skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the system should then be able to show its working

The system fundamentally cannot do this. You can make it generate text that is like what someone would say when asked to show their working, but that's a different thing.

> It's very tempting to give these systems the benefit of the doubt, but that tends to lead to hugely inflated conclusions about their capabilities.

I agree. I am seeing a bit too much over-optimistic predictions about these things. And many of these predictions are stated as fact.
> Point being that setting your servers to UTC is one less thing to worry about.

It's only one less thing to worry about if you worry about it in the first place. I do not.

> I'd flip the argument on its head and posit that there's no compelling reason to use anything other than UTC.

There is a compelling, or at least useful, reason for me; from another reply I did:

Using UTC when all of my servers are in one timezones actually decreases clarity, as I live in America/Toronto with my daily existence, and which is what my laptop and (mechanical) wristwatch are set to. If I less(1) the logs I now have to do mental math as to "when" things happen because the hour number it says in the logs does not match my human reality.

If I look at something now (at Mar 25 21:09) the logs would say "Mar 26 01:09" which is not "now" in my mind.
Yes, not all readers will follow everything but my post is true and studying it will clear things up. However the movie will resit any attempted clarification.
We are at really at unheard of levels of hype at this point. This is such a strange and rushed piece that seems to forget to argue, much less say, anything at all. The point of the chinese room is that the rule-following work involved for the subject in the room is feasible whatever their prior knowledge is, not that they simply don't know Chinese! Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but I can't really know because the author moves on so quickly, we aren't even sure what the commitments are that we are making. (What is the compression scheme of general intelligence? Is there some common idea we don't even have a TB up there??)

The author says: "What is left of rationally defensible skepticism?" But they seem to have forgotten to say anything at all about this skepticism itself other than they used to be skeptic, but have been "too surprised" to stay that way for long. Which at once seems to misunderstand the fundamental epistemological position, as well as forget to even articulate what we are even being skeptical about outside of the terms they are laying out! Is it that the models have "understanding," using their qualified definition from the earlier section, or something else? Like, just please give the reader something to hold on to! What are you arguing for?

Like I get that we are Rokko's-basilisking ourselves into a million and a half blog posts like this, but at least spend some time with it. Its ok to still care about what you write, and it should still be rewarding to be thoughtful. You owe it to the human readers, even if an AI can't tell a difference.
Then tip the rest.
And what I think we'll find is that we are, essentially, stochastic parrots. (I'm OK with that. It is what it is).
What makes you the arbiter as to what is an "extraordinary claim"?
People are generally very resistant to change. Our minds are literally programmed against it...acknowledging an enormous change happening very quickly triggers all sorts of yucky things in our lizard brains. So we try and rationalize things and fid some way of explaining to ourselves that "no, this isn't actually a big change, my model of the world is still rock solid" as a pure survival mechanism.
> The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

a) no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited, b) does it not give you at least a bit of pause how quickly this is advancing right now?
Text only news websites (2022)
Just the usual reminder that systemd is crap and that is terrible for us that it was forced shoved to everyone in Debian and co.

The main issue was always this one, having side functions like dealing with timezones breaking your pid 1.
In such a case it is almost impossible to resolve the problem from the system itself you have to mount the drive with another OS or reinstall when possible.
This website doesn't even set a font size. The font size is just your browser's default. You have your font size set too small. This website is one of the few examples of doing it right. How can a web developer know what your requirements are? Only you can know that. There are many bad things about the modern web but fortunately being able to set your own font size is still a thing.

Firefox even lets you set a minimum font size. And there is an option to stop websites overriding your choices which helps with sites like HN (but not the one you are complaining about) which explicitly set a small font size.
Won't the prompt itself be the test? TDD is literally just providing an expected output on a given input, before implementing the functionality. The prompt we give AIs follows the same pattern, "I have a data that looks like ___, visualize it in a graph that ____"
2000, my boy Al Gore was robbed by that butterfly ballot UX
No, as I described that is not the case. Not every process running needs all the memory it allocated all the time. A GB or two can easily be swapped out from your browser, Networkmanager, file manager, email client, etcpp. swapping only becomes a problem if pressure is so high that you constantly swap in and out the same pages.

You can see this well from the kennel's proactive swapping. If I run a bog standard desktop Linux distro and leave swappiness at the default 60, after a few hours of normal usage where I don't even get close to filling up my RAM with actual memory allocations from processes, the kernel will have swapped out almost a GB of data from several background services. Because a lot of programs allocate some memory for something and then never look at it in a long time. So it makes more sense to swap that to disk and instead use that ram as page cache.

Also, with current NVMe speeds, swapping has become a lot more bearable. Really the only place where I can see why you wouldn't use swap is servers with a well defined, dedicated workload. Here I indeed want a fast and noticable fail mode in case a new version of whatever I'm running might have a memory leak, or just vastly different behavior regarding memory usage.
Probably for all the unimportant NPCs running around in a game, AI does a good enough job. But for the main characters and the plot, I suspect a human touch is still needed. Climb up the value chain. If you're cranking out monsters in volume, you're at the bottom.
That's the risk of participating in a completely new industry... You don't know how long it's going to last; it has no track record. It reminds me of my own career as a software developer. I self-taught myself coding since I was 14 in 2004. I'm from a relatively small town and nobody in my family had a tech background or even knew anyone with a tech background. So it was quite a stretch/unlikely for me to become a developer. I would spent my lunch breaks in the school library; sometimes coding by myself on library computers. My dad thought I was wasting my time. Back then, the only people making any money in tech in my town were developing websites for local businesses and it wasn't very profitable. My dad wanted me to be a lawyer.

I feel like I did many things right; I got into web development early (while most of the jobs were still for programming for desktop PCs), I was an early adopter of Node.js, I went to university and did a course on AI/Machine learning. I launched a popular open source project. But somehow it never worked out for me financially; I was never accepted into any fast-growing company, my popular project was big among startups but didn't gain enough traction in the corporate sphere (where it could have been monetized). Now AI is threatening the entire profession.

I think my dad was right, I should have been a lawyer and done software development as a hobby.

The only silver lining that I cling onto is that my main interest has been software architecture and higher level systems/infrastructure thinking. So far, AI hasn't shown itself to be able to effectively solve higher level software architecture/design problems. It's great at answering questions, but not at asking (the right) questions which is what software architecture is about.
Also the criminals end up rich and in capitalism having money increases your self worth and you are rewarded for having money no matter where it came from.
Or a french expatriate like me :D

And for a tourist all it takes sometimes is a few bad experiences with the locals which was the case of my non french gf when she visited it.

As a french, whose family is still based in the vicinity of Paris, I still don't really get it compared to some other nice european cities that I think are much more attractive/beautiful and better to live in.

I would also say that experience vary differently when you are a tourist (i.e. with a budget and time that allows you to enjoy the good parts) or when you are struggling to make a living in a city and don't really have the money and time to dedicate on the cultural stuff.

Also your perception can change based on becoming indifferrent to things you are used to see. I am living in a touristic city and every day I am kind of amused and puzzled to see tourists taking photos of my street [1]. And then I realized I did the same of similar streets when I was a tourist as well.

[1] buildings aren't especially nices but it is car free, has a number of exotic trees in the middle and residents have unofficially and kind of illegally privaticized the public space by putting plants, palets made fences and garden furniture to delimit space.
Clarksons farm is a show about Jeremy from top gear taking up farming. In it and at the start, he buys a Lamborghini tractor. It’s huge, massively expensive, and very fancy.

His farming advisers suggest he get rid of it and find something smaller and older. New is no good they say, go for simpler and functional.

A few hilarious moments throughout the season and he ends up keeping the lambo and getting some more proven and smaller.

Show is done well. Jeremey recognizes that he is very rich, has a ton of prime land, and tons of money and help to throw at the problems yet still struggles to avoid financial ruin.

Unrelated, I live in a farming community. Have heard of stories of John Deere dealers having a back lot overflowing with equipment just sitting there because some small piece is missing and no one can get it. Have also heard of farmers buying two of everything, including machines costing many hundreds of thousands just to have one working and the other sitting in a warehouse to cannibalize as needed. Maybe in the tech world this isn’t impressive when Meta burns billions on games no one wants but for farmers (not including bill gates and other mass conglomerates) to have to spend that kind of cash just to have it sit is nuts.
I asked Google Bard to tell me a short story about a computer hacker. Here was the result, completely unedited... Blew me away:

Sure, here is a short story about a computer hacker:

Once upon a time, there was a young hacker named Kevin who loved to explore the world of computers. He was always curious about how things worked, and he loved to find new ways to break into systems. One day, Kevin was exploring a new website when he came across a hidden file. The file contained a list of passwords, and Kevin was curious to see what they were for. He tried a few of the passwords, and to his surprise, they all worked! Kevin had just hacked into a major company's computer system.

Kevin was excited about his discovery, but he also knew that he had done something wrong. He had hacked into a system without permission, and he could get in a lot of trouble. But Kevin couldn't help himself. He was too curious about what he could find in the system. He started exploring the files, and he quickly found out that the company was up to some shady business. They were involved in illegal activities, and Kevin knew that he had to do something to stop them.

Kevin decided to hack into the company's website and post a warning to their customers. He wanted to let them know that the company was not trustworthy, and that they should avoid doing business with them. Kevin knew that his actions would get him in trouble, but he didn't care. He was doing what he thought was right, and he was willing to face the consequences.

The company was furious when they found out what Kevin had done. They threatened to sue him, and they even tried to have him arrested. But Kevin was not afraid. He knew that he had done the right thing, and he was willing to fight for what he believed in.

In the end, Kevin was able to expose the company's illegal activities, and he helped to protect the company's customers. He also learned a valuable lesson about the importance of doing what is right, even when it is difficult.
This article lines up well with my feelings on the matter. In general, people seem to understate the emergent behaviours of ML models, while overstating the uniqueness of human intelligence. I think a lot of this is down to the fact that although both systems exhibit a form of intelligence, they’re very different. LLMs deliver mastery of natural language that would normally be a signal for a highly intelligent human. While in other ways they’re less intelligent than a cat.

So it’s not ‘human like intelligence’ but it is a form of intelligence and the reality is no one would have predicted the behaviours we are seeing. So it seems silly to pretend we can know for certain how it achieves its results.

For human intelligence, do we assume cave men had theory of mind at the level of modern day humans? Or did language have to develop first? Our intelligence is built on previous generations, and most of us just ‘interpolate’ within that to a large extent. We behave on occasion like ‘stochastic parrots’ too, mindlessly repeating some new term or phrase we’ve started hearing on Hacker News (why? It just felt like the ‘right thing’ to say).

Human intelligence is the working example that combinations of atoms built into large networks have emergent properties. I’m sure our artificial networks won’t behave qualitatively like the human one as they continue to develop, but I think the burden of proof is on those that suggest we can know what ultimately is and isn’t possible.
Downvoted for speaking real facts right here. Many Christians are given a pass to feel contempt for LGBTQ folks, which leads to dehumanization and hate. I had friends growing up in the 90s who were outed and then forcibly disappeared off to realignment camps. I never saw two of them again and lost contact. After the camp didn't work, they were sent away to live with relatives or boarding schools so to not embarrass the parents with the gay. The comment above isn't hyperbole, it's what really happens. I grew up in terror of my close LGBTQ friends ever getting outed, because I knew we'd never see them again. We all did everything we could to help them keep their cover. We'd never even mention it, we all just knew, and would fabricate stories that made them appear straight.

And keep in mind, there is no evidence that conversion therapy has any success rate. However, it is well known to increase suicide rate by 2.5x. The people who run these groups know they don't work, but do it anyway. There's a saying that sums this up perfectly, "the cruelty is the point".
It is true that a Mac running Safari is just a glorified boolean circuit. It is also true that a human being is just a glorified bunch of subatomic particles. It's not a useful way to understand what's going on. There is a higher-level structure built out of the lower-level pieces, and it is the higher-level structure that is important and not the lower-level pieces.

It would be possible to make a web browser out of a different type of logic circuit. It's the higher-level structure of the browser that matters, and not the fact that it is built out of boolean logic.

Similarly, with ChatGPT, it is the higher-level structures (whatever they may be) that matter, and not the low-level details of the neural network. The higher-level structures could be far too complex for us to understand.
I don't see the relevance.

Natural intelligence has not been understood because if our brains were simple enough that we could understand them, we would be so simple we couldn't. This explains why it has not been reproduced.

>There is no repeatable experiment going from inorganic matter to self-aware, self-replicating life.

You can do the RNA world experiments in a lab, it would just take a lot of time and a lot of primordial soup, but eventually you would observe abiogenesis. I also don't see how abiogenesis and biology are relevant.

>capable of doing the impossible, e.g. predicting the weather with fidelity substantially into the future.

Thankfully this is not a measure of intelligence, since we can't do that either.
Hacker News is a terribly designed website and just plain unreadable without zoom. 12px might have been the standard 15 years ago, but most sites use larger sizes. Gmail and old Reddit are using 14px. The New York Times and Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads). The fact that you can zoom and override fonts does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.
"It’s a sign of the economic times... "

Right, people are so hungry they are teaming up and putting together elaborated plans to steal containers of (likely) booze.
> doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything

So a dystopian police surveillance-state?

Thanks but no thanks. The socially optimal amount of theft is not zero.
> I've gained 20lbs over 3 months of Starting Strength. I wish it was all muscle but it wasn't.

You gained fat following a program that is notorious for making people fat. Google images for "starting strength meme" and see for yourself.
This thread is a good proxy for why commercial computing is so toxic; people can't even agree on the time of day.

We share this planet with people that don't use UTC. That's just the way it is. If some computers are set to time zones other than UTC, then non-UTC time zones must be correctly handled, even "servers".

This is just patronizing hand-wringing; well done you.

For global systems, a single time convention is the basis of co-ordination. So many people on this thread have seem to have a "pets not cattle" viewpoint, it is quite concerning.
Russia didn't apply to join though, they (Putin) expected special treatment.

The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000.

“Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’

And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...
I've found that to a lot of developers, the tools that they use are magic, and replacing those tools or building new ones yourself is something that is beyond their imagination.

You'd think this is something more common with juniors than seniors, but in my experience it's been the opposite. Probably something about being distanced from the fundamentals made them forget how it's possible to build anything from scratch.
We're molecules in a weird soup, nothing is really fixed... depending on the emotional context, the tension of the era, the global fatigue, objectivity can take a massive blow. Social childish regression in a way.
You're right, it's not believable that only 1/3 don't know the rules, most likely it's 2/3 of people that don't know the rules, given how people drive.
Yes, that missile. Zelensky contradicted western reports that it was Ukrainian AA and stated repeatedly that it was a Russian missile attack on NATO territory.
Then the AI is performing a sort of collage of copyrighted work and the AI / prompt writer would not own the copyright to the derivative work. If a photographer stages a photo based on an existing photo, and it shares enough features with the original work, it likely would be copyright infringement.
Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. Often risking their reputation to do so, and being accused of racism, heresy, deviation-ism, and so on.

Now that crime has risen in the past couple years, it's amazing how many people never said "defund the police" and when confronted with the evidence that they did say that "din't mean it that way."
A glitch/privacy risk associated with the new Bing chatbot feature
>Typescript lets me write the complex logic

What is it about Go that prevents you from writing this complex logic?
No, it is not (nor does it seem feasible). Why not just spin up multiple workers?
> then I guess it won’t be too difficult to construct an impressive mathematical AI.

Yes, we've had Wolfram Alpha for ages. For me, the biggest problem Wolfram Alpha is that it often doesn't understand the questions, and while I also sometimes get that with ChatGPT, the latter is much much better.

I've not had a chance to play with the plug-in that connects GPT to Wolfram Alpha.

> It's very tempting to give these systems the benefit of the doubt, but that tends to lead to hugely inflated conclusions about their capabilities.

This is an excellent and important point.

I think people who treat it as already being superhuman in the depth (not merely breadth) of each skill are nearly as wrong as those who treat it as merely a souped-up autocomplete.

I've only played with 3 and 3.5 so far, not 4, my impression is that it's somewhere between "a noob" and "genius with Alzheimer's".

A noob at everything at the same time, which is weird because asking a human in English to write JavaScript with all the comments in French and following that up with a request written in German for a description of Cartesian dualism written in Chinese is not something that any human would be expected to do well at, but it can do moderately well at.

Edit: I should probably explicitly add that by my usage of "noob", most people aren't even that good at most things. I might be able to say 你好 if you are willing to overlook a pronunciation so poor it could easily be 尼好 or 拟好 (both of which I only found out about by asking ChatGPT), so I'm sub-noob at Chinese.
The point is that at no point in evolutionary history did a cognitive scientist sit down and write a bunch of S-expression GOFAI rules for human cognition.
Or, it has a deep conceptual understanding of its input data, but, it works similar to humans, and during its reasoning it pulls out some facts from memory or hand-waving, which can be wrong.

No mathematician would make this exact mistake because it looks ridiculous, but for example I made similar mistakes multiple times, claiming low numbers prime or not prime wrongly during a reasoning. Especially when working at night.
>does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.

They aren't as the rendering of a website is ultimately always controlled by the client/visitor.

Any website whose semantic is only made of text is infinitely more accessible than another that would use bigger fonts but would include images or content that only render if javascript is activated.

And ultimately, they have every right to make it the way they want.

> Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads)

In the full text maybe, I find much smaller fonts than those on computer.rip in metadatas and subtitles.