skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The media coverage of this (and the title of this submission, which I argue should be changed to the actual title of the bill) are really confusing everyone - both in here and elsewhere.

There is a Senate bill[1] called "S.85 - No TikTok on United States Devices Act", which is very short and seems to only do one thing, and that's ban TikTok. This bill is in committee.

There is another Senate bill[2], called "S.686 - RESTRICT Act", which is the one linked in this submission and is the one everyone is - imo rightly - quite concerned about, because a bunch of stuff seemingly unrelated to TikTok is getting the Department of Homeland Security treatment. TikTok isn't even mentioned in the text of the act. This bill is also in committee.

I'm honestly left wondering if the RESTRICT Act is being intentionally amplified as "The Bill to Ban TikTok", because of how shitty it is, to give people the means to say "no we shouldn't pass this if the cost of banning TikTok is Patriot Act Part Deux", when in reality we shouldn't pass this bill anyway because it sucks.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/85/...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
lol ridiculous.
I grew up in a time that there were 0.~ kids per year getting murdered in school. School was a 'safe place' (insofar you weren't a target for bullies). A place to have fun and learn things. The first time that happened, where a school was shot up. It literally (collectively) fucked us up for days/weeks.

I'm not advocating for guns to be taken away, I believe that ship sailed a couple hundred years ago. But Americans need to get their shit together, that's for sure.
Not what this bill is about. You got tricked by the surrounding rhetoric and you're repeating it like propaganda.
Gambas is a phenomenally good VB-like. It has a repo of libraries, extensions, and sample code for everything from databases to games. It compiles to native code and uses Qt for its widget set. It really goes above and beyond VB while providing the same feel (even if it is not 100% source compatible).
How would such a loop enable it to come to conclusions? I'm genuinely curious.
Does what you're saying have something to do with reinforcement learning?
Who are the "microscopic elite that controls the media"? How many people are in the "uppermost echelons of society" to where they try to influence other people?

From my middle-of-the-road perspective, everyone is trying to change how everyone else thinks, from the small insignificant details to a cult-like brainwash. Even here and now both you and I are trying to change each others and everyone who reads this's mind.

I see so much calling out of "elites" with a negative connotation, yet anyone can post anything, and everyone can ignore it. Is it general paranoia? Do you know who these people are? How are they special/different, and why should we be scared of them?
But in any case, given that AI and automation will soon make the majority of US workers economically unnecessary, it's more important than ever for the powers-that-be to ban end-to-end encryption and guns and maintain full control over social media. Otherwise, the obsolete workers may resist their obsolescence and cause problems for capital instead of being gracefully attrited from society.
Then why does "Google" get tax benefits and not individuals?
FYI: i heard about that in a news article, I didn't actually read the bill.
How striking is it that everybody has so much to say about the dangers of AI.

What if we look at it this way: there are already real-known dangers coming at us: climate change and a change of instability of the world order.

What if we only have one shot to solve these known dangers and what if an exponential growing corpus of smartness could teach us how?

We need to grab that chance, the stakes are too high.

Pausing is not an option. If 99 per cent pauses, the 1 percent that does not obey will have a tremendous advantage.
It’s moving pretty fast, so it hasn’t become a scissor statement yet. Both sides have reasons for disliking TikTok, red because of Cold War China rhetoric and blue because of fake news and children’s mental health rhetoric.
>Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable

This statement by itself sounds reasonable. But for me an interesting thought experiment is to take this letter and imagine the equivalent for some other technology, for example semiconductors in the 1960s, the world wide web in the 1990s, or social media in the late 2000s-early 2010s. It is always true that new technologies have the potential to radically transform society in ways that we can't predict. One could reasonably have said "[semiconductors/the world wide web/social media] should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable". Does that mean that a self-imposed ban on research and development with the threat of a government moratorium would have been justified?

At this point the best case scenario is that society learns to adapt and keep up with technological developments. Every new technology increases our ability to both improve people's lives and harm them in various ways. It's not a good long-term solution to intervene and stop progress every time we gain new capabilities.
The US regulators and government is not tired of collecting money from and imposing fines on all social media and tech platforms, hence why Facebook, Google (YouTube), Instagram, Snap, etc all have been fined by the FTC for privacy violations.

Facebook and TikTok are of similar sizes and have both violated the privacy of its users and since FB has paid a giant billion dollar fine to the FTC, it already makes sense to also fine TikTok on similar grounds including overseas access to US data by specifically targeting US journalists.
layoffs are great for this. they allow companies to shed employees they couldn't justify firing before.
> I'm a professional dev

So you have particularly skewed perspective; you should try a bit of operations, or at least devops, to normalize it.

> Arch perfectly suits my needs

Good for you. You just need to realize that you are minority. Do you notice that Arch is not the dominant distro? There's a reason for that.

> where as Flatpak/Snap... cause excruciating pain every time I'm forced to interact with them

You are holding it wrong ;)

> but Nix

Nix is not exactly a typical immutable system; it has strong opinions about many things, that other systems don't. You can't evaluate other systems through assuming they are like nix.

Nowadays, even MacOS is immutable and people live with it just fine.
Unfortunately, I had to quit using Beeper a few days ago. Ever since they migrated to their new hungryserv, iMessage reliability has gotten steadily worse and worse. It culminated in an entire day of sending iMessages where Beeper gave them all a delivered checkmark... But none of them actually reached their recipients. Was fun explaining to people who were angry I hadn't messaged them back in over a day... I'm back on BlueBubbles now, hopefully it will be more reliable. Overall it's a shame because I'm really rooting for Beeper to succeed. I'm sick of all the existing chat providers.
My main issue is that I think it's wildly unfair that giant corps can pretty much put anything into their content laundering machines without any scrutiny or attribution.

I don't think AI is fair use, and I don't think anyone who released their work under "free for commercial use" licenses could have imagined this type of usage.

So my suggestion would be to make it a requirement that training data has, under terms decided by its authors, been allowed to be used specifically as training data.

And it should be required to implement a way for individuals to check if their data was used for training.
Even so, the principle of proportionality demands that the remedy fit the wrong, and the Court would like to see the state of play of the evidence at the end of fact discovery. At that time, plaintiffs will be better positioned to tell the Court what might have been lost in the Chat communications.

No sanctions for now.
So do the execs at google. And what is "better" anyway? Morality won't pay the bills.. Engineering society to do whatever it is you want society to do is good business however.

You'd hope this is where government and its legislative arm would step in to speak up for the 'citizens' but in fact, government is just the other wing of the same bird.
But when things go right, Google reaps most of the benefits, individuals just get a small piece of the pie. But when things go wrong, you want to blame the individuals instead of the group?
What could it do that isn't already being done? I ask this sincerely. We already have bots constantly attacking every server they find 24/7. We already have botnets

Is the concern that GPT will be able to find and exploit e.g. a novel RCE exploit in SSH?
Constant war mongering regarding China doesn't really help. Which countries has China attacked or invaded over the course of the last 50 years and how many the US? China is a new powerful nation.Change in "leadership" has happened over many centuries. Just get on with it
It’s also worth noting that the Secretary of Commerce is not an elected position.
I'm not sure why a direct communication style is inappropriate. We all learn as developers not to write extra lines of code, to be economical with wire/communication protocols, and to avoid duplicating sources of truth. It's only natural that we extend these principles into our professional communication.

When I use direct language, I am trying to economize the time and energy of everyone listening to me by speaking as clearly and concisely as possible. It's also a style practiced in military communication, where it's taught as the ABCs - accuracy, brevity and clarity. I don't think we as an industry should concede that this style is reserved for jerks.
> Honestly I expect it to happen.

Not as a language model. Other leaps in technology would need to happen before it can code.
In my experience GPT-4 is much better at producing correct code than GPT-3.5. Can you provide an example where it’s not the case?
Or, Plato's Forms are not what we would expect. Because humans are converging on something, and it doesn't fit 'someone's specific concept of ideal', doesn't mean it isn't converging to the Form. That is just arrogantly saying you have more of the 'ideal' in mind than anyone else. But nature can be ugly too, and that is potentially the true 'ideal'.
Transitioning SSE/AVX Code to Neon with SIMDe
> A lot of music that gets stereotyped as background mood music has a lot more depth to it than people realize (who would have thought George Winston was such a weird rabbit hole?)

I actually like that about it. Because it actually lets me distract myself by just stopping and listening rather than going down internet rabbit holes.
Very little Tether (if any these days) is bought with USD. Tether admits themselves they don't hold USD reserves to cover it if it wasn't obvious already from other sources (there is much more Tether being printed than the whole inflow of money to Bahamas banks of which Deltec (Tether's bank) is just one.
> The Court has repeatedly asked Google why it never mentioned Chat until the issue became a substantial problem. It has not provided an explanation, which is worrisome, especially in light of its unlimited access to accomplished legal counsel, and its long experience with the duty of evidence preservation.

courts never stray "outside the case" but I wish they had said "...and google's long experience saving every scrap of information about everybody on the planet they can find, so weird they would delete this information"

ianal, but i think when a court finds you have deleted evidence, that the information deleted is assumed to be evidence against you. It's not the direct sanction against this behavior that is the worst part, but whatever the case is about going against you.
Did you know that all american (or even western) social networks are banned in China?
(I'm not trying to convince you of anything, just making this clear for anyone else reading. also: comment talks about suicide)

> In the old days they pretty much had to learn to accept themselves for who they were and not worry about what other people thought, both because no one was encouraging them they deserved acceptance and because few would have budged.

According to scientific research, around 1/3 of patients with gender dysphoria have attempted suicide in the past. The only medically accepted treatment for gender dysphoria is transition. If you're advocating against that then you're advocating in favor of preventable suffering & deaths.

Also, using human nature as an argument is fallacious.

https://www.psicothema.com/pdf/4483.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9501960/

re re:

I understood your comment to be against social acceptance of trans people, (and honestly still do. Admittedly this isn't a best-faith interpretation of your comment, but it made sense in the context I read it in. )

Therefore, my comment wasn't intended to be only about available medical treatment options (including surgical), but also about social acceptance of trans people, which is a kinda important part of all of this.

If that's not how you intended to mean your comment, that's great, because I agree with you on the medial/surgical side of things.
The Doom Effect
Indeed, and all the local (and unfortunately global incentives, like GDP) are aligned for production, not wealth preservation and quality of life. The reupholster option is the most efficient wealth preservation option and saves production capacity for making new furniture for other people.
No this is a red and blue thing to give themselves more power.
Right, I don't want to talk down gnet, it's neat, but you're basically writing non-idiomatic libevent-style networking code --- ie, very non-idiomatic Go code --- and it seems to me like most of the perf win here is minimizing the number of goroutines you have serving blocking operations, which is not really a problem you're going to have with an NBD implementation.
> For half a decade, I have lived outside of the US, and I've watched as it has fallen to shit in slow motion.

Then you no longer know the place. According to media the US is nothing but school shootings and government censorship.
Well, the newest Avatar movie made a cool $2.25 billion, so... yes?
That's a different comparison to what I was replying to. I'm talking about the "linux doesn't work the same on all devices" vs "mac just works"
Means prawns actually. In Portuguese too.
E.M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops":

“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then
they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that En charmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution....."
Maybe actually try to think about it once, neutrally. If you spend any time around animals like dogs, cats, horses or even cattle, you’ll notice they exhibit signs of a character: they show affection, have bad mornings, nightmares, favourite foods and care for their offspring with what you’d call love in humans.

This pretty clearly indicates some kind of sentience, meaning a feeling of subjectivity (all of this is solidly backed science-wise, by the way) and emotions. Now those animals might experience reality very differently from us, but that doesn’t even matter. What matters is that they experience some kind of subjective reality.

Is it really too foreign of a thought to try and minimise the number of animals that have to live in agony until they are killed, just for that tasty steak on your table?

I don’t want to control your life. I believe this is a logical conclusion thinking will eventually get anyone to, given the effort - and moral integrity.
The federal government has many tools by which they could accomplish this ban. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has a long, successful history of forcing divestiture by foreign owners of domestic assets.

Additionally, app stores and ISPs are a pretty obvious route for blocking 99% of U.S. users from circumventing the ban. Any users who are able to circumvent those measures will be using an app whose network effect has been destroyed.
Missing Meebo! It was truly ahead of its time. I remember the struggle of keeping just 10+ chat windows open, but man, it was a lot of fun to use!
> the same level of sweeping control with the implementation of a Great Firewall

The same level ?
This looks awesome. My only nitpick is, I will suggest transcription integration with whisper.cpp[1], which in my simple CPU based tests (likely your most user base), works much much faster compared to OpenAI whisper

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
More accurately, it's not the gun, it's the people weilding/operating it...

Except corporations are magical things that shield you from consequences of doing illegal things apparently, so nope, Google did it.
So you agree that the Chinese government is doing the right thing when they block a Chinese citizen from viewing Twitter?

You agree with the usage of the Great Firewall? You agree with the ability for the government to tell you what websites you can visit? If you use a VPN to read a Chinese newspaper article, you agree that the government should be allowed to imprison you and take all of your possessions? That's madness IMO.

We should be making Super-TOR instead of this.
> I am fine with banning what is, effectively, a Chinese psyop marketed as a social media app.

As a non-American, I would argue the last 70 years of Hollywood and social media has been a psyop by a foreign power. The DoD literally aids in the making of Hollywood movies as long as their ideological content is "correct"[1]. After all that it's pretty funny to see this kind of pearl clutching about "psyops" coming from American citizens.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof...
Thanks for sharing! Glad you had fun.

GPT4 sometimes insists on adding commentary even though I told it to only reply with code. I need to add a regex to clean up the response and only put the code into the page. I fixed your code manually to remove the explanation.
Wow, really? That's crazy!

My wife and I use WeChat because her family lives in China and we want to be able to chat and do video calls with her. If Secretary of Commerce declares that WeChat is illegal that is going to put an enormous strain on my family.
tiktok doesn't actually incentivize it.

they hosted the videos and banned them as they were reported.

you can't even search the term anymore as it shows a get help button instead.

however i can go on youtube and watch all of the ripped tiktok that people downloaded before it was removed.
An Unstandardized, Decentralized Carnival Fire: How Rare Books Are Cataloged
An open source ChatGPT UI
A Community in Crisis: ChatGPT Token Theft Epidemic in Unity1Week Games
It's the American way.
The organic varieties are much more in line with what a consumer expects to find in Whole Foods --- this retailing choice makes sense to me.
The reality to me is that they want to suppress the Gen Z vote (who predominantly vote democratic) by banning "their" platform. They guise it under a "China vs USA" intelligence war (who makes all the phones and computers we use? Riiiight). It's simply to dumb down the next generation to suppress the vote so that sitting house members can continue to be sitting house members. Prove me wrong.

There's a bunch of 18-28 year olds who are going to be super pissed off.
Meanwhile, experiments to create Synthetic Life, including novel basis for life and possibly new viruses as a lab exercise (that may leak like the GoF virus did in Wuhan) proceed with no oversight or calls for pausing. We can unplug the AI and forbid AI weaponry (except by the state) but we can’t unplug synthetic viruses and new potentially dangerous or superior forms of life once it’s out there. Something very phony about the calculus.
There ain't no stops on this rollercoaster
Thats an odd analogy.

Prusa loves open source and maker mentality. Just look at PrusaSlicer and Printables.
@dang – if you are going to chance it from one piece of editorialized misleading clickbait, don’t change it to another.

Unfortunately, the bill’s official one-line summary (“To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes”) and title (“Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act”) are also misleading, though perhaps not clickbait (they are more to discourage looking inside by making it seem bland than to encourage attention.)

The summary is factually misleading, because the Secretary of Commerce isn’t authorized to prohibit anything by the bill, the President is, and the bill specifically prohibits delegating except to the Attorney-General, and that only for litigation purposes, and it is an obscurant because it is vague about what kind of transactions and why. And the title is basically word salad to fit a forced acronym, though it does hint about the business domain of concern.
if those apartments were $1000/mo for the quality of construction, you pay an extra $1500/mo on top for the surplus enjoyment of living the lifestyle which is intrinsically instagrammable.
From time to time one comes across an extreme version of the "nice but incompetent" character. Not only are they nice and incompetent, they are super optimistic, confident and ambitious.

They pitch their idea to you. It's a terrible idea that for a billion obvious reasons will fail.

What to do? Do you want to be the person to crush somebody's dreams?

It's much easier to say to somebody that they made a mistake compared to saying that they simply suck at something and don't have what it takes.
> What's driving this? That's what the article is about. Is it actually pull from customers, or is it push from the manufacturers?

It's both. Most people don't want a gray car as their first choice, but it's probably more people's second choice than a real color. So red cars sit on the lot for 15.3 days, blue ones for 14.2, and gray for 11.6. Obviously (in MBA terms) the dealer, should order more gray cars. So they sell more gray cars, and the feedback loop means it's now hard to find a blue or red car because, if you ask a dealer, "nobody" buys them. So now the manufacturer just stops making those colors, which makes their life easier, and the cycle is complete.

I begrudgingly have a gray truck and my wife has a silver SUV, because those were basically the only options available, many brands now you can't get a decent color selection if you special order them.
It is Google and inside Google some specific individuals. Corporations are part of the society and their capital is its representation.

Corporations have to be liable and whoever takes benefits has to take this.
"Accomodations" in this case could be something as simple as noise cancelling headphones for employees working in an open plan office. Or a woman wearing a sweater because the office is cold. We don't tend to think of these as a disability measure because the problems are obviously caused by the setup of the work environment.

Expecting people to suffer hardships and learn to work harder instead of using simple tools to improve their productivity is just bizarrely cruel.
Scholar: Traditional Machine Learning Algorithms for Elixir and Nx