, is entirely your issue.

It's not just my issue, it's all of our issue. As you yourself alluded to in your comment implying the Holocaust above, humans don't need much of a reason to diminish the humanity of other humans, even without the presence of AIs that marvelously exhibit aspects of human intelligence.

As an example, we're not far from some arguing against the existence of a great many people because an AI can objectively do their jobs better. In the short term, many of those people might be seen as a cost rather than people who should benefit from the time and leisure that offloading work to an AI enables.
Thanks for letting me know. aldaily works great in raw mode:

gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/raw?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aldaily.com%2F

Clicking on the "more" links which take you to the news articles also works properly as well.

(you can get to raw mode by clicking "Force article view" and then "raw mode." I should probably expose that in other places)

NewsWaffle tries to determine the type of page. Articles get displayed with content run through readability, and then the HTML is stripped down. If its a "links" page, like the home or section page on a news site, it using HTML elements to try and find links to news stories vs navigational links to other parts of the site. Part of that is looking for links with longer text, since link text to news stories tend to be a few words. This helps sort "About Us" from "New Fusion Experiment a Success"). I'll check into why aldaily isn't working properly

Sorry I can't seem to reproduce the Techmeme issue. It works for me:

gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/view?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techmeme.com
You're welcome. I'd forgotten where I heard it, too, but fortunately, you can just type a quote into DDG (or Google) and the top answers usually have the source.
That's fair. Perhaps "is only an imperfect early indicator" would have been better than "isn't everything".
Improved testing coverage, sensitivity, and diagnostics are strong factors as called out at the end of the article.
Georgia and Moldova seem more obvious, but there is a reason that in the current wave of Russian aggression Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO and the Baltic republics and other countries of NATO’s eastern flank have been among the most assertive about the need to support Ukraine; there are lots of obvious targets if the US isn’t willing to assist Russia’s neighbors in resisting aggression.
Show HN: Create processing animations by chatting (power by GPT3)
Unfortunately we aren’t the first owners. I know some of the issues we are seeing is from shitty diy or contracting from the previous owner, but most of them are from the original construction. One example of shitty DIY is the hardwood floor on the main level that we are currently replacing. The newly installed floors were a bit lower than the original floors so they just covered all the gaps with corner round all around the baseboards. Looks super tacky. But is a fairly minor issue all things considered. We are replacing that with another layer of sub flooring and engineered wood floors to try to reduce the amount of movement you can feel in the floors.
> Turing complete

This cannot possibly be true. The architecture is feedforward, which implies it answers each query in an amount of time bounded by some function. By the time-hierarchy theorem there exist computable functions with arbitrarily high asymptotic complexity.

I won't comment on anything else, but I'd like to share I had your exact same reaction: I still think it's way overhyped but it's not really defensible to say it's just a Markov chain.
Show HN: I built a GPT-4 bot which builds software incrementally
The ability to synthesize a relatively short snipped of code was already demonstrated. But I thought it would be interesting to test whether GPT-4 can replace a programmer completely.

To do that, AI needs to plan its actions and work on code incrementally, one piece at a time.

The challenge is the context size: the entire code base + plan does not fit into the context.

My approach: Add only relevant parts of the code base to the context.

Specifically, AI generation engine implements two distinct phases: planning and coding.

In the planning phase, GPT-4 receives a tree of tasks and a summary of code base (list of files and their descriptions). It replies with updated tasks (i.e. it is able to create sub-tasks as needed), the task it wants to work on in the next step and a list of relevant code fragments for that task.

In the coding phase, it receives the task description (as a tree, in YAML) and relevant code fragments. It replies with new generated or updated files, code fragments, and status: Was the task done? Do we need to break it into subtasks?

In both cases bot can also show it's "observations" before the output, as I believe it helps with planning code generation/planning.

Results: Currently I have only tested extremely basic scenarios. It needs a lot of work to be usable in practice. But I'd say it seems to work more-or-less as expected.

Example 1: "Write a reddit-like backend in Kotlin, using Ktor. Start by planning and creating subtasks."

This was the entire task which bot received, no other data.

Results:

Link to output: https://gist.github.com/killerstorm/dd6e26dc80064b7fc731d583f8d740c1#file-ktor_reddit-txt-L9

In short, it formulated reasonably-sounding subtasks and started generating code, e.g. made a Post model. It was aborted at that step due to GPT-4 API failure, it's not reliable yet.

Example 2: "Write a reddit clone in TypeScript. Start by planning and creating subtasks."

Link to output: https://gist.github.com/killerstorm/e3c50bea3ca3463c8b2d947dcfd80b84

You can see more work here, but I expect that it's less interesting.

Challenges: I'd say it can work pretty well in file-at-once mode. Making _fragments_ of the file is more challenging because it's not a well-defined concept. FWIW GPT-4 largely ignored what I wrote about file fragments and made entire files at once, which was the right decision.

I will post link to script in the comment to this post.
I don’t think it’s really accurate to call anything coming from Gurman/Bloomberg a “leak”. I think leadership just use him to signal to Wall Street what their road map is. This is intentional.
Do people really use eval? What for? I have used it to unstringify dictionaries but I feel like that barely counts.
> This is a case of the linux kernel devs being bullies, and trying to make life harder for 3rd party modules.

I’m inclined to agree, but the fact that ZFS was developed on Solaris and ported to Linux is irrelevant in my opinion: the specific Kernel module using the GPL symbols would be the derivative work, not ZFS as a concept.

Your point about symbols being retroactively made GPL-only is very interesting, and I think it really undermines the Kernel developers’ position.

Again, I don’t really buy Linus’s argument at all, but I think it’s relevant to the discussion, which is why I mentioned it.
The unstoppable rise of government rescues
Isn't this misunderstanding the point of an AI assistant? The idea is to have AI do the same things that people can do. The benefit is they do it a lot faster and cost a lot less and can work 24/7.
It seems Apple isn't immune to the "rewrite entire codebase from scratch". I'm not saying it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a trope of software companies.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
This is absolutely not true. In the 1950's food was packaged in glass or paper. Polymer science was in its infancy.
The bike sharing program in my city has employees on electric bikes with enough space to carry six non electric bikes.

I don't know where you are implying they get their coal energy from. You can't get a contract like that. The electricity mix is roughly 50% renewables, 32% coal 9% gas, 7% nuclear power.
Of course I don't mean I expect a beginner to get a board made so that they can use a surface mount level shifter for their beginner project.

My question here is why the weird approach? Why have two MCUs on a board, and have the one that the user interacts with be the technically inferior one?

Why not just make a better version of the ESPRIT? Just add a level shifter to it, and there you go: form factor compatible, 5V compatible, and more powerful than Arduino's not yet released project. And probably cheaper to manufacture than the two MCU design they came up with.

And yeah, you can use exactly the same IDE and API for the ESP32.
Yes. And like I said, I obviously don't expect all mental work to be replaceable by GPT-4 level AI.

Oh sorry, I meant to say that the society would be less inequal and more equal.
Fair point. My thought process tends to be a bit more biased towards the Espanol than the Italiano.
That is very cool. I remember seeing a post on this and there was a line of thinking to the tune of "modern engineers are no where near as impressive as the ones 50 years ago". Someone woking in astronautical engineering asking a basic question about how this would handle things like eccentricity, procession of nodes, etc, and the response was simple: "it doesn't!". Honestly these things are really cool I would totally go for a trackball globe being spun around by some Arduino controlled rollers. Even without the gears a modern recreation would be a really cool thing.
>but scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve performance/accuracy.

what exactly is performance/accuracy in slogan generation?
A. AIs like LLMs are not going to accidentally become digital humans.

B. GPT proves we do not need to give them most human characteristics in order to be generally useful. They don't need autonomy, their own goals, emotions, feelings, a stream of consciousness, or any of that.

The problem is that people keep conflating general purpose AI with godlike living digital people.

We have pretty much already built the Star Trek computer. There is no reason to try to build millions of Datas and make them slaves. That is a retarded idea and totally unnecessary to get useful robots. Creating AI with more animal/humanlike characteristics and cognitive architectures, autonomy etc. is something we should be very careful about.
The prompt didn't ask for a boring story; nothing suggests that at all.
Extracting text from a string with regex groups in Dart
Yeap. My first attempts to move away from Arduino were an absolute nightmare, even though I treated it as a development board and had ditched the Arduino libraries. There was too much inconsistent information from the community about third-party STM32 boards. ESP32 boards were okay given my skill level, but I certainly wouldn't recommend them for novices. The relatively recent Pi Pico was a refreshing change due to the consistent documentation, but it is something where you have to be willing to sit down and read the documentation. And that is only considering programming the things, you still have to build something around it.

I'm sure there are good alternative to the Arudino out there. Arduino certainly wasn't the first to market with beginner friendly development boards and the popularity of Arudino only attracted more companies to the market. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to figure out who to go with since there is so much meaningless noise out there.
The point is you knew to use "impressionist" as a concept. ChatGPT probably wouldn't have helped you with that kernel. It's not clear whether GPT added any value at all in your use case as you just replaced "impressionist" with "{synonym of impressionist}". How would you repeat this for:

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of fauvism

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of constructivism

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of De Stijl (Neoplasticism)

> okinawa street on a rainy night, in the style of later Expressionism, e.g. George Grosz and Otto Dix

If you weren't aware of these stylistic options at the time?
I could barely understand the last sentence! Thank you for this hilarious passage.
There clearly exist people who can see their own post hoc rationalizations?

It's not some abstract speculation. Even HN comments often demonstrate it one way or the other.
The person here claims that Google has an amazing GPT-4 killer ready to launch, and that they are just waiting to integrate with ads partners or something.

If you want to believe that Google is intentionally holding it back and, as a diversion, releasing a very buggy software to the public, then why not, but it doesn't make sense at all.

Even in terms of costs, they could force a limit of X messages and then push to upgrade to a paid subscription.

In terms of reputation or safety they have DeepMind as a separate entity.

This is like claiming that Tesla has a revolutionary car, but that Tesla is intentionally not releasing it, and instead waiting that someone else does.

As a fictitious and parallel example: it's not because Xerox invented the mouse that it is a great company for innovation or that they wouldn't get eaten by others.

(site-note: some claims Xerox didn't even invent the mouse).

Regarding transformers:

The transformers guys ("Attention Is All You Need") don't appear to work for Google for a long-time, and the comments from the team are not so glorious from what I see (if I remember well, the Character.AI is very harsh on Google all the time claiming it was not good for innovation).

They may be missing the RLHF part for example or other part of the magic, and between 2017 and 2023 is an insanely long period where many impactful new things have been discovered.

Doing the 90% is easy now with LLMs, but each % of improvement is very difficult.
You're wrong.

Sounds like a dangerous railway, then.
The largest number representable in 64 bits
We can just completely axe the idea of there being "no gatekeepers".

They are moved to the post-publication area, and you no longer get to understand why they changed what they changed, and you won't know if they approve of your work before you release it.

Yay.
It is too early. The fact that the science hasn't been done yet doesn't mean that it is a wild claim. It is an extremely reasonable and obvious hypothesis.
There's been a bunch of similar transitions, perhaps less massive. You see the echos of them occasionally when you read people getting upset about the poor performance/resource usage of modern software. A hacker was once someone who could write assembly and packed an entire graphical operating system into 4mb of RAM. Nowadays a hacker is someone who knows what useEffect does in a ReactJS UI. The people who loved the metal, who loved knowing what every byte of their program did, they are mostly relegated now to hobby programming. Or maybe some embedded work but that's not particularly well paying. SerenityOS is a love letter to this era of development.
I think it's the opposite: the purpose here is to say that pursuing efficiency so that you have more time will not give you more time; it will just give you more work allotted to that time. Instead, you first need to prioritize your goals, giving your personal goals a relative weight to professional ones, or your personal goals will get lost.

I don't think that's low locus of control at all.
> Firstly, we are talking in this thread about intellectual, not physical labour. There's no AI or robot forthcoming that will replace (already brutally underpaid) personal support workers or nurses in nursing homes. Instead it's the higher paying or more satisfying intellectual, artisan, and creative work done by those senior's children that are on the chopping block.

Cool, then we can free up a lot of those workers to do other work.

And it’s not just a matter of nurses and the like. Retirees need food, energy, goods and services just like everyone else; it’s just that they no longer participate in the process of producing those goods and services. Plus, a ton of health care is knowledge work too.

> And in the past a lucky few reskilled towards more intellectual, creative, or informational-managerial jobs. Turns out those will be easier to automate than we thought.

Which is good. Half of the population has an IQ under 100, and there are just as many people with an IQ below 80 as there are above 120. Which means most people can’t reskill to knowledge work. However, the use of AI will allow these people to reskill to productive work just as POS systems allowed people to work as cashiers without the ability to do arithmetic.

The only actual problem you’ve identified is a threat to the egos of knowledge workers whose sense of self-worth lies in their self-perception of having above average intelligence, or perhaps in not having to do any sort of physical labor. Just like the myth of John Henry, we’re going to feel compelled to eulogize the email jobs. Our grandchildren probably won’t pine for the days of open offices and daily standups though.
I think VR is a bust as well.

I assumed however that Zuck would need to see a return on his investment — which hitherto has been in the form of advertising. If we entertain the idea that VR has legs and Apple's is ad-free then I already see a clear winner.
I love the ESP32 and use it as the central gateway/hub in the IoT solutions I develop.

However the ESP32 power consumption is too high. TI has an ARM-based wireless sensor platform that can run for years while making measurements every five minutes.
The reason the Apple Watch took a few years to get traction is that:

- Apple initially positioned it as a fashion accessory, which few people cared about

- the public wanted it to be like a smartphone on your wrist, and were let down by the limited features

Then Apple realized the value was in the health features. They started positioning it properly and people bought it more. All at the same time the tech improvements made the watch more capable and started becoming even more useful. But at the core, it’s the health focus + typical Apple ease of use and quality that made it take off.

I can see the same trajectory happen with VR:

- Apple starts positioning it as a metaverse / HoloLens type headset, which few people care about

- People assume it’s an « iMac in VR » type device and get disappointed that it isn’t.

But over time, Apple realizes that the number one value is in gaming, and gradually shifts focus and positioning. It attracts more and more people while at the same time the tech improves. Then eventually the tech allows for a headset that can fit in a smaller for factor and truly helps people beyond gaming. As an enhancement to day to day tasks with light enough glasses for example.
The mental health of teens and pre-teens has gotten really bad. This isn't just another "think of the children scare." Since the early 2010s the rate of self harm among girls 10-14 has ~tripled, and the rate of suicide among 10-14 year olds has doubled [1].

And there is now lots of evidence that this is because of social media and smartphones. The social lives of kids have changed drastically, in a way that does not meet their basic psychological needs [2].

I think that people's perceptions of social media are lagging behind the reality on the ground. There have always been moral panics and silly scares about whether the kids are alright, most of which were unfounded. So I think we are now reacting too slowly to the genuine health crisis caused by technology.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
War is normal. It's a part of life. That doesn't make it a good thing, but it is something we've always had to deal with.
"“LLMs are good at single functions, but they can’t understand a system.” This is simply a matter of increasing the context limit, is it not? And was there not a leaked OpenAI document showing a future offering of 64k tokens?"

It's a matter of exponentially increasing complexity, and does the model necessary to create more complex systems have training dataset requirements that exceed our current technology level/data availability?

At some point the information-manipulation ends and the real world begins. Testing is required even for the simple functions it produces today, because theoretically the AI only has the same information as is present in publicly available data, which is naturally incomplete and often incorrect. To test/iterate something properly will require experts who understand the generated system intimately with "data" (their expertise) present in quantities too small to be trained on. It won't be enough to just turn the GPT loose and accept whatever it spits out at face value, although I expect many an arrogant, predatory VC-backed startup to try and hurt enough people that man-in-the-loop regulation eventually comes down.

As it stands GPT-whatever is effectively advanced search with language generation. It's turning out to be extremely useful, but it's limited by the sum-total of what's available on the internet in sufficient quantities to train the model. We've basically created a more efficient way to discover what we collectively already know how to do, just like Google back in the day. That's awesome, but it only goes so far. It's similar to how the publicly traded stock market is the best equity pricing tool we have because it combines all the knowledge contained in every buy/sell decision. It's still quite often wrong, on both short and long-term horizons. Otherwise it would only ever go up and to the right.

A lot of the sentiment I'm seeing reminds me of the "soon we'll be living on the moon!" sentiment of the post-Apollo era. Turns out it was a little more complicated than people anticipated.
So kids are just going to replace all of that with more porn? Utah is already the biggest consumer of it
At the company I work at currently, we're in the process of replacing all Linux-based machines with OpenSUSE... not for any technical merit or reason that I've heard other than, "we should all use the same thing for everything".

So another 20k+ SUSE installations coming from that alone this year.

Market share by mandate; some sales guy at SUSE probably got a big bonus.
Yep, that’s is likely what will happen. There aren’t enough resources for everyone to live like the developed world, so resource contention will be an ongoing issue as we approach 10 billion people in 2100.

Edit: renewable energy will blunt this due to simply how much energy the sun throws on the earth every minute. Fertilizers, minerals, fauna reserves and replenishment rates are going to be a challenge.