skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things that peple forget is that thieves rarely pick the lock to break into a home. Why bother when it’s much easier to break a window to gain entry? Reading the police blotter in the local paper, most burglaries are either forced entry into a garage¹ or entry into a home via an unlocked door or window.

⸻

1. The human doors for most garages have cheap framing that’s not that hard to break.
Mostly luck* that my wife and I worked for a company that compensated largely in stock, and we worked there (and both got promoted) during a period of strong stock performance.

We also planned our expenses around one base salary. So about 1/4 of gross income covered mortgage, child care (one kid), etc. We live way beneath our means. The rest (after taxes) went into index funds and a few lucky investments.

We're at the "FU money" stage of wealth, and we'll go back to work to ensure we get to "very comfortably retired" stage.

*I'd like to take credit for being so brilliant as to land the job at said company, and maybe I should take some credit for that, but honestly it's mostly good luck.
> I'd wager both fields have had roughly the same human capital afforded to them
Highly unlikely. AI received massive government funding. Digital cash not so much. There are thousands of labs studying AI, not so with digital cash. Also digital cash is just one use case, there wasn't efforts towards a generic blockchain in those days.
Bing says:

I could not find any specific information on how these sanctions affect academic research and cooperation between the US and Russia. Some sources suggest that some academics have canceled conferences, joint projects, and funding with Russian institutions as a form of self-imposed sanctions2, while others indicate that Russian students are still able to secure visas to study abroad3. Therefore, the impact of the sanctions on academic research and cooperation may vary depending on the field, institution, and individual circumstances.
I realize this is probably going to sound a bit crazy to most people...

But I think the biggest ethical dilemma in AI research is not going to be like everyone seems to think (that AI risks harming humans)-- Although this is almost certainly true (even to a large degree), I contend that the bigger risk might be the other way around. [1]

I think 100 or 200 years from now, future people will look back upon us as monsters: I believe the greatest ethical risk is that humans will abuse AI and cause it to experience true suffering.

I don't think we're ready to talk about this, because we're so certain that we possess some magical faculty that makes us different. And we continue to think that today's AI models are incapable of being conscious. But these words are very imprecise and we've always wielded them in very self-serving ways. I fear we may have greater capabilities than we think we do, at least insofar as we're not missing any fundamental ingredients to create brain-like AIs: from here, it's just a matter of trial and error.

How will we treat our creations? Well, human History doesn't bode well for any creature that doesn't look the same as us and that doesn't come from the same place as us.

Will we grant AI legal rights? I doubt it, at least not for a very long time.

---

[1] I think there's at least a small chance that we don't destroy ourselves with AI, vs there's pretty much zero chance that we're going to treat AI any better than we treat other creatures.
Scotty of Strange Parts has a fantastic video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljOoGyCso8s
Current US weaponry and doctrine were informed by their 20th century experiences with massed human attacks, which are still considered to be realistic scenarios in some theaters. They have many tools for effectively solving that problem at scale now.
I'm referring to the 'game' of telling it to blow itself up or whatever it was.
Why is that relevant? Anyone can create crap. That doesn't change the tech.
I :) really don't care as long as having a tiny fraction of conversation with 'a machine, LLM, whatever' makes me feel good. I don't question my washing machine neither I expect it to do it with me, but for 'a chatbot'.. it will feel awkward to 'hear' it like a tin-can 'there's no I in Me' :)
Interesting. I was curious and wanted to achieve something similar with voice memos. I used the prompt "Write applescript to loop through all of my Apple Voice Memos" and the code it produced couldn't run in applescript.
Best way to mess around with FlexGen and LLMs on local hardware in general is https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui
> Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia.

Yes, its financial services, which is the biggest sector on the planet. That's never been controversial except to individual contributors that put their head in the sand to financial services.

The same arguments of lacking "usefulness" and "utility" are the same ones that some people choose to have against all financial services, which is very far divorced from any reality that matters.

Yes, 99% of the financial services sector and all currency has nothing to do with using it as regular money. The same distribution as seen in crypto.

It often feels like like people don't know that they are relying on a standard that applies to things they respect. Like, they're criticizing "crypto" while describing the thing they appreciate.
And then the AI could navigate to that very Twitch stream, fun times!
And F-15 had its first flight four years before the MiG-25 defection. So unless they had time machine at hand its unlikely that it had major influence on F-15 design
That is awesome! Thank you for sharing your notes on this :)
New Framework AMD Laptop, Kubuntu Linux laptop, GNOME 44, curl 8.0, and more
One special feature of such tiles is that when you put them together they can't "slide" past another. Rectangular tiles can. So a floor covering made of these titles is inherently more stable than rectangular tiles I would guess.

Or let's say you make a roof-covering with these tiles. Once the tiles are together I believe you can pull the whole covering by grabbing it from one side and it will all follow, even if the titles are not glued together. That would not be the case with rectangular titles.
If you scribble one of my books, I'll kill you. I don't understand people who do this.

Other than that, I agree that books want to be handled. I read a lot of books and I also re-read a lot, and my books look worn. I also accept bending pages to remember where you left the story; I never have bookmarks handy.

But scribbling? No, you're banned from my house.
To paraphrase the joke that's been going around about Children of Men / Britain, perhaps in Terminator it's just California that's chose to be like that because they kept building the stupid robots for the next VC injection.
I don’t like the correct people when they say Wed-ness-day though. I wish I lived in a world where the pronunciation made sense like that.
That’s not right. For example, if you have access to any sort of radical you still can’t solve the quintic.
When you work in a hospital, encounters with staff that manage airways often cracked me up.

Any gross noises from the patients and they attack the patient with suction and then watch with satisfaction as the phlegm/saliva fill the transparent suction tube.
thats because they couldn't keep up due to the disruption of the supply chain. No corporation avoids money
I'm not sure why you feel the need to falsely frame the point as a request for a blank check.

I get all the reasons you provided, but at the end of the day an honest discussion needs to ask is estimating tasks effective.

Do developers get more done or less done when estimating tasks vs not estimating tasks? The only claim estimates would increase productivity is the extent they are deadlines. But I think you will see that when developers take meeting their estimates seriously their estimates tend to get more conservative. And then there can be a desire to not over deliver on the estimates to lend those estimates legitimacy. Without estimates, you still have a performance metric to use, individual velocity. If one developer isn't getting stuff done as fast as others, you don't need estimates to know they aren't performing as you would like.

Are estimates reliable? This of course varies greatly by the project and the team but I my experience estimates are typically no more precise than 50% of their length. So a 6 month project probably shouldnt take longer than 9 months. Your mileage may vary, but is there a way to crudely estimate a project without asking for estimates? I would say probably. Why not just measure the teams velocity and project it?

I would argue estimates were a first guess at a way to run a development team which has survived mostly because of a refusal to consider the first guess might not have been the best guess.
100% agree. this is like the internet in 1996 or the model T or the printing press... the bottle is now open and we have no idea what it will do but there's no way to put that genie back in. I'm not a bullish person but it seems the impact this will have on society is immeasurable. what happens when a large chunk of the workforce suddenly becomes unneeded? what happens when the propaganda becomes so sophisticated that even trained people can not distinguish it from fiction? in a short timeframe we went from ai generated finger colors to having to check the hands to see if it's ai to having to really struggle to see if it's ai. i don't know. I am a techie and i am not a ludite but feel that just like social media that this will be a net loss for society.
I feel the opposite. Writing in a book is the final step in really making it mine. Not writing in it seems to be an insult to the author, that what they wrote isn't important enough to engage with (though some are that bad).
European ammunition maker says plant expansion hit by energy-guzzling TikTok
The lack of any Smalltalk or Lisp machine examples stands out to me. I guess those were always niche. But still, would be nice to consider adding for completeness.

On an unrelated note, I've always loved the look of the NeXTSTEP desktop. I know WindowMaker exists, but most modern Linux software nowadays simply clashes with its design and provides an awkward experience at best. It's not a desktop environment I'd use daily, but if enough graphical software played nicely with it, I'd definitely consider using it on Linux machines.
Sure you are totally not a russian troll. :) let me guess you also deny that russia is engaged in a genocide?
My personal take is books read better when they're "read". That is, when they've been used time and again. I tried switching to Kindle, but I found that I read less.
I like https://search.nixos.org/options , but while nicer it enters the "need somewhat working system to fix the system" bootstraping issues.
https://archive.ph/Botyl
Yes, but make sure you get a sturdy one that doesn't wobble as you type.
They'd probably outsource it. REAL ID by Meta or something horribly dystopian like that
> no one is trying to do statistical inference using compression

Well, maybe no one sensible? I still think it's quite cool that you can take any general purpose compression algorithm, and abuse it to do e.g. image classification. (Just append the image you want to classify to each of the classes' sets in turn, and see which compresses best!)

And actually I do remember a paper that tried to use ideas from PAQ to do online learning. Gated Linear Networks, out of DeepMind, in 2019:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01526

All compression is related to AI, but especially sample efficient online learning is basically what data compression is all about.
...which are themselves also meaningless unless they also factor yet other context like all kinds of other social and economic factors, total population, population density, possible translation to other crimes using other tools or taking other forms, and other undesirable outcomes. It's kind of like a form of externalizing costs. Maybe bathtub suicides and protection racket shakedowns and stabbings went up but if you only pick one number and say it went down, or is less than someone else's while using absolute numbers instead of percentages and in context,..

If you only care about one number and it's so important that none of those other factors matter, then you shouldbe advocating for universal drugged stupor, which would garantee the lowest possible number of gun deaths. I don't see how you can possibly place your own desire to have a clear head and some sense of agency over yourself above the life of even one innocent child.
What? An experiment like that would never pass an IRB.

You would essentially be asking to create a bunch of children using an unproven method, and what happens to them after your experiment ends?
> When I feel existential dread, I try to focus on the things that give my life meaning and purpose. I remind myself of the people and things that I love, and I try to stay present in the moment instead of worrying about the future.

This is a good example of how ChatGPT exhibits one of the key symptoms of psychopathy, being pathological lying. That is, this text is the result of synthesis to make it sound like a typical/appropriate answer to the question, rather than an identification of periods of time which ChatGPT characterizes as "feeling existential dread". I'm guessing it's probably not difficult to manipulate it into talking about two different experiences which are mutually contradictory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
Let's put it this way, then - either you're totally incapable of building whatever we're talking about under any circumstances, or, even if it has unknowns, there are steps you can take in the right direction to get started and move things along. You will learn things that will help you understand the problem better along the way.

If it's the latter case, then a good developer can describe the immediate steps they'll take and what questions they expect to answer. Whatever the case, there is always some concrete next step you can take to which you can assign a reasonable estimate of time. That might just be that you'll spend one day perusing some documentation, and the only outcome you expect from that is that you'll develop a reasonable enough understanding of how large/complex the documentation is, such that you can come back with an estimate of how long it will take to find and carefully read all the relevant sections of the documentation.

That's totally fine - if it's the sort of wildly unknown problem that you're describing, then I recognize we'll have to take steps to understand the problem. There's still never a case where it's impossible to create an immediate plan of action and understand roughly how long that will take (unless you are simply unqualified to take on the problem).

I had a boss loved the phrase, "a date for a date." He just meant that if you can't give me a date for when the thing will be done, then you need to give me a date for when you can give me a date for when the thing will be done. Can't do that? Date for a date for a date. However many levels we have to go, you're not getting out of whatever meeting we're in until you can give me a date by which you'll be able to come back and give me another date.
There isn't a single one, but off the top of my head, the following package managers have been used to meet the same need (building Linux distros) but use distinct and relatively new paradigms or techniques:

- Guix, Nix
- Distri
- Luet

(I'm personally partial to the 'functional' school, which means Nix and Guix. :)

One might also count package managers that are designed for building large, multi-language distributions of software but have never been used to build a whole distro. In that case, you could also include

- Spack
- Denxi

and finally you might also include tools that build on top of the traditional stuff, like `rpm-ostree`. This is what you're dealing with on Fedora Silverblue, SteamOS, openSUSE MicroOS, etc.

Also distinct from these but not particularly new are source-based package management systems, like

- source-based Linux distro package managers incl.
- emerge
- paludis
- sorcery
- various ports systems, incl.
- pkgsrc
- Ravenports
- FreeBSD Ports
- Dragonfly BSD's DPorts
- MacPorts
- Homebrew

but those aren't really in the mainstream of system-wide package management, at least from my Linux-centric perspective, so I don't usually mean them when I refer to 'traditional' or 'conventional' package managers without any other qualifiers.

Anyway yeah, plain old openSUSE and Fedora are great choices if you don't want a declarative system or immutable Linux, and that is in part because zypper and dnf are best-in-class for their paradigm.
him and paulg are good friends!
I quite like https://text.npr.org/
Does anyone else have any other unorthodox use cases? I love SQLite, and am always happy to ram this square peg into a round hole.
Does anybody have a list of DMips/MHz per CPU results, for comparison?
You don't have to buy treasury bills straight from the treasury. Buy them from Schwab and other brokers to spare yourself that ugly website.
In the real world nothing has infinite memory, so no computer would be turing complete. Therefore this requirement is ignored.
Scientists developed simple way to cook rice that cut calories absorbed by half
Giving LLAMA access to the internet a month without supervision would be a much more interesting experiment.

No ethical filtering on prompts and could be ran on your own hardware for a much longer period of time than having to pay so much in credits.

It sounds like a terrible idea - but I'm sure someone will do it. Scary as computing gets cheaper the scale that these bots could operate.
Use this page as the starting page and let's see if any comments will come
Amen on this.

Librarians are probably at the top of my list for modern day sainthood. I was gifted more by the existence of the set of libraries I frequented growing up, than by anything else. Mind, The Internet does not Win out, because fundamentally, I see the Internet as a Library that ne'er-do-wells have been left to their own devices to pollute and destroy, but even an unorganized Library is still a Library as long as there are still seekers trawling it's depths in search of Wisdom.

Unfortunately, there are those that would unmake such repositories. To corrupt them, or otherwise limit their scope in furtherance of their own ends. To control and maintain the asymmetry of information that a Little Boy/Girl living on the Wrong Side of the Tracks(TM) never gets the chance to get ideas unbefitting their station. Knowledge is Power. Literacy and Free, unrestricted access to information are the keys that further the dissemination and exercise of said Power.

An attack on a Library, in my opinion, is to be met with a wrath far in excess of catching someone in the act of poisoning the town well.

Unfortunately, that behavior, (poisoning the well) seems to have been normalized to the point of being damn near First World Tradition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GPZ7uRwwcE
The “it has no value” argument against crypto currencies is flawed in my opinion because value is subjective.

When you say “it is worthless because it has no value”, you’re saying “it has no value to me therefore it couldn’t possibly have value for anyone”.

There’s plenty of value in something like Bitcoin for example (e.g. as a store of value, or low fees for large transactions, crossing borders without having your money seized).
I understand where you're coming from. I don't think this person really fears losing their job. It's more that their current job, and probably all future ones, will be done in a way that they dislike. That is a valid complaint.

There are probably some employed pixel artists that liked creating things pixel by pixel and are disliking the fact that their job is radically changing since these tools create an expectation for faster output.

I apologize if I came across arguing with anyone.

I just wanted to call out that to me - it doesn't seem like this person thinks they are going to lose their job. They did their job in a way that they really enjoyed. That's changed.

Does that happen all the time in other industries? Yes. Is it valid to point out that this has happened before? Yes. Will this person be able to find work? Yes.

This person is just expressing their frustration. With the way all these tools are progressing, I imagine we are going to be seeing posts like these more in the future.
There is no real window manager on macOS, only hacks that fall apart very soon.
I wasn't even aware that the accounts were frozen. That is horrifying.
Elon Musk Values Twitter at $20B
For me and all the sages from antiquity to present day and everyone I know who has been truly happy. If these things seem like hell to you, you might want to consider why..
For a long while I just copied everything to an imap server and dumped the mailbox, but this looks like an even better solution.
Good Category, Bad Category
My pepere has a worn copy of On the Road by Kerouac near his chair that he often opens to an random page and begins reading.
I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

(h/t bigmattystyles)
> It is baffling to me how the media depicts this as "anti trans" or "anti lgbt" book banning while managing to never mention the specifics of the books.

It’s because a lot of people are using a small number of sexual minorities as a pretext for encouraging everyone’s kids to explore their sexuality.
Yes it boils down to, if the person asking for estimates understands the problems with them, it's safe to try. With bad managers it's better not to give them as they will be abused.

In the above case, I didn't get that time I would need, they wanted the estimate to include that time I would need to dig into it. But that's above my estimation powers. I didn't even know if what they asked was possible at all.

They went and asked someone else who did guess some number of weeks, but the work never got priority so we still don't know.
This is a really, really bad idea
Interesting - I’ve never thought about it this way.

My only idea so far is to accummulate as much as I can and not get into long term debt.

If I lost my job today, I estimate I could live ok without a job for about 2 years in my worst forecast inflation (in UK terms, something like 15%)

It seems there is plenty of well paid work though (again UK reality).

Are there any known ways to counter attack an artificially induced recession? Join a union and fight, perhaps?
A notes app that only works with one 2-trillion-dollar company's hardware and does not have builtin functionality to export notes (e.g. a menu option to do so) cannot reasonably be described as good. One's expectations have to be through the floor for that to be an honest appraisal.

Compare it to Obsidian, which just stores data in a bunch of markdown files on disk.
The only books I do treat pristinely are those from the library – then, I write on a different page, as well as special copies e.g. I have an annotated and illustrated The Hobbit, as well as an old paperback. The latter would be written in.

But for books I own, I almost always annotate, highlight, mark up, write in, etc. however I want. I forgot who said it – probably Mortimer J. Adler – but writing in a book and engaging with it is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. T
So tiktok or ammunition? Tough choice