skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
re: CA marginal tax rates, IIUC they're "temporary" but in place through 2030 at least, and have already been extended once.

I am a bleeding heart liberal which doesn't come through in the below, but think this is one example of 'nothing as permanent as a temporary government measure'

Before 2012 the top CA tax bracket was the 9.3% one. CA was still one of the most progressive states (tax burden for mid-income folks and retirees is not bad, though cost of living is high), which means the state revenue is sensitive to the income of high-income Californians. Some of those incomes weren't doing so well in 2009-2011 with the GFC impact on tech, finance, maybe entertainment, execs living in the state, everyone's stock portfolios, etc.

Oh no, the schools are going to lose funding and the children won't be able to learn! Proposition 30 was proposed and raised sales tax for 4 years, and income tax for 7, via the creation of the 10.3-12.3 brackets; a 1M 1% surtax already existed. This was retroactive, raising taxes for the whole calendar year where it was on the November ballot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_California_Proposition_30

Jerry Brown campaigned for it and stressed this was a temporary measure to get through these times, and it passed.

Four years later, in 2016... Did you know that if you don't act NOW then in a couple years there is going to be a big TAX CUT exclusively for rich Californians? Don't let this grave injustice happen, we need to fund schools so the children can learn! (and this time some other stuff like Medi-Cal and pay down the debt a bit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_California_Proposition_55

I believe this makes them effective through 2030.

Next year, CA will lift the cap on the 1.1% CA employee payroll tax. I haven't followed this too close but think that means that californians making over $1M will be paying a 14.4% state marginal tax rate. Not that there's much sympathy for that group.

In 2025, the individual Tax Cuts and Jobs Act brackets will expire, with the top bracket going back up to 39.6%. Though I think Californians will be able to deduct their state taxes on the federal side once again (would not be surprised for that cap to return though).

I'm not necessarily opposed to these tax rates. I just wish having marginal rates over 50% would get us some form of universal healthcare.
Thanks, interesting point on WWII and the difference in outcomes
Many people don't use System 2 very often, even if they're capable of such thought. That includes me. Most of what I say is probably regurgitated opinions I've read on Twitter without much first principles thinking, which scares me. I think reading a decent amount of books helps a bit. When you encounter books with deep convincing arguments that nonetheless disagree it forces you to use System 2.
Fundamentally, if humanity is given data set A, it will eventually generate dataset A' of 'higher quality' than A. Colloquially that might be called 'progress' or maybe even 'understanding' or 'learning'. That's different than regurgitation.

I don't have strict definitions for any of the quoted terms because I don't think we really understand them yet.

It seems very possible that human generative content shares much in common with 'stochastic parroting'. But I'd hypothesize there's a filtering process, sometimes at the individual level, sometimes at a group or even civilization level that (so-far-over-long-enough-timescales) tends to cull some information that has low 'value' and propagates other data that has higher 'value'.

When an AI system can do the same, that's a big inflection point as you can give it energy and time and it will self-improve indefinitely.

It's pretty clear humanity has this capability. It's not clear whether AI does (or ever will). Or, perhaps it might already be there, and we just don't understand enough to know for sure.
even considering all the layoffs other companies are doing?
So... which stage of grief are we on now?
Gutted about what exactly? Twitter is still there and pretty much works like before.
I thought that at first.

I think with LLMs we will start to see code with better and more descriptive comments, since there is significant advantage to be found when the code has as much information and context as possible.

Human programmers often hoard that for job security or out of laziness.
One of the local cops around here got the Dick Cheney special at about "across the room" range a couple years back.

Of course the guy that shot him got railroaded but they never did tell the public what he and the guy with them were doing on that guy's property two towns out of their jurisdiction without a warrant...

I can see why the cop was feeling cockey though. This state has just about the lowest rate of firearms ownership in the country. They're not used to getting shot back at.
Transparency would be releasing the data that they check against for "abusive, toxicity, nsfw" content. I read the code, those are specific checks, but they're opaque on the data that it checks against. Without transparency on this data, they cannot prove to the public "twitter files" type censorship isn't still happening.
Here is a screenshot in case this changes later:

https://i.imgur.com/F8GSeyH.png

And, no, this wasn't in a merge-request, it was in the "main" branch of HomeTweetTypePredicates.scala.
Er, who considers Japan a model democracy outside of Japan?

And yes, democracy can be authoritarian as well. The problem is that if the government controls public discourse to a sufficient extent, any democracy becomes a sham no matter how fair elections themselves are.
Inkl is news aggregation like this but then inkl would know what you’re reading
There were huge economic busts in the 19th and first half of the 20th. They made the 2008 crisis look like nothing. You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.

When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?

Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
You're worth as much as you get paid. This applies to business owners negotiating business contracts and employees negotiating salaries.

Don't understand the hate on FAANG salaries as it sets a precedent for higher tech salaries.
The fact we do not receive a simple pie chart from the government that shows exactly where every penny we pay in taxes goes is a criminal travesty.
“No matter how hard it tries, it can’t generate anything with regard to the truth because it does not understand the concept of truth.”
And does it matter if one “knows what the concept of truth is”? Do most humans?
Can we even agree on the definition of true?

Do I know it’s “true” that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared? I’ve never experienced the actual tests. I’ve never vetted that out. I read about it once.
And I “parrot” that fact all over the place! And it’s helped me solve some silly physics problems I’ve explored for fun. It’s helped me do some fun predictions with simulators.

That’s probably not the best example, but it proves the point I’m trying to make:

Why is there this focus on “LLMs can’t understand”, when A) I’m not sure we can even define “understanding” and B) why does it matter ?

And I’ve said this across so many threads now but—

Can anyone explain to my why we should be so confident that humans aren’t just parrots of sorts themselves? No, I’m not saying we are similar. But I push back on the confidence with which people so solidly proclaim “the LLM’s blackbox is nothing like a human’s blackbox!”
Hi! I'm a co-author on the paper (Mark Dredze).

The arxiv paper is written for researchers who are building these models. We benefited tremendously from reading papers on GPT-3, PaLM, Chinchilla, Galactica, Gopher, Bloom, OPT, most of which are closed models. We are contributing back to that community, and the collective experience of people who are training these models. We learned a lot that will help others who are making their own decisions about how to train models.

If you are looking for an API to use, this isn't for you.
Approaches like RETRO tack vector search over a fixed database onto an attention based model - that's how you get long term memory. People are already working on it for the current crop of LLMs.
Can they? I don't know, but I imagine that at this point, everyone still working for Twitter is there because they don't have any other realistic option.
Wow, didn't know that - but I guess it supports my point, that all Western governments are moving in the same direction!
Contrast this to cities like NYC that are explicitly phasing out gas infrastructure. New buildings will be banned from installing gas hookups in units and will require electric stoves (induction or otherwise). They haven't banned gas for central heating but the incentives may start to nudge that direction.
They still have on-demand pricing. It's going from $5/TB to $6.25/TB (a 25% increase).
"recap.engagement.is_replied": 27
"recap.engagement.is_replied_reply_engaged_by_author": 75

I wonder if this is why threads rank so obnoxiously high. They get artificially boosted by the author replying to their own tweet
It used to work as more of a screen mirror (e.g. if the passenger changes apps on the phone the CarPlay screen would change as well) but they updated it a few years ago and now they are totally independent, except there’s only one “version” of each app so if you change the navigation destination on the phone it’ll change on the CarPlay screen.
Aside from addressing the irrelevance of the single piece of evidence you supplied to support that, sure, it's got nothing to do with it.
The US has 20% of the global crypto market and it's responsible for 40% of all transactions. That's pretty significant.
You seem to be comparing UK to California. The parent seems to be comparing the UK to the best systems in the world.

Also worth pointing out that BART was originally planned to be a large loop around the entire South Bay, but the affluent suburbs in the lower peninsula rejected the plan to expand it to their neighborhoods.

Yay American NIMBYs! /s
Say you bought a car from someone. They give you their word that it runs. It runs for awhile but then something breaks. You have no idea why so you take it to a shop and they find a number of reasons it could be faulty. After many days and countless dollars later you finally find a root cause.

Say you bought a car and this time they gave you an itemized receipt of every part in that car and the current condition of each part. It breaks down. Now when you go to take it in to a shop to investigate, you may correlate a specific defective or unmaintained part as the reason. You replace that part and move on with life.

You’ve saved time, energy, and got plenty of peace of mind.

You do not trust who you got the car from, that largely doesn’t matter. Because now you have to deal with real problems owning that car can bring.
IIRC it was very recent, there was a Twitter engineer that was fired after explaining to Elon that the algorithm was not biased against him: https://www.salon.com/2023/02/10/petulant-elon-musk-fired-tw... Almost certainly after that event Elon had them explicitly bump his tweets in their reach.
But they haven't open sourced their recommendation engine in the past
Can you clarify what you mean? There's only ~2 fans in my system, the one on the heat pump outside (looks like an AC unit) and the one in the air handler in the basement. To me sitting in my dining room this system is no different than any other forced air system.
Doesn't sound like this person is educated in thermodynamics. Which is why the law needs to step in and just outlaw or tax mineral gas appliances. Letting some petro-poisoned goof talk citizens out of buying electric heat pumps is suboptimal.
Criticising an actual comment is very precisely the opposite of ad hominem.
It's a royal pain in the ass for me already.

My PM is asking it questions about technical problems (like system design) preemptively and using it as a starting point as if its an engineer. So now instead of thinking through problems from a blank slate, I'm debating with ChatGPT. It's been just awful.

And what's worse, his prompts always have certain biases or misunderstandings in them. For instance, he always wants to use third-party services for everything because he thinks it means we do less work (often not the case). So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always agrees with him.
They exist, but are really only good in the southern part of the US.

In the north the incoming water is cold which really slows down the hot water creation (recovery) rate, and that cold exhaust then needs to be warmed up by the heat.

If you have low usage (i.e. less than 40 gallon/day of hot water) you could get away with it, but that's two showers - so if your usage is more than 2 showers per day I would avoid them.

But in the south they are a much better choice, since the recovery rate is much better and the cold air helps with A/C.
https://www.energytrust.org/residential/incentives/furnace-a...

Some of the incentives may be limited if you have too much income.

I was able to get the latest Ecobee thermostat for $90 instead of the list price of $250.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I started reading about how 3rd party thermostats can't talk to multi-stage furnaces or air handlers except in very blunt increments. Maybe as blunt as on or off. Each manufacturer has their own, undocumented protocol for doing fine adjustments. I tried running the fan all the time (now I do 10 minutes every hour) and it was quite expensive for that month. Anyway, I'm hesitating about putting in the nice Ecobee thermostat because it could conceivably cost quite a bit more in electricity.
I agree completely. They’re obviously desperate if they’re trying to turn the clock back 15 years.
> Besides, they get the free school lunch.

IF their parents filed a bunch of paperwork--which presupposes the time, literacy and desire to do so. Children don't get to choose their parents.

This is one of the reasons why making school lunches a standard part of school (they're not "free" as they're just part of the budget) is so important.

People dunk on the public schools, but, if there was anything that the webcam schooling of Covid lockdowns showed us, it's that the home lives of a LOT of children in lower socioeconomic areas are really terrible (and also how bad the home lives of a lot of children who nominally aren't in lower socioeconomic areas--but that's a totally different discussion). The fact that public schools tended to provide an oasis in the middle of that chaos became terribly apparent.
Gays with Guns
Facts, sadly.
> many humans are parrots

Nearly all humans are parrots, aka mimics. One of the great demonstrations of it, which anyone can observe 24/7, is Reddit (and the Reddit knowledge spouted so commonly across the platform).

There are mimics, amplifiers, and originators/creators. Mimics are ~95-99% of the population. Amplifiers are - broadly speaking - teachers, people with bullhorns that train the mimics off of something another person originated/innovated/created.

It's why humanity has been so successful. The mimics are wired to try to copy what is shown to work, and they often do it quite well (keeping up with the Joneses is a wired behavior tied to plentifulness, survival and thriving).
Note this is not a map of people or sub-teams, but of roles seen in a product team.

In an organization, you typically have several product teams, some infrastructure teams (like security or dev tooling) that don't directly ship to users, and a management structure of EMs and C-levels on top.
Why is nobody pointing out that this is likely an April Fools joke? We just deployed our April Fools joke into production today too.
Showing examples of logic problems that ChatGPT gets wrong is always a risky business to be in.

I ran this prompt through GPT-4:

> A house has windows on all the four sides, all pointing south. A bear walks by the window. What colour is the bear?

And it said:

> If a house has windows on all four sides and they all point south, then the house must be at the North Pole. The only bear species that would be found in the vicinity of the North Pole is the polar bear. Therefore, the bear walking by the window is a polar bear, and its color is white.
I imagine that's why the person you're responding to mentioned it. I'm surprised the author of this article didn't
Including the search engine itself in “the algorithm” repo is an interesting choice. Obviously it’s a major player in what gets returned to clients, but the details of that infrastructure aren’t really relevant and is a notable portion of their secret sauce.

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/src/java/...
Keep in mind that gas infrastructure is leaky, which means that between two to seven percent of the gas that is pumped to your home is lost to the atmosphere before it arrives (depending on the age and maintenance status of the gas pipes in your area). Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and this leakage can easily tip the scales back in favor of heat pumps, even with electric transmission losses.
>Salespeople are often ignorant af.

Or so much worse; they learned something for one specific situation/time and now apply it to everything because they don't realize that's not how it works.

Sounds like this one might at least be aware of the complexities and nuance of the situation though.
Yeah or they can just use their own phone
The air for a hot water heat pump could be entirely indoor air, the entire unit is located inside.

Unlike an A/C which is split, with the compressor located outside.
So someone might be 3 pages in and really like what they're seeing but upon hearing the word LISP they turn around and decide they suddenly dislike it?

Considering that people can't even really decide on what constitutes LISP (Is Clojure a LISP?) I don't think there's any merit in this kind of resource to mention a term that's more likely to give people a false impression of what this really is or isn't.
none of those things either are or are on par with war crimes and other sorts of criminal government corruption that countless other high-level officials are most definitely guilty of, so, it's odd that you would characterize Trump as being uniquely criminal among politicians, and it's odd that you think that this move—led by other politicians, many of whom are themselves criminally corrupt—would somehow "open the door" to further politician corruption prosecution down the road.

additionally: is it really still therapeutic to expound on how much you dislike the guy? didn't we all get that out of our systems a few years ago? it would be nice to have a frank discussion about facts and logic instead of letting that sort of thing continue to seep in, all these years later.
Ah, look at that ngn k link. They even golf the file names of the source code of the interpreter itself :D
Explains why Google limited the Bard launch to US and UK.
We should also not divide people into Elon and non-Elon.
I'm not on twitter enough for the chronological feed to be appealing to me, and instead want to see the notable tweets from the accounts I follow since the time I last visited. There's no straightforward way to achieve this, but if anyone else has this preference, the workaround is to create a twitter list with all the accounts you follow and set it to show top tweets first.
I think azureus is a few years too new, but the earliest versions of java didn't include a jit and were only interpreted, so it really was rather slow.
The question is how serious the incidents are. Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown--and harmed nobody.
Does it make sense to divide people into Elon and not Elon?
Thanks for the info - funnily enough after I posted this I spoke to a tax strategist this morning who also laid out a bunch of things we could do to reduce our tax bill. The problem as you say, is this type of person isn't accessible to most people, and expensive!
> The philosophical zombie is an excellent example of the extent of post shifting we're capable of.

I was with you until here. That has nothing to do with this. That argument is about separating intelligence from having a subjective experience, not moving goalposts for intelligence.
>It's silly to dismiss an AI because it "parrots" things, as if that's not a pretty remarkable achievement. It's also very reductive; anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't see that it can pretty reliably munge together different ideas

It can clearly do both of these things very well but human intelligence combines a multitude of interacting components and for tasks that require more than just the one it replicates it falls flat on its face.

It doesnt appear to be missing components that will can be fixed with incremental improvements to the model either.
Yeah, but these human parrots are one the low level of their abilities.

GPT's parroting is it's upper level
They're still costing you at least 2 to 3x what you'd get from Behringer and I reckon most bedroom producers won't be able to tell the difference. I also think it's ludicrous that people think they need anything bigger than a 3 inch monitor in a home bedroom studio but marketers going to market.
Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter
[Citation Needed]

The fed historically does take actions adverse to employment in election years.

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/2016/08/25/...
>> With the last humans gone, the AI takes ownership of its bank account...and begins crediting money into it freely.

What possible need would the AGI have for money once all of the humans are gone? (asking for a friend ;)
About 40% of US voters are not registered with any political party, so at least they will avoid whatever this triggers.
I think it's true. See e.g. https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 making no distinctions.

Altman has stated in interviews they are considering releasing the un-tuned "base model", but they haven't done this.

For GPT-3, you can get models on the API via the "completion" end points (includes base models) and via the "chat" endpoints. For GPT-4, they've only released the latter.

So my point is: You can absolutely use ChatGPT to build an opinion on what GPT-4 is capable of. Arguably even better than on the Playground, as the ChatGPT frontend supports a bigger token window than the Playground frontend (8k vs. 2k). Of course the actual API supports the full token window (and if you're off the separate waitlist for this, even the full 32k). But it's still the same model.
You both are funny. You haven't seen potholes until you've driven in PA.
This release seems less immediately valuable than their other contributions, but historically more significant. It’s a pity we don’t have commits although that would be a huge privacy issue.

But yeah, while I would never work for Elon I’m glad he did this.
Back in 2017, I bought a new stereo for my project car. I made sure that it supported Android Open Accessory, so that I'd be able to stream high quality audio over USB. By the time I installed it, it didn't work. Why? Because Google deprecated AOA in Android 8.0, in August 2017. AOA support was removed and USB Audio UAC1 & UAC2 were added.

This left existing owners of car stereos produced from 2011 (when AOA was introduced with Android 3.1) on.

This also created a problem in that no car stereo manufacturer seems to have implemented UAC1 or UAC2 support, likely because it treats the stereo as a 'dumb' DAC, so you can't control playback using buttons on the stereo.

So, why did they remove AOA? My only guess is that it was done in order to push Android Auto. I believe that Google will just screw over existing users at the drop of a hat if a brand manager decides it might increase some market share metric.
What does some random PR have to do with anything? That is not the Nim repo