skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that in programming the discovery part is often 90% of the task. There can be situations where there is no 10% discovery phase and the rest of the time we’re banging out predictable code.

Right now I’m replatforming a legacy app. It’s undocumented, developed by dozens of staff — all of whom are gone, and full of crazy bugs and gotchas.

Out of the box it wouldn’t compile, the source code was missing files, etc…

The task is to find every such hidden issue, fix it, which then allows us to find the next hidden issue, and so on.

When we’re done finding issues, we’re basically done.

Can you tell me how many issues we’ll encounter? I can’t. I’m being perpetually surprised by the code base, finding random binary blobs that actually are from some other project we didn’t even know exists until that moment.

Fundamentally, it’ll take as long as it takes. The application is mandated by law, and it must be made to work. It’ll cost what it costs, and it’ll be finished when it’s done.

Instead of begging for estimates, a good manager would be bending over backwards to accelerate the process. Get in the original devs for a week under contract. Procure tooling that helps find bugs faster. Instrument the source servers to get better comparative info. Etc…

I’ve never seen that occur. It’s always just the same question repeated over and over as if that can make the unknown known.
Since WW2 world had less than a week time without having a war anywhere at the world
> "Our results show that GPT-4, without any specialized prompt crafting, exceeds the passing score on USMLE by over 20 points and outperforms earlier general-purpose models (GPT-3.5) as well as models specifically fine-tuned on medical knowledge (Med-PaLM, a prompt-tuned version of Flan-PaLM 540B). In addition, GPT-4 is significantly better calibrated than GPT-3.5, demonstrating a much-improved ability to predict the likelihood that its answers are correct. "
Fucking agreed. I’m not dying in a war to drum up support for Biden’s election campaign. Biden hates people like me
Thanks for the info and was intrigued by the code published under the readthedocs!
In most companies it works this way "Give me an estimate based on what I am telling you now. I haven't really thought it through and there are a lot of unknowns I view this estimate as a commitment that should be kept although I will probably make a lot of changes during development"
The broomsticks scene in Fantasia is based on The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the first recorded version of which was written by Lucian of Samosata around 150AD. I believe it's the earliest example of the 'AI rebellion' concept.
Still that's kind of like the "you won't always have a calculator with you" argument. Going to other humans takes time, persuasion and can be expensive. This is a glorified calculator that's free and one click away.

Is it really cheating when it's just using another tool in the box? People should learn to do more with everything at their disposal, not arbitrarily limit themselves. Should I not use a 3D printer because I ought to sculpt by hand? Must I not use a regular printer because I should write and draw everything with a pencil?
As in, turn an inkplate10 into a secondary (or even primary) display for something like a raspberry pi.

I want to make an eink writing machine, something like a freewrite but not costing $500.
C11 also has them: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/atomic/memory_order
MobileMe is now iCloud.

HomePods still exists in both the mini form and the original form factor with newer chips.

The modern version of Ping is what is built into Apple Music.
If a family wants to watch game of thrones today, every one can gather around one TV screen and watch it using one person's account.

I think Apple first needs to solve how to license a piece of media to one account that can be then be shared to anyone else in the same room, or a lot of families are never going to try it.

The Nintendo DS blew me away with its "buy one game and let others download the multiplayer part for free" approach.
It means:

Some idiot (Musk) decided to axe 90% of workers, and the company hasn't completely evaporated (Twitter). Investors; therefore, are jumping on the signal that a bunch of capital is allocated to non-productive work.

Therefore, Welch it, trim the fat, give me back my money so I can stop being a source of welfare for techies, and start pouring money into something interesting.
Two-layer neural networks are universal approximators. Given enough units/parameters in the first layer, enough data, and enough computation, they can model any relationship.

(Any relationship with a finite number of discontinuities. Which covers everything we care about here.)

But more layers, and recurrent layers, let deep learning models learn complex relationships with far fewer parameters, far less data and far less computation.

Less parameters (per complexity of data and performance required of the model) means more compressed, more meaningful representations.

The point is that you can’t claim a deep learning model has only learned associations, correlations, conditional probabilities, Markov chains, etc.

Because architecturally, it is capable of learning any kind of relationship.

That includes functional relationships.

Or anything you or I do.

So any critique on the limits of large language models needs to present clear evidence of what it is being claimed it is not doing.

Not just some assumed limitation that has not been demonstrated.

—

Second thought. People make all kinds of mistakes. Including very smart people.

So pointing out that an LLM has trouble with some concept doesn’t mean anything.

Especially given these models already contain more concepts across more human domains than any of us have ever been exposed to.
"For competent people it should be pretty easy to convert the bathroom into a kitchen"
Me and my son had a lot of fun "reading" this book

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/428862.Wreck_This_Journa...
Apple makes more on games via iOS than all of the console makers
Yeah I was coding up a fairly complicated payment form for a Stripe like processor the other day. I thought I’d give chatgpt a go and it confidently gave me the example code I needed and told me how to use it, etc. I was blown away until about 30 seconds later when I realised it was all complete bull crap. It was quite bizarre because this company didn’t really have any public docs out from when chatgpt supposedly harvested it’s data until, but it knew about the company and knew a couple of funny keywords this company uses in its form, so it was almost believable.
Pwn2Own Vancouver – Day 3 Results
Day 1 - https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2023/3/22/pwn2own-van...

Day 2 - https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2023/3/23/pwn2own-van...
A snapshot of dynamically updating page

https://archive.is/JVqPR
> I don't get the ethical side of AI.

That is clear from your comment.

These are tools. Complicated ones at that. Depending on how it is designed can cause more or less harm to people. Some of the harms are more direct and obvious, while others can be less so. AI ethics is about studying the harms, and investigating what choices can be made during design time, training time, and usage time to lessen them.

> I have a voice activated box ...

Great story. What does it have to do with the topic at hand?

> [weapons], is still a tool and neutral as the tool is unaware of the intended use

Weapons are not ethically neutral. You can design weapons which have more collateral damage and you can design weapons which have less.

There are scatterable landmines which are famously attractive to children. They look like toys! They also cannot be disarmed and remain dangerous for years after deployment.

There are also scatterable landmines which have sophisticated detection circuitry to only detonate when a tank is passing by. They don't get triggered by humans on foot, they don't even get triggered by civilian vehicles. Furthermore they are programmed to deactivate after a preset period has passed reliably.

The second of these weapons is designed to be more ethical. Yes, both are designed to kill people but the designers of the second one went out of their way to kill only the ones they intend to. This is how ethics looks like in the context of weapon building.

> When these models are trained, I am not a big fan of them being corralled or limited.

Everything from how the model is constructed, how the training set is assembled, to what metrics are checked during evaluation are "corralling" or "limiting" them. There is no "raw neutral" state of such a model.

What you are asking for, the "un-corraled" or "un-limited" LLM, does not exit, and is not a coherent thing to ask for.
They have enough artillery pointed at Seoul to cause mass civilian casualties. It would be a humanitarian disaster on both sides of the border.

Now, in a case where a (conventional) war broke out between NK and SK without China's involvement, that artillery would be carpet bombed to oblivion by US air superiority in a matter of hours/days.

But if the US was tied up elsewhere, or China was providing support. Nightmare scenario.
I worked at a robotics startup for a while developing a robotic arm. The big problem we kept coming up against was that the robot was just part of the story. A robot arm doesn't solve a customers problem - a robotic solution does. Programming robotics is effectively software development - it requires logical thinking, branching logic, variables and often ends up being quite complex. It's a similar problem to no-code and visual programming - the complexity of software development isn't in the medium of code, but the constructing of logical systems.

The robot arm then becomes a piece of a much larger engineering puzzle - and so the people using it need to be highly technical. All the "user friendly" gimmicks are just obstacles in their way.
I don't like this. It's too useful to malicious developers relative to how useful it is for legitimate purposes.
What a bunch of nonsense. So it can't say "I don't know X" or "I can do X for you" or "I called such and such plugin API and produced this report for you"?

Also why is there equivalence drawn between unemotional AI and ethical AI?

In any case, an LLM is a reflection of us, and our language. "I" refers to the sum of its local state & capabilities. It's not a concept related to ethics.
Thoughts about Genetics
Things I Don't Know About AGI
One more thing to consider: The new iron curtain, now called "sanctions".

My best guess currently would be that the US will try to outlaw the competing market should one arise: The US will just forbid its people and the people in the allied countries to make business with China, like they do with a lot of other countries, like Russia or Iran.

It's unlikely this would happen immediately as the US is currently still depended on China. But as the economic war intensives walling-off will happen at some point. There are already "sanctions" in place against Chinese companies in some market areas. This will likely only worsen over time.

You can still invest in China, sure. But you will be forced to move there at some point, or loss everything over there, I guess.
When I was a teen, I heard an author say they loved signing clearly well worn copies of their books. Not only did it mean it was not likely going to be resold, but it also meant it was well loved. I've always treated my books roughly since then.

I always carry a paperback in my back pocket, and it's often margin written and beer stained. My favorite books get the worst treatment.
The tractatus isn't like the blue and brown notebooks, where we just grabbed random notes of his after he died and published them for future generations to study. It's an intentional published work. He means everything he says in it the moment it is published.

He _definitely_ evolves the view presented throughout the course of the tractatus, but this is intentional, walking the reader up the ladder, the last step of which is throwing the ladder (the tractatus) away.

The relation between early and late Wittgenstein more complex than outright repudiation. Immediately after the tractatus he thought he solved the problems of philosophy, and later came to realize simply destroying the positivist project was not ask there was the problem of philosophy.

On Russell, hilariously, he would organize readings of the tractatus with the Vienna circle. Wittgenstein would be so furious with their interpretation he would sit the room with his back to them and talk Indian poetry aloud.
It's worth it. I switch often between standing and sitting with most of my time sitting. I have one from autonomous AI. If you get a hand crank one, depending on the type of person you are, there's a good chance you'll actually switch between sit and stand all too often. Standing for long periods of time isn't great either, best is to just switch positions often.
That’s what it feels like. A sort of rising tide that will lift all boats. Though many boats will also sink… so there’s that.
Im not sure geopolitical experts would agree with this pondering
> Using training sets that include unlicensed copyrighted works requires attribution and licensing

Is there a rulingn for this? This would be similar as using a school book requires attribution and licensing for your education.
> The video game??

I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)

> Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.

The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer.

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
Spanish has as much accent variation as English and has managed to develop a reasonable spelling where you know how to pronounce a vast majority of words just by reading them. The spelling doesn't have to be phonetic, just consistent. It should work for English, too.
One shining use case though, I typically live in Ruby and the example code for this company was all Java and Python. Getting ChatGPT to convert the boring encryption methods into Ruby was amazing.
Benchmarking Cheap SSDs for Fun, No Profit
Drawing Combinators: Functional Creative Coding
You will not need 15 years - I'd give it the next election. Someone just needs to turn Q into a chatbot and we're basically there.
like the plugins it just released
‘The talk about superfoods is absurd, and miracle diets do not exist’
Bus factor and deployment safety.

It takes time for the rest of your team to stay up to date on what you are doing, and you don't want to release too many changes at once, so it's faster to pinpoint which one has an error
28nm with multi patterning can go to lower process node. SMIC has experience up to 7nm for that. I think early TSMC 7nm used DUV.
I prefer FreeBSD if I am going to use ZFS, never had a problem and I always use zroot mirrors. On linux I have had many issues, I won't use it on linux anymore.
I think about this too! Black Mirror visualized some basic methods of torture for virtual consciousness, and those were already bad enough, while still leaving a lot of room for worse. The idea of accidentally subjecting anything similar to myself to this is horrifying. And given how little sentience animals have in your average persons mind, I have no doubt that it will take a long, long, long time until most people are convinced a conscious AI really does have sentience.

I don't think we will know or notice the exact moment it happens (if there is even a single moment, instead of a gradual change). But we must already start talking about the possibility. Not because it's here with LLMs or because it's gonna be here in the next 2-3 years - but I see realistic chances of this happening in our lifetimes.
My impression is the Westerners’ best guess about the Mig-25 contributed significantly to the design of the F-15 and helped to make it what it is. Getting their hands on it was a relief, or even a let down.

The alternative scenario, where the Mig-25 really was generations ahead, plays out in the movie Firefox from 1982 where the US is so far behind they have to steal a Soviet Mig-31 superplane. Good for laugh today, but once upon a time…

The rumor I heard is Soviet intelligence infiltrated American industry and stole what they thought were plans for America’s next generation air superiority fighter. What they’d obtained were the plans for Plymouth’s Roadrunner Superbird, thus the Mig-25’s uncanny resemblance. Proof: https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/1970-plymouth-superbird-a...
If you read the technic paper of gpt-4, the confidence of the base model directly correlated with its ability to solve problems. Sadly, the hammer of alignment knocked it right out.
> If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it.

Will reality do?

Over recent generations, kids have systematically been robbed of critical developmental environments - primarily they are denied regular hours of unsupervised alone/peer time and expansive areas to free range.

The environments that kids absolutely need to develop social and problem solving skills have been replaced with ceaseless supervision, ceaseless containment and a soundtrack of false messaging about risk from stranger kidnapping (spoiler: FBI stats are clear that kids aren't and haven't been at meaningful risk of stranger kidnappings). At the edges of all that are justice systems/LEO/authority that stand ever-ready to transform routine stupid transgressions into forever penalties that systemically ruin future life/job/housing opportunities.

We adults have erased their life prep and endlessly notched up pressure on every front. What else do we expect to follow that except poor mental health?

As for social media's part, one has to take a lot of nuance out of teen mental health studies to single out SM as the primary driver of bad mental health. ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for...
Yeah, I was misremembering; I thought they actually did end up using high energy neutrinos.
Was it a relevant suggestion for you? If yes, then what benefit does the disclosure provide? If not, then downvote and say so?

In this particular case, I think halotrope just didn't think the dislosure was necessary. They have a link to the website in their profile and aren't trying to hide the affiliation.

Full disclosure: I'm not related to halotrope in any way nor to the website in question.
Same. Removed for being too wild?
KDE is way better and really feels like a finished product IMO. Things you don't like you can just change unlike gnome which has almost no customization.
I assumed they are taking about inodes
I just don’t accept that accurate estimates are actually possible unless:

- the requirements are well written and complete

- they never change

- the duration of the project is very short

- the number of interruptions is minimal

- there are no other priorities

- it’s a simple change to an existing, well defined system

If all of the above is true then sure, it’s possible to come up with accurate estimates.

But most of the time accuracy problems are not (only) due to the inability of the engineer to estimate, but also the overall uncertainty of the requirements and productive time available.

The narrative around estimates is that the engineer is responsible for things being late, but in several places I’ve worked, it’s largely the externalities that cause estimates to be wrong.

When I was able to control these factors, my team and I were able to make good estimates most of the time. But it’s really rare to be able to control them.
When a contractor is remodeling your bathroom or your garden, the amount of time spent planning the design is insignificant compared to the cost of labor and supplies.

But in software, the planning is the entire project. The closer the plan is to covering every single possible case, the closer the software is to being done. In construction, the work doesn't even start until the plan is done.

Every one of these comparisons that involve a physical product whether it's contracting, bridge building, or manufacturing all completely miss the mark.

If you compare with other industries where the plan is the product, you'll start to see more similarities with software development. And the less the planning is cookie-cutter the more trouble those industries have with estimates as well.
The narrative around this round of big tech layoffs seems wrong.

The article opens:

> Since the start of 2023, more than 150,000 people have been laid off at tech companies, large and small. That’s a staggering number of people who have been put out of work.

Who says those people have been put out of work? There are lots of startups that have wanted to hire engineers that couldn't because the FAMAG paycheck money firehose made it nigh impossible.

These people are mostly not going to be out of work. Most of them will still be earning way more than almost anyone in the country.

This is a good thing for startups, as now the (frankly anticompetitive) big tech hiring practices are getting rolled back to sane levels.
are you trying to tell me that the world’s second largest economy banning cryptocurrency had no real impact on demand for cryptocurrency?
I always assumed it was another way in which I am weird.

Velcro gets me. It sends a shiver down my spine, it's worse for me than nails on a chalkboard.

Slowly pulling velcro feels physically uncomfortable.

I can feel the noise in my head. Every small crackle.

All these neuroses popping up everywhere, I wonder if it's just too much sensory input.

When younger I'd dream about living in NY with the 24hr hustle and bustle and getting 3am pizzas.

As an adult it sounds like absolute torture and my dream is living alone in a cabin in the woods with minimal power and internet(and the latter wants fade daily).

Maybe it's all another symptom of slowly becoming the old man who yells at clouds.
If anything we might be concerned that the trend will continue and we will be left more busy and more overworked, not less. That’s historically how it’s often gone. Every labor saving innovation creates more work somewhere else.
> Bingo. Nobody who ever won a Nobel Prize, competed in the Olympics, or, in Joseph's Heller's case, wrote several novels that each took years to complete ever got up in the morning and said "I've done enough."

I am sure that is true. That said, whether such a person lives a satisfying life depends on the motivation behind such a drive.

Do you pursue your research, your sports training, and your writing because of your love of the process and the activity itself? If so, you are doing great.

Do you pursue your research, your sports training, and your writing because you are "climbing the ladder" toward a Nobel Prize, an Olympic medal, or the status of a famous writer? If so, you are probably going to have a bad time.

The message I took from the book is not "don't excel" or "don't put your heart into things". Rather it is that excelling at something and putting your heart into something should be a conscious decision on your part, instead of a default response (e.g., mindlessly climbing the corporate ladder) because that is what everyone seems to be doing.
No, AI rendering is crazy slow and will remain that way for a very long time.
> Simply put there is no right or wrong way to write English

Gud tu nou.
> but uptake is not great in the US versus other developed countries

It's painfully confounded with other variables, but that could provide a (noisy) quick check on how likely it is that HPV causes the cancer increase, right? If there's an effective vaccine with varied uptake, then we should be able to compare countries by rate of vaccination and cancer, and see if there's a substantial negative correlation.