skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Whatever is behind my surprise, I am confident that the scientific method will lead to explanations.

I agree! Wholeheartedly so. But for the time being, the scientific method is not being applied. All that's been done is willy-nilly poking of different models and ooh'ing and aaah'ing at what falls off.

Of course, scientific explanations must take into account existing knowledge, the knowledge encoded in accepted scientific theories. We don't have any scientific theory of "understanding", in humans or machines. What we do have is a very clear theoretical and practical knowledge of how language models work. They are machines (in the abstract sense) that estimate the probabilities of sequences of tokens. Any explanation that fails to take this knowledge about what a language model is, and lack of knowledge about what "understanding" is, into account, will have to do a great, big deal of work to present a new theory.

And I would like to see such a new theory. In particular, perhaps we could have a theory of "understanding" in machines, based on current observations of the behaviour of large language models, and the known principles of their design.

But, so far, we have nothing like that! We have hand waving, wild proclamations based on faith and nothing else. It's impossible to reason for or against matters of faith.

>> 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.

I don't find that surprising. There are plenty of examples of systems capable of interacting with humans by generating natural language responses that "could pass as human-generated". For a couple of famous examples, SHRDLU, ELIZA and Eugene Goostman; they should be easy to search for online, otherwise please ask me for links. We know very well by now that this is no way to figure out the capabilities of a system, comparing it to human behaviour. That is particularly so for systems that are specifically created to mimic human behaviour.

You see, that's the big problem we're neck-deep into. Language models are machines that mimic human language production. By observing how good such a system is at producing human-like language, all we can say is how good the machine is at what it's designed to do. We can't draw any other conclusions. Not safely, because there is a great, major, risk of confirmation bias, and of circular reasoning, waiting in the wings. That would be so for any system designed to mimic human behaviour, but for a system that mimics language that's even more so, because it is extremely difficult to disentangle grammatical text from the expectation that it was written using human faculties.

tl;dr: we 're in a bias pit and we'll keep falling down it until someone figures out how to measure the abilities of LLMs somehow else than just poking them.
I really wanted to buy a Husky but they don't go high enough for us tall people. I wish that Husky would add another 3 inches both directions to their range.

Nonetheless, settled with a $250 Flexispot and haven't regretted it. Would still love a Husky as a workbench.
no, it's not a gradient/spectrum. The HN title is just missing extra words, like "Mathematical".

Nobody said that Hans had no intelligence, the point is that Hans doesn't have the kind of intelligence that was being attributed to him from the arithmetic demonstrations.
You try flying an F-15 with 12 to 24 Slammers (and bags since you'll have so much drag. That's going to fly like a pig. Just because Boeing does some demo of it to sell more airframes doesn't mean it's going to be used that way.
This is an interesting observation. Governments officially support inflation, i.e. stealing your hard earned money (as stealing money seem to be better for economy) and you cannot do anything with it.
I posted the video to the whole thread… no game
In theory, yes. In reality, everyone has limited time and energy and it is important to ensure that the pressing problems are not ignored to make time for much less important problems.
Right, but there is zero differentiation there between physical and virtual products. GP implied that there is some sort of protection against price dumping of physical products that doesn't exist for virtual products.
Is this a good time to mention I replaced my library with a kindle some time ago? ^^

(Someone was going to say it.)
There’s a lot we could learn from artists about creative practice and enjoying other people’s work. I often wish I could have gone to a programmer art school.
I think there's something called 'Yabai'.

EDIT: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
A bit out of context, but did you know you can actually write OSA scripts using JS? In Script Editor there’s a menu where you can change the language.
No, again, their conclusion is that 97% who state an opinion on anthropogenic climate change agree with the notion that anthropogenic (literally, “caused by humans”) means, not to put to fine a point on it, “anthropogenic”. You’re trying to infer that the choir doesn’t believe strongly in what that the preacher is preaching… THAT is the non sequitur.

Your dispute isn’t with the consensus of orthodox experts, which this paper does successfully establish, your dispute is with how the media portrays that orthodoxy as being 97% of climate scientists (rather than 97% of climate scientists who stated an opinion).

Regardless, you’re unlikely to get to a rational conclusion on any of this, as you’re nitpicking about the direction the wind is blowing in a hurricane.

Greenhouse gasses affect the environment, this is an indisputable fact of chemistry and physics. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, equally established. Human beings release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere today at a vastly higher scale than has ever been released by any known terrestrial biological source — also indisputable, unless you wish to dispute the Industrial Revolution. If you’re willing to accept that 97% of experts with an opinion believe humans are responsible for a non-zero impact on the client then you’ve already given up all moral impetus for disputing the point… ANY human contribution to climate change is something we must, necessarily, mitigate, eliminate, and reverse… if ANY percentage of climate change is anthropogenic, we’re responsible for it. Moreover, if we’re not responsible for it — a philosophical stance that beggars belief — the point is moot, because we must work to mitigate, eliminate, and reverse non-anthropogenic greenhouse emissions as well, anyway.

Why? Venus… lots of atmospheric carbon dioxide there, not a single human (or, as far as we can tell, living thing). Approximately 100% of climate scientists agree that we cannot survive the climate on Venus, and that allowing our atmosphere to tilt in that direction == bad… any heterodoxy on that point is NOT trustworthy.

Disputing the degree to which humans are causing the problem is INANE, once you’ve accepted the problem exists at all, unless you’re one of those people who believes Jesus will come back and snap His fingers and put all the oil back. Now, if you are one of those people — IIRC one of Little Bush’s energy appointees was big on that theory — then there’s likely little I can do to help, except gently prompt that maybe, maybe, just maybe, assuming that’s Plan A, perhaps — just perhaps — we should put a wee little thought into having a Plan B, just in case.
Whether MAGA want to hurt millions of people, that is the result of conservative policies.

1 million+ unnecessary deaths during the pandemic. Targeting of LGBTQ people, blacks, teachers, librarians, politicians, election officials and even doctors (wtf?). Forced "detransitioning" of trans people. Banning all forms of abortion, even in the case of rape, minors and incest. Banning life-saving abortions, forcing women to carry unviable fetuses to term. And that is just today, they have more plans in store...
A basic rule is that you cannot patent a mathematical formula.

But what you can patent is a novel way of "doing" anything. So if this is a novel way of covering your floor then my guess you could at least try to patent it.
> ntrlly

This one took a moment. (It's "naturally", not "neutrally" or "entirely".)

The rest is surprisingly readable.
Lots of good answers which add a lot more value than mine. I'd like to answer it with an xkcd comic - https://xkcd.com/1425/ that hopefully gets the message across as to why we estimate.
Probably more to do with the opinions and preferences of those admins than anything to do with the distro. Sounds like they didn't know how to manage it, lacked the same visibility into it that they had with Windows or just didn't want to deal with it.
He might be talking about Belenko's defection with a MIG-25 to Hokkaido in the early 1970s. Though neither aircraft is really related to the other except in very basic visual sensibilities (twin engine, twin tail).
I remember them deliberately limiting hash rate of their cards because the did not want them to be used by miners.
Real-Time Charisma as a Service (CaaS) Using GPT-4, Whisper and AR Glasses
> is essential

I like the sentiment, but I think there is a healthy middle ground and really the right answer is for the owner of the book to treat it however they feel brings them the most job.
A bridge between GPT-4 and a headless Chromium browser
A YOLO version of this: https://github.com/refcell/run-wild/commit/7b71a4cd928b4382d...
> online services have cutting edge security with no known exploits, yet you have millions of people attempting daily and developing brand new methods for getting in

Reality is the reverse. Plenty of online services with big-security holes, but no one really probes things that hard.
I couldn’t agree more. I listen to multiple audiobooks sort of intermittently plus multiple podcasts and it’s great to have such a mess. It’s about processing the information. What’s the point of reading a book if you don’t plan to remember it! Even fiction should be memorable I hope
They know it. When you dig down under the surface a lot of freedom evangelists favor religious warlordism or monarchy.
But who knows? I think the objective function is so vague that it can come up with basically anything. I would be super interested to see it actually running. I imagine someone could set up a Twitch stream with this - perhaps with other objectives - and it would probably get a large following
As with so many things attributed to Mark Twain, this was not written by Mark Twain. According to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain:

Actual source: A letter to The Economist (16 January 1971), written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's Words at Play books. This was a modified version of a piece "Meihem in ce Klasrum", published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
The rant on the Windows 11 page is so on-point:

http://toastytech.com/guis/win11.html

What isn't mentioned is that the spacing of the files in Explorer list view is much wider, and (at least for now) you can turn it back to the original spacing with the "compact" view option. A completely useless change for everyone not using a tiny touch screen as their sole pointing device. I absolutely hate this trend of hieroglyphic UI elements floating in a sea of white(or black)space...
- Leaving phone keyboard clicks turned on.

- The crazy for mounting stolen school PA megaphones on cars and push bikes, often just to play Celine Dion.

- Flat smoke detector beeps. If I can’t find the damn thing after 20 beeps, please just catch fire. I don’t want the house anymore.

The person who makes a device that mutes noise for your home (or even just bedroom) will transform cities for the better.
“employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business”

By “employees” in your first sentence I assume you mean the C-suite?
Part of the problem with these sorts of analyses is that it looks as 'crypto' as a class rather than specific cryptos. Monero is actively used as a currency, and I'd say a much higher percentage of its userbase uses it for that purpose compared to other cryptocurrencies.
It's junk based on what? Racial inferiority? Why feed stats to someone who isn't interested in reality?
I thought this was a great read for a high-level overview of Figma's approach: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
> Wow, being sarcastic about AI! (...)

OP presented a clear and insightful comment on these critiques of AI.

You, on the other hand, added zero to the discussion.

If you have nothing to add, add nothing.
Correct, anti-trust law can introduce a lot of rules prohibiting actions that would be fine if it weren't for the monopolistic position of the actor. But as mentioned in the other comment, there's no differentiation there between physical and virtual products.
> To me it's very weird people compare AI to crypto. Except that there's a lot of hype behind them and they're fundamentally a technology (and tend to be run on a GPU), they don't have anything in common.

is that not enough?
Because we printed trillions of dollars and haven’t come close to removing all that excess stimulus yet - nor have any supply side constraints that existed prior to Covid been removed.
I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!
> We're end-to-encrypted, which I think this crowd will appreciate.

Yes, we do! Just curios why this doesn't currently include files and images? Some of the most sensitive info in my notes is inside PDF, e.g. contracts.

> "We do not end-to-end encrypt things like files or images you upload"
https://reflect.academy/security-and-encryption
I think early adopters more excited about being able to communicate in a fundamentally new way. The internet is more like the invention of the radio or tv.

Crypto is more like the invention of electronic cryptographically secure beanie babies with a semi-fixed supply.
What is ignored by the media – but will be studied by historians? [thread]
UBI doesn't prevent available productive work. It doesn't take jobs away. How does it force people to no longer be productive members of society?
We don't want constant team growth. It's the managers, the psychopaths, the ladder-climbers that do. And they are rewarded for any growth, as that's the only measure the higher-ups know, and the one they used to get where they are so it can't be so bad.

For startups, it's the investors who know only to measure growth because there is no expected profit until the bing bang happens.
What would be interesting is a 3D mono-tile to cover 3D space.

A SUPER LEGO.

Assuming such a block also had like 13 or so sides I think you could keep such "bricks" together without glue and build houses and anything. Then disassemble if needed and build a different house.
>If you must work hard and be efficient, consciously pick that work

With this one sentence, the whole dichotomy proposed by the article falls apart. It all depends on what gives your life meaning and what your goals are. If you primarily derive meaning from having experiences with friends and family, then it absolutely makes sense to devalue productivity. If you primarily derive meaning from creating artifacts that will survive for a long time and provide benefit to humanity, then it's hard to see why you shouldn't optimize for productivity.

A lot of the anti-work, anti-productivity discourse seems to revolve around this assumption that some things are more meaningful than others independent of individual preferences. If people really value competence in a certain domain and "getting ahead" is important to them, what ground is there to stand on to say that they're wrong?
Books are expensive.

Sure, I am currently earning enough money to be able to afford messing up my books if I wanted to but it feels so wasteful. Feels so weird to purposely vandalize your own stuff. I prefer making notes in a separate medium and keeping my books clean.

I like being able to gift or sell my books to other people. Plus, I might want to re-read them and I really dislike having any annotations in them. I feel like it would stop me from having a "fresh read".
I don't think it's controversial to say that MiG-21 compared favorably to its contemporaries when introduced. Afaik it successfully fought off newer, much more expensive, American F-4s in Vietnam war.
Well, most of the other sources would hate that I think there's something to get out of Marx too! Jim Grant is about as hardcore libertarian as you can get. The longer I watch and trade markets the more I see the value of ideological flexibility and being able to synthesize many different and even contradictory perspectives.
That's why I'm asking what I'm asking, but Open Source is also not guaranteed to be funded.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the recursive prompting.

The other day I considered feeding computer vision (with objects ID’d and spatial depth estimated) data into an robot embodied LLM repeatedly as input and asking what it should do next to achieve goal X

You could have the LLM express the next action to take based on a set of recognizable primitives (ex: MOVE FORWARD 1 STEP) Those primitive commands it spits out could be parsed by another program and converted to electromechanical instructions for the motors.

Seems a little terminator-es que for sure. After thinking about it I went to see if anyone was working on it and sure enough this seems close: https://palm-e.github.io/ though their implementation is probably more sophisticated than my naive musings
The Sex Pistols were a boy band, Lydon had a brief window of authenticity with PIL but has, in the last decade or so, become a caricature of himself, to the point of endorsing Thatcherism. Lydon today overtly rejects what he ostensibly "stood for" in the era of the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. You couldn't come up with a better illustration of how un-punk crypto is than a Johnny Rotten NFT.
LangChain is a great workaround for that. [1]

> how to work with a memory module that remembers things about specific entities. It extracts information on entities (using LLMs) and builds up its knowledge about that entity over time (also using LLMs).

[1] https://python.langchain.com/en/latest/modules/memory/types/...
It’s quite tricky to find interesting screen shots of Symbolics stuff. Weirdly I found more interesting stuff in old product demonstration videos on YouTube than I did in still images.
I don't understand what value this tool adds over the library it uses under the hood (which includes a command line tool for exporting your notes; I've been using it for years). What is it for?
I was under the impression that the crypto industry—and by extension the mining of it—went into a skid when China (re)banned its use
> You might be happier using a different desktop environment.

What other desktop environment can you use in RHEL without adding third-party repos (which a lot of companies don't allow)?
“Ethical” AI seems boring.
People are lonely.
> but whenever I look at it, it seems like there are a ton of sneaky config options that one must get right to get a working system...

Well, on any system there are tons of sneaky config options that one must get right to get a working system; it's just that on non-nixos, those aren't deterministic/version-control friendly/reproducible/centralized.
Yeah. Not to criticize anyone else's take but, unless something is some variant of a "coffee table book" meant to be appreciated in part for its form, anything is fair game. Most cookbooks I regularly use have scribbling in the margins as well as reference books of other sorts. I have zero issue with taking notes in a paperback. Perhaps obviously, I like/prefer ebooks for a lot of purposes too.

The form of some books is a lot of the experience and in general I won't mess that up by writing in them. But most are about the words and I don't consider the form sacrosanct in any way.
This was also my path. I'm still surprised that stm32 development is not more widely taught. I'm also surprised that products like the leaflabs maple didn't take over.
The teacher manipulates the student for the student's benefit. The business owner / manager manipulates the employee for the business' benefit.

See how you needed to use a teaching example to not make it sound bad?
The server's clock should indeed be UTC, with the timezone translation done according to the user profile configuration.
How does using this allow the user at run-time to specify that a task should only have read access to X and dynamically give write access to fu.bar?
It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time though – with https://github.dev/github/dev it seems like Github is trending towards trying to solve similar problems as Vercel or Replit.
I do wonder if developers would accept the same from people they "employ" to do a task.

I imagine sometimes I renovate my kitchen, an expensive task, within my budget but with not a lot of leeway, I can't renovate the kitchen twice for example. If the workers say they don't know how long it will cost and they won't provide an estimate to when ... I would not be happy.

Even creatives, writers, musicians, graphic artists have deadlines and must estimate their work.

But we feel that our work is special and should not be asked to give an estimate.
Corporations can merge financially to create one entity. Close enough to marriage,
I can see of course why clients want deadlines, but I can't help but imagine that deadline-based work is somehow antithetical to who we are as humans. We are supposed to go out and make what we can of the daylight, then retire satisfied that any work towards foraging or the homestead is good work. You don't set out to forage x amount in y days; you forage for a period of time and see what you end up with by the end. There is no deadline or quota to meet for this sort of work, nor can one provide any estimates because things are often well out of your hands, controlled by the forces of nature.

Not all that many jobs grant you the opportunity to work like this in the modern knowledge worker domain, unfortunately, so we are constantly stressing ourselves out with these self imposed "deadlines" that go against the sensibilities of how our species evolved. Of course you end up grey haired and stressed out before long, we aren't built for this. Maybe a job that allows you time to venture into the woods and come back at your own pace so to speak is the kind to have for a low stress life, perhaps one a little better suited to our underlying biology.
do the pinouts become 3.3v instead of arduino uno 5v?
Yes, of course it does. But there are losses, and then there are losses. 10-year yields going from 1.56% in 2021 to 4% in 2023 is equivalent to a price drop of 17% (given maturity in 2031). If 10-year yields had only been, say, 3% in 2021 before rising to 4%, the bond price drop would have been closer to 7%.
Protecting data with ITimeLimitedDataProtector interface in ASP.NET Core
From your article on how you wrote that:

> I've been stubbornly refusing to learn AppleScript for nearly twenty years at this point. Thanks to ChatGPT I can continue not to learn it, but I can now use it to solve problems

The Apple scripting stuff can also use JavaScript. It might be better to continue not to learn in JavaScript instead of AppleScript, if ChatGPT is as adept at Apple scripting in JavaScript as it seems to be in AppleScript.

That way if you want to tweak what ChatGPT gives you it will probably be easier. With AppleScript both interacting with other things and control flow or computation can be weird and confusing. With JavaScript at least the control flow and computation will likely be more normal.
I see these kinds of posts with gpt-9 or gpt-7 ... Never with gpt-5. I'm pretty sure it happens with gpt-5.