skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that the US and China are effectively engaged in a cold war, this "commitment" means virtually nothing. Sure, all commercial production and distribution may have been restricted, but I would bet that would not stop their military or intelligence organizations from continuing to engage in this form of social warfare. The CIA has done much worse with less at stake.
I think this method works because it exposes you to more books than you'd otherwise get to, increasing the chances you'll find a great one.
This is such a sick burn.
The "making up leaves" story was incorrect. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750660
We've known how to solve opioid addiction for decades: give people opportunity, hope and community and they won't choose to escape reality. Rat park generalized to humans.

Our politicians would rather feed the drug-incarceration-industrial complex than serve our society at the expense of their rent seeking patrons.

We don't have zero idea what to do: the solution is just something that people who are part of this machine refuse to grok.
Is that something the us gov had the authority to do? I’m skeptical it does
I went into great detail to prove my point. What would you say I am missing?
As someone who writes (not Unity) C# for a living, what is going on here? Does Unity maintain it's own, non-standard version of C# and it changed the behavior of null?
iCloud Numbers
Russia is already on its way to becoming a vassal state to China, they only need to stay the course.
The US has a mixed system. Tariffs exist raising the price of everything in the US. Farming, tech get boatloads of money. Illusion of a free market.
There's lots more of these kinds of problems.

Fermat's Last Theorem used to be one of them.

Another one (that's actually solvable by mere mortals) is the 'firing squad synchronization problem':

> The name of the problem comes from an analogy with real-world firing squads: the goal is to design a system of rules according to which an officer can command an execution detail to fire so that its members fire their rifles simultaneously.

> More formally, the problem concerns cellular automata, arrays of finite state machines called "cells" arranged in a line, such that at each time step each machine transitions to a new state as a function of its previous state and the states of its two neighbors in the line. For the firing squad problem, the line consists of a finite number of cells, and the rule according to which each machine transitions to the next state should be the same for all of the cells interior to the line, but the transition functions of the two endpoints of the line are allowed to differ, as these two cells are each missing a neighbor on one of their two sides.

> The states of each cell include three distinct states: "active", "quiescent", and "firing", and the transition function must be such that a cell that is quiescent and whose neighbors are quiescent remains quiescent. Initially, at time t = 0, all states are quiescent except for the cell at the far left (the general), which is active. The goal is to design a set of states and a transition function such that, no matter how long the line of cells is, there exists a time t such that every cell transitions to the firing state at time t, and such that no cell belongs to the firing state prior to time t.

It's fun to work out.
The world as we know it can end multiple times, with different ways of knowing it.

The physical world will remain in its place (unless a very improbable event happen), but things changed drastically around many singular events, several in our lifetimes. Personal computers, internet, 9/11, iphone, snowden, facebook, and more are some examples that meant an end of the world as we used to know it. Probably AIs will be more akin to those examples than, i.e. end of civilization or extinction.
What does this mean for APIs that do response wrapping?
It sounds like you're describing some bad judgement calls.

And I agree with you. I remember the ELAC speaker review you're referring to. In fact, a friend of mine had a friendly business relationship with the speaker designer. He spent (wasted) a lot of time doing damage control thanks to that review. And while the speaker designer remained professional and polite in public, I am told that he had some much spicier remarks in private as one would suspect. So I think Amir was quite wrong there.

But I don't think some isolated bad calls mean that ASR is not science-driven. By and large, he gets it right and his contributions have been tremendous. We're talking about a handful of controversial moments... versus literally thousands of quality objective reviews and a real wealth of data.
why not just run whisper from the command line directly? Why put it into a docker container??
Agree with this. Once a self-help author publishes the second or third book, it’s time to consider what more can they offer. Didn’t their first book solve everything? Or are they just doing it for the money.
Google senior management seems out of touch. It baffles me, since they got the money and the influx of talent. If you got those things, how you use it becomes the problem and that is all on management. Google might have become the old school corporate incapable of innovating or producing new modern business lines. having worked in those corporate environments, I can say that badly incentivized management can kill any giant of industry.

Its been going on for some time. Something that was once a joke in good jest AKA Google's graveyard, is now their actual reputation, and helping their strong big tech competitors when competing on new services.
Also, this kid doesn’t appreciate how truly bad computers used to be not that long ago.

Modern computers may not exude bespoke craftsmanship, but they certainly are designed with an eye towards aesthetics.

What he’s done is very cool though. I would love to see a diversity of form factors for desktop machines beyond rectangles.
Folia – fork of Paper with regionised multithreading
> Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats.

I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days.

I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality).

wav: 434MB
flac: 249MB
mp3 (-V0): 80MB

A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio.

Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now...

Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here.

In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match.

https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."
The author's proposed solution is:

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

How is this less violent than bombing data centers? His proposal is literally "bomb datacenters plus a bunch of other stuff".
It’s not always just about what is “allowed in US states” but making it easy for addicts who need a solution to be locally accessible vs just as easily going on the corner with $10 for another high. I was purposefully being colourful saying Suboxone was handed out like candy in Canada but it probably needs to be to compete with the wide availability of Fentanyl and other drugs.

I should also note that being in favour of harm reduction doesn’t mean tolerating Portland style appeasement of crime and public
…craziness. The baby is often thrown out with the bath water with this stuff and it doesn’t have to be that way. But that overreaction goes both ways in terms of dealing with the drug problem.
I dont think it’s intentional.

With heroin, you can eyeball an appropriate dose even if it’s 100% pure.

You cant do that with fentanyl.
Here's a proposal: let's just start WWIII, get it over and done with. By the time it's over no country will be technologically capable of anything resembling AGI.
Been using system message with GPT4 and it's supposed to follow that better, but that's a good idea. Will experiment with that.

Cost is somewhere between 1 cent to 10 cents per iteration (follow up iterations include all previous code so it's a lot of tokens).
They aren't hiding that, though? Literally the first graphic on the page shows their claim of a "word error rate" on test data has an error rate of around 14% in the best case compared to the state of the art at 15% (for en-US content).

It's only 1% better than the current state of the art. But it's still noteworthy. From the end of the abstract:

> We demonstrate that utilizing a large unlabeled multilingual dataset to pre-train the encoder of our model and fine-tuning on a smaller set of labeled data enables us to recognize these under-represented languages. Moreover, our model training process is effective for adapting to new languages and data.

It's amazing to me that the chaotic process of "machine learning" can end up with an internal state for languages that is readily adapted to entirely new languages.

For now, they've got this handling audio transcription, but with some hints that this approach could work well for translation. Perhaps we'll be able to use these improved models to decipher Linear A[0] or other un-deciphered languages. It sounds like "magic", but it's the kind that could maybe exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
> Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable.

This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer...

> If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling.

> Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats.

The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible.

> Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.
The price increase at Baremetrics almost balanced itself out
I mean the conspiracy argument would be that the $10B isn't a normal investment. It's a special government project investment facilitated by OpenAI board member and former clandestine CIA operative and cybersecurity executive Will Hurd through his role on the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel the investment arm of the CIA. It's funneled through Microsoft instead of through Google in part because of Google's No-Military-AI pledge in 2018 demanded by its employees, after which Microsoft took over its military contracts including project Maven. The new special government project, the Sydney project, is the most urgent and ambitious since the project to develop nuclear weapons in the mid twentieth century.

Of course I don't necessarily believe any of that but it can be fun to think about.
It was no secret that Microsoft had designs on putting ads on Bing Chat someday, but I had imagined they would appear below the answers, as a sort of search-related ad. But no, they've gone and blended the ads into the answers themselves. Have they no sense of ethics at all?
This seems good.
I do have the sense that group decisionmaking worked better before the advents of public relations and social media, among other things.
That's impressive. ClickHouse is great but it's a huge PITA to operate on-prem so you guys will be rolling in them moneys. Speaking of, maybe you know someone who had to stay in Russia and didn't go to youse guys or Altinity? We (AliExpress Russia) are looking for a CH DBA to help us implement an on-prem CHaaS. Salary is like $9-10K/month.

Basically, we're looking for the person who has at least some expertise with operating CH in production and paying big money. In four month offering $6K-$7K/month we've got ziltch.
That might explain why the Vorlons of Babylon 5 were such assholes.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Vorlon

>Distant Past

>The Vorlons were among the first races in the galaxy to attain sentience and become space-faring creatures. In the distant past, the Vorlons attempted a grand experiment into reaching a higher plane of existence where the souls existed and all life was founded. To accomplish this, they poured all their knowledge into creating a gateway to this dimension. After activating the gate, the vortex into Thirdspace was formed and the aliens within that realm came pouring out, intent on destroying all other forms of life. After much hardship, the Vorlons finally managed to push the enemy back, but one of the gateways was lost in Hyperspace where it was hidden from the Vorlons. They would encode some of their servants with an automated message to warn the younger races of the threat from the inhabitants of Thirdspace.
Whatever heuristic you want to use is fine, the key thing is that if it fails your test, you have to be willing to put it down and move on to the next book. Don't get caught up on 50 pages, it's an arbitrary number.
>that there is no easy way to block clients

Sure there is. Remove the client from the app store. They could even remotely uninstall the clients if they wanted.

>Presumably they have a data centre full of actual macs (or VMs).

Apple could ban every single one of those machines from imessage.
The whole economy might benefit but individual voters often don’t. The groups most likely to be displaced, non-senior white collar office workers, are quite large and vocal.
I've known about Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas for a long time, but here is something I've never seen: what actually he has produced, in term of scientific output? I've read plenty of his lesswrong's writing on the idea of rationalist, as well as plenty more on the AI alignment side (obviously including the famous basilisk). But can someone please point me to some results from the last 2 decades of his works? Either from him or his institute. That helps to calibrate what his expectation for the AI safety field (for me, at least).

Normally I'd apologize for not doing the search on my own ... but yeah for this case it takes too much effort to dig through the different writings. He wrote a lot of words, for better or worse.
The problem is going to be what happens when the <thing> needs to be serviced, whether it be a car, boat, lamp, or 3d printer. I'm glad that your experience is good -- as the way it should be with most consumer equipment.

But this comes down to basic dogfooding. Prusa dogfoods their stuff. Bambu AFAICT doesn't. Are any of the parts on the Bambu 3D printed or is everything metal and injection molded with plastic? Serious failures are going to happen at the 1/2/3 year mark.

I really don't know that answer for bambu. I do know the answer for Prusa.

I also know because Prusa open sources their designs, E3D had a platform to sell their REVO nozzles.
I'm not talking about the arrangement of characters: I'm talking about the physical shape and placement of keys.

If you want examples, take a look at the subreddit for ergonomic keyboards: https://www.reddit.com/r/ergomechkeyboards/
I'm not even sure what you are actually trying to say at this point.

At first you seemed to be insinuating that AI will "upend vfx" because a lot fof movies are "like transformers" and now you're saying "never is a long time and what if AI becomes like a human"
Your scenario seems more likely to me than the usual "omnipotent super-AI kills all humans", because technology failing seems much more believable to me than technology being so perfect that it outsmarts all humans, controls everything on earth, and is impossible to defeat because all of it works so perfectly.

As long as printers sometimes work and sometimes become invisible, Windows forgets which window is supposed to be on which screen after it's been asleep for a few hours, Linux trackpad drivers fail randomly, and IoT light switches need to be rebooted twice a year, I think we're a long way from a global super-AI that controls everything perfectly.
I don't think 'non-branching' is something we can rigorously define.

I mean, lambda calculus doesn't have any build-in branching, but you can style write arbitrary programs in it. Same for 'post correspondence problem' or SKI calculus.
Not a novel, there was a movie called "Her" around 10 years ago. The man fell in love with a Chatbot. iirc He also used the Chatbot to do some writing.
Same experience with that book; I started listening to the audiobook, but never finished it. Maybe someday.
Texas Observer journalists raise $270k in bid to save publication
> Proprietary software isn’t any more opaque or protected than open source software.

lol. Look, in practical terms - as well as by definition - proprietary software is owned by someone else.
> Humanity is not going to end because of an online bot that can summarise and string words into sentences. It’s basically a smarter SIRI/Alexa.

And cars are just faster horses, but a world with cars is fundamentally different from a world without them.
And it sort-of lives on as the bayonet.
which one? I'm not familiar with the other narratives
Are you talking about an abstract mathematical process, or a specific physical embodiment?
I get what the author is saying, but I feel like many of the examples provided have more to do with poor culture and chronic mismanagement rather than issues with “agile” itself.

However, I don't believe Agile is the root cause of tech laziness. No framework encourages underestimating capacity or wasting time on distractions like “TikTok smoothies”. This issue stems from people and performance problems, which would likely exist regardless of the planning framework.

Before adopting Agile, I experienced the need to justify financial spending on Waterfall plans for non-existent hires/teams, two years in advance. With quarterly agile planning cycles and static teams, we spent significantly less time worrying about whether we’d get people at all, and more time looking at the teams' overall velocity and outcomes.

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without the estimations and structure that the author despises.

The reality is, in larger companies, teams don’t exist in a bubble. They need to justify their outcomes, plans, and velocities, or they get laughed out of the room by finance and budgets slashed. Frameworks around agile (SAFe/etc) give tools that help management to forecast and finance investments into their teams. If I didn’t have estimations and velocity, and a way to break down and visualise work,

I don’t get what the author suggests the alternative is. I’m sure some teams have full autonomy and trust to do whatever they want without oversight by finance and PMO, but my experience is that is few and far between (or small enough where the team and upper management are one and the same).

While I've encountered my fair share of subpar Agile implementations, it doesn't mean we should abandon the concept altogether. The widespread adoption of Agile suggests a genuine need for improved working methodologies.

Instead of advocating for Agile's downfall, let's acknowledge the necessity of tools for sharing roadmaps, streamlining transitions between teams, and assisting management in making data-driven investment decisions. By doing so, we can collaboratively refine and adapt Agile methodologies to better meet the evolving needs of contemporary organisations.
Then it is revealed that it's all just a simulation, running inside a solar-powered but long-abandoned data center in Prineville, Oregon. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
I'll toss in whaling as well.

But these are still bad examples,because they are all bad-at-high-volume activities, with minimal paths to scaling or profitability for those who persist.

Nuclear weapons are not profitable at any scale. There are CFC alternatives so remaining on CFC production is low-scale niche market stuff. Unleaded gas costs the same as leaded gas.

AI though is different.if one company or country developed AI and the others paused, then a long-term, highly scalable and stunningly profitable advantage will accrue.

That's not something that can easily be halted.

This page could have a billion signatures,but it would mean nothing. We live in an age of trillion $ companies. We've seen Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon - companies that can go from zero to trillions in a couple decades.

The closest real comparison is gene research, gene editing, cloning. There are some bans in that field, but research and development simply proceeds around those bans. Montsano has shown how much money there is in genes. Imagine the profits of the first company to use gene editing to cure childhood leukemia.
Many worthwhile books are difficult, true, but many are not. You'll never read all of either group. This advice is saying: don't waste time on books you're not getting anything out of, if it means missing out on books you would get something out of.
Just use a slightly different rule that stops when it reaches 1.
Couldn't upvote this hard enough.

I fundamentally blame Sun and Java for this. I guess I blame James Gosling for Java, and Sun's aggressive marketing of Java in the 90s, along with the naming/marketing deal with Netscape that resulted in JavaScript being created instead of Scheme being adopted.

One of the greatest tragedies in tech history.