skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I chose them because I know my audience.

HN members on average hold views on these topics that are more apt to view as socially constructed than other topics. By focusing on these topics, we can explore why they might be socially constructed and why those reasons are necessary and sufficient. Once establishing that, we can examine IQ to see if they apply as well.

Don't mistake me bringing them up as an endorsement or critique of them in and of themselves. Besides, bringing up global warning, the holocaust, and gender dysphoria will inevitably attract follow-ons who want to debate the validity of those topics.

I'm not here to do that. What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example. If you want to switch to a different set, by all means, go ahead and choose them instead. I personally think it will be a less productive discussion, but I'm willing to play along.
Thanks! Your saying "Being male, he has absolutely zero reference point for what it's like to be female" made me think.

That said, I disagree :-)

I'm male -- both in chromosomes and in thought -- but I know that (generally) being a woman involves wearing skirts, makeup, and in general softer, more elaborate clothes; paying more attention to grooming a certain way; maybe wearing makeup, at least a little; being deferred to in lesser matters like who goes first through a door, but expected to defer in more serious matters like where to go and how to get there. I don't have to experience any of the above to envision what they feel like, or to know whether I would be more comfortable experiencing them one way or the other.

Calling these things "stereotypes" is a silly minification of them. If they are just stereotypes, then women should be able to discard them whenever they wish, but that is far from the case when it comes to negotiating, advancing, getting their way, etc., etc.

"And if you look on the trans forums where these males discuss this, you can see it's all about performing stereotypes of femininity." You've done extensive research? :-) And again, "stereotypes" is dismissive.

Your last paragraph is an unjustified panic, but I'll at least reply to say that if I were to be concerned about someone in the bathroom, it would be concern for someone who presents as a woman, but is forced to use the men's room because beneath their poodle skirt they happen to have a penis.
Show HN: Kysely, a type-safe SQL query builder for TypeScript
If they could now implement table resizing and tables that do not render with graphical errors, that would be so nice.
I mostly agree, but if it's a technology I've never worked with and I'm asked to do something I've never done before, I'm not an expert. That doesn't stop them asking for estimates, which turn into deadlines.
I'd be curious to know which aircraft were actually better than their US contemporaries and by which criteria they'd be judged better.

The Mig-25 seems like a good example of a Soviet aircraft considered better than its US contemporaries, at the time. Misunderstanding and misinformation let the US to think they were far, far behind the Soviet Union. Viktor Belenko cleared that up! It was a plane good at just one thing, with downsides that would never let it through a (non-CIA-directed) US procurement process. On the plus side, competition, fear, and rivalry, drove the US to some amazing research, engineering, and innovation.

As a child at a local military airshow, the F-15 was awesome, dangerously beautiful. Shamed even the X-wings and Tie fighters I'd just seen on the big screen. Many years later, I had a similar feeling watching an Su-27 at Farnborough; Sukhoi captured some aesthetic that Mikoyan-Gurevich never seemed to get right, and did it better than any western contemporary.
"Intelligence Misattribution"

right in the title.

either it's clearly a gradient/spectrum, or this article isn't making the solid argument it might seem to be.
Xi never called me racist.. as a Navy veteran I know which side I will be on in this war.. xi never called me racist
Can you do it? Provide an estimate that's accurate and stick to it with the routinized scheduling of a blue collar job?

It's not an apples to oranges comparison. You give me an architect's blueprint and guys who build to the legal building code, and I could probably get a house built. Expensive and painfully, but it can be done.

I don't even know what the coding analog to an architect's blueprint is. They are fundamentally different jobs.
It doesn't have to be anonymous to be censorship resistant or useful in those environments. It takes more work, sure, but it's not a must-have property of the system in order to be resistant to censorship.
I host a bunch of stuff for friends completely free with the expectation that if there is an outage I'll do my best, on my own schedule to fix it. If I plan on sunsetting something I'll let them know a bit of time in advance, and that they're responsible for backing up the data they can't afford to lose.

So far everyone is happy with that arrangement, and I don't mind sharing the extra resources I have with people I care for.
yeah it is, gpt3 scored in the 80th percentile for the bar, gpt4 scored top 20 percentile and is much better at math, plus having 4x the context alone gives it much more power.

it's just it's different in capabilities. chatgpt delivers different results and both have unique characteristics.

gpt4 being able to not only create images but also decipher what's in then is another huge advancement.

Gen2 another ai can create amazing videos from a text prompt. Any director or film maker wannabe with more prowess on creating the story than filming it, can now just use ai to create the film from their vision.

even more exciting is the speed that things are progressing. it was supposed to take 8 years to get chatGPT quality training down to 400k price instead of millions. Stanford did it in 6 weeks with llama and alpaca. it can run for under 600 or slower on home PCs.
It's funny in a sad way how nearly every modern app seems to adhere to these guidelines

http://toastytech.com/guis/uirant.html
I suppose you'd have told Ms Parks to shut up and get off the bus if avoiding crime is all that's good for society?
Chemistry's visual origins (2010)
I loved your post about the pelican! https://simonwillison.net/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/
Nice write-up! Incidentally I ran all the exercises through ChatGPT which seems to have completely crushed them, with work shown. Forget about assigning grades via math homework, it only took a few minutes (though I should go through and check it by hand I think). [edit looking at the answers in more detail it seems to go down some strange rabbit holes that probably were not what the author intended]

Also, if one wanted to extend this article a little, ask it about the role quadratic equations with complex roots played Gauss's derivation of the fundamental theorem of algebra. Here's the core of the output:

> "Suppose we have a quadratic equation with complex roots. The roots of the equation are given by the formula:

x = (-b ± sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a

> "If b^2 - 4ac is negative, then the roots of the equation are complex numbers. Gauss recognized that the complex roots of a quadratic equation come in conjugate pairs. That is, if one root is a + bi, then the other root is a - bi, where a and b are real numbers."

> "Gauss used this fact to show that any polynomial equation with complex coefficients can be factored into linear factors with complex roots. He did this by taking pairs of complex conjugate roots and combining them into quadratic factors. Then he repeated this process until all the roots had been combined into linear factors."

Numberphile has a video on this and the rest of Gauss's proof:

https://youtu.be/shEk8sz1oOw
That article is about adults being uncomfortable with both fractions and percentages. Considering “20%” just means “20 in 100,” I doubt “1 in 5” is going to be much more comfortable for these adults.
Thanks, I think she has a potential to become a great developer, unless we all aren't replaced by that chatGPT thing everyone's talking about.

Regarding teaching, I understood early that while I can program, I have very little understanding on how to teach it. So first, she underwent two Python courses (basic and advanced) on stepik.org [0], which had automated tests and have her an understanding of the language.

Then, I planned to start throwing tasks of increasing complexity at her until she solves them, giving her a more or less complete coverage of all things programming. So far, she has written such things as

- Tetris, in the console, with keyboard input

- Snake game, with competing snakes which use wave algorithm to find path

- LZW algorithm to learn bits and compression and other things

Next my plan for her follows roughly this path:

- some GUI programming, using GTK and Windows Forms. Calculator or maybe Checkers or something.

- some web programming, backend and frontend. Most likely Django / jQuery

- maybe some neural networks since are all so hot now

- some hardcore assembler stuff, like maybe some simple game or visual demo

- some mobile development, Android or iOS

Once she'll be done with all that, I think she'll have quite a clear picture of most general areas of development and will be free to pursue the area she liked the most.

[0]: https://stepik.org
>FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have any financial or personal stake in crypto so I don't have any issue criticizing it and I am pretty pessimistic about it at this point. But the irrational hatred and dismissal of crypto sometimes bothers me more than the irrational optimism.

I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. To run a cryptocurrency you still need a functioning power grid, datacenters, internet, and chip manufacturing/importing, all of which depend on a pre-existing political system and economy. I find it implausible that we will migrate all of these systems to run 100% on crypto with the current state of the technology. You could argue that it's feasible with some hypothetical much-better-bitcoin, but that's just speculation at this point and not something I would want to stake the future of whole societies on.
Laid off: Reflections and Lessons learned
> Suddenly the goalposts moved so that it has to have happened "totally" and "thus far" to qualify as taking their jobs?

I was asking a question. I don't think anyone can confidently quantify the effects of AI at this point so I was seeing if I was missing something. What I said is just some word vomit about what I'm seeing on the ground as an engineer. I'm happy to accept a refutation as we gather more concrete data. The reason I asked the question the way I did is because as I stated there is no doubt AI will impact our jobs, but I'm understandably more concerned about less jobs because of AI. I also have the experience of writing a lot of automation, and hearing this same style of rhetoric when we started doing that heavily. For all the scare around automation, it did end fact end up creating more jobs and typically made lives easier.

Jumping to "shifting goalposts" over that is pretty trash conversation.
>Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society

I wonder what kind of society Nvidia wants? Crypto (some of it) offers a freedom to buy and spend that is not corporately regulated. Some crypto brings huge investment in energy production; Green where the society structures it to be, not green where the society structures it not to be.

Did they think gaming brought more value to society?

Its nice that AI will 'reinvent nearly every industry', but i suspect it will just become another focusing tool to focus more wealth onto the very wealthy.
Or, all that happened was the guns in use went from being standard and traceable to being obscure and untraceable. You don't automatically get to decide who is sane and who is not based on your religious beliefs.
> unlike what I am seeing in AI and deep neural networks for decades which that still has not changed with the way on how models continue to get larger and require more planet incinerating power and will currently require millions and in the future, billions. As long as they stay inefficient, Nvidia will continue smiling knowing that.

What are you talking about? The inaccessibility of the models and the heavy gatekeeping by the big players is leading to more and more open source models that can run on an average gaming GPU or a Mac M1. It seems like every day on HN there is another post on another super-optimized version of something that was once only accessible to those with huge server farms or cloud budgets. You're seeing announcements like Stanford's Alpaca that specifically mention how it can run on low-budget commodity hardware or a few hundred dollars in the cloud.

I'd say efficiency and optimization is one of the hottest areas in large language models right now, although the motivation is less for climate reasons and more for 'I want to do this on my own hardware and have no safety censors' reasons.
I don't think the new siri is intrinsicly tied to the device. I think that as part of remaking siri, they're using the new platform as a rallying cry and story as to why it's important. (it's hard to justify features such as making siri spatially aware otherwise)
> Worth noting that while China has a larger navy in terms of number of ships, the US Navy is larger in terms of tonnage, and most critically has more aircraft carrier task forces.

China needs carriers if it is going to fight the US over, say, Puerto Rico.

It doesn’t need them to fight the US over Taiwan. Mainland China (well, the parts close to Taiwan, at any rate) is one big, unsinkable, aircraft carrier for that war.

OTOH, they do need amphibious assault ships, but they have lots of them (slightly fewer than the US does.)
Nah. The people I’m thinking of are fucking magicians.

If they are hiding their true skill then OMFG.
You're saying we've been calling it "Software Development" in error, and it should really be called "Software Production"?
It seems like ASR is interpolating the words since at 1:04 it sure does sound to me like Georgi says "yeah, not sure how to feel about this" but it is transcribed as "Yeah, I'm not sure how to feel about this". It also seems to be doing "um" and "uh" suppression, which I can see how that's valuable in some circumstances but "do what I meant" rarely ends well in my experience
I work as a data engineer for a Defense company. It's not always stable but depends on the contract you can get on, some have a pretty broad scope and arent going anywhere, others are small projects with less stable funding.

Most of what I work with is Databricks, Python, Pyspark, etc. So most coding is done in notebooks. I haven't felt that there was a lot of restrictions coding wise, but getting access to different databases, clusters, and especially on boarding can be a pain.

Environment wise its been pretty good, you find even the clients are often contractors themselves, but if you dislike them you can always roll off and onto another project, it seems everyone needs more devs
Think 50 LLMs with different personalities and focus points talking to each other, mixed with stuff like Wolfram. You can instruct them to “invoke” tools. An outside system parses their “tool use” and injects results. You can get quite crazy with this.

LLMs are just the part of a much larger looping system that can do these things you speak of. Be active and seek out stuff. Of course, it’s all illusory, but I’m sorry I think it’s no different with myself.

By the way, it actually gives ok reviews on novel code, so I’m not sure what you mean. At some point nothing is truly novel, even innovation is composing existing “patterns” (at whatever abstraction level).
Maybe something System76 can do, create an arm based system for Linux ( and of course BSDs)
We don't really need a whole entire OS to run doom.. I want to see a port where Doom IS the OS :P
I have no intention of defending the article's thesis, but I think your comparison of these language models to a calculator stops just when it is getting interesting.

Sure, it is unsurprising that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language, but what I find surprising about it is that this alone quite often results in responses that could pass as human-generated.

When I write something, it does not feel as if I am just picking the next word to follow what I have written so far. Instead, it feels like I am working on several different but hierarchically-related goals simultaneously, with next-word choice being the least demanding. It seems implausible that probabilities derived from a large corpus of unrelated text, and, furthermore, by a process that does not understand language, would be useful in achieving my particular goals.

Maybe I am overrating the abilities of these models, despite not wanting to. Maybe my impressions have been skewed by seeing too many cherry-picked examples. Maybe I am being overly generous in my reading of the models' responses - or maybe my intuitions about how we humans come to say what we do is mistaken. Whatever is behind my surprise, I am confident that the scientific method will lead to explanations.
Pimpl for Small Classes
Turn Short-form video content into tweets or threads
The guy who would have 25-50b worth of BTC “at the top” somehow drifted into the ether. No pun intended.
I have the opportunity to introduce (or re-introduce) quadratics to students fairly regularly, and I'm eager to incorporate this understanding! I've often highlighted the symmetry of the quadratic formula, though usually we get there via completing the square, rather than this translation approach.

I desperately wish students got more practice with function transformations. It's a powerful tool that far too many students leave high school without understanding.
What changes in Bitcoin are you referring to? Or maybe you didn't mean Bitcoin.
Candid question: how do you finance your sabbatical ?

I feel like a lot of people (I'm in there) are dreaming for exactly what your are living right now, but won't EVER be in the position to do it.

I am 36 with about 14 years of software engineering, and I need LOTS_OF_MONEY per month just to finance my mortgage, the school of my children and the basic living expenses that rose about 50% in the last year due to energy and inflation. If my wife and I quit for 3 month, we are out of our saved money and will be losing the house.
Ohh, thank-you for that! Here is an updated search:

site:astralcodexten.substack.com gpt-4

I see an article as recent as 6 days ago:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/half-an-hour-before-da...
> (There may though have still be an Easter egg lying around where the crayons would wear down until Jan 1 when they would be restored to full size.)

Missed opportunity to receive "new" crayons on Christmas Day!
> user-hostile decisions that forced me away from my first love of windows.

So well said. Its been travesty after travesty. "First love of Windows" is what really leapt out at me and triggered some dusty memories:

- finally learning how to spell administrator

- G4 Cubes

- Apache Server-Side Includes

- How good Acer's Desktop over Windows 3.11 was

- Kilrathi

- How delightful it was to customize my Win95 desktop. Picking out icons and sounds for too many hours, my AuDHD antidote to middle school.

- The stunning bunch of people I fell in with who had a particular set of skills. Phreaks and Geeks. In retrospect they all grew up to be some fantastic people, but they felt so edgy at the time.

- All of the sounds of computing, playing over PCM speakers, the drives, the models, the hum of simpler fans. The gawdawful desktop mics.

- Dirty, hairy, smelly Mouse balls

- All of the print media about computing before there were consistently good online publications about tech.

- The first time I ever held a $1200 check with my name on it for helping a small business upgrade their Windows machines.

- The ethereal pull of software catalogs

- The smells of burning/smashing capacitors

- Lego Technics

- Elenco Electronic Playground 130 Circuits - the one with the spring terminals.

Look at me ramble on. It's a milestone day for me and I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm sitting here on a Win 11 boot and I haven't taken the time to virtualize it yet (IOMMU Passthru being as it is..). Its really good. It stays out of the way most of the time, and its new APIs + new gen hardware performs very well together. I've been feeling uneasy about using it the whole time, but certain applications for configuring my hardware required it, and the occasional game demands it. I'm really productive in WSL. I've done all I can to disable telemetry but haven't messed with my network yet to filter and block their outbound requests. In any case, I like the system, I detest how they have made it into a tool of supervision and coercion. I'm having similar concerns with some of their groundbreaking APIs and popular services, and I'm frankly at a loss with how to proceed with either topic.

In any case, thank you for reminding me about how I loved Windows, and a lot of memories surrounding it. Not all of them were related to anti-trust, bluescreens, and dystopian corpgov topics. And thanks for plugging Opensuse, and after a honeymoon with Fedora I'm facing some of the "beta tester" experiences as well, and I have too many demands on my time to volunteer in that way for IBM, nor is it my talent.

I just want a good, just-works system that lets me do anything and demands little in return. For that, I am happy to financially support and get involved.
> What about growing stuff closer to where they are going to be eaten

You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local

Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

Very little food is air-freighted; it accounts for only 0.16% of food miles.

Many of the foods people assume to come by air are actually transported by boat – avocados and almonds are prime examples. Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate ... only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Now tell it to make some paperclips.
Just the ones with changes to later editions not made by the author.
The precise estimaters are doing more than fixing a tire and they are doing it in less than a month. Empirically, these people are often more than average productive.

It helps that I also know how to program. So I know that the task in question is hard and I know that the patch they submitted is the real deal.
Just like everything it depends on what you buy and when you buy and sell it. Post 2017 the largest theoretical gain from bitcoin so far was about 20x, if you bought at the post 2017 low in December of 2018 and sold at the 2021 high almost three years later. Gamestop stock almost matched that 20x for 2020-21 gains alone. Apple has been up well over 500x in the last 20 years.

Ethereum was a better deal during this time, but you'd have to know to buy it. And some people really made bank on altcoins, but again, right time to buy, right time to sell.

There's a limit on how much the crypto market can be worth with people still able to use it as a currency to buy things. Logarithmically we're closer to the top than to the original bottom, though like all markets timing can still yield very good returns, especially if everyone else is hodling like Fort Knox.
Were the quotes offensive, or was it just a case of someone having a stick up their behind?