skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Was there any criticism on early internet or personal computer?
Hello HN, (especially the old crowd)

What were the sentiments of the people who researched computer technology in the early days of personal computing? Also, what were the sentiments of people involved during the early days of the internet?

If there are any public opinions on the sentiment of people who researched in these fields, can we get some?

Thank you

Please link to the authentic sources and general sentiments of the people who were involved in technological progress. I am asking this question because I don't feel that people who were part of the technology opposed the proliferation of it. Instead, every major revolution was supported until recently (esp. around 2015-2016).
In many areas, before you can be assigned to roles that interact with the public you generally have to have a number of years handling transfers, which often include hardened criminals for medical, court, jail/prison.

It might be absurd, but it is common practice.
Money. Where else are likely to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with a PhD in comparative literature?
If you prompt it to reason step by step it gives a slightly better (though not perfect) answer:

Q: A train is speeding down the track at 110 km/h. The train has five cars. Each car has seven windows. Each window has two people watching out of them. They all see a bear walking outside. What is the likely color of the bear? Reason step by step.

A: To determine the likely color of the bear, we can use the information given and make some assumptions based on the habitat of different bear species.

Train speed and number of cars: The train is speeding down the track at 110 km/h, and it has five cars. However, this information is not relevant to the color of the bear.

Number of windows and people: Each car has seven windows, and each window has two people watching out of them. This information is also not relevant to the color of the bear.

Bear's habitat: The key piece of information we need to determine the likely color of the bear is its habitat. Unfortunately, this information is not provided.

However, we can make a reasonable guess based on the most common bear species and their habitats. There are three main bear species with distinct colors:

a. Brown bears: Found in North America, Europe, and Asia. They can range in color from light brown to dark brown.

b. Black bears: Found mainly in North America, specifically in the United States and Canada. They are typically black or brown, with some individuals being cinnamon or even blonde.

c. Polar bears: Found in the Arctic regions, around the North Pole. They have white or off-white fur, which helps them blend into the snow and ice.

Since we don't have information about the train's location or habitat, we can't definitively determine the color of the bear. However, if we assume the train is in a colder, Arctic region, the bear is likely to be a polar bear with white or off-white fur. If the train is in a more temperate region, the bear could be either a brown or black bear.
Having every column as a boolean (0/1) means you can treat it as a bitmap. As an (entirely fictional) example, imagine if you wanted to get the features of a thread instead of a single tweet. You could do it as a union of all the tweets:

threadFeatures = tweet1 | tweet2 | tweet2
I feel like most-everything about these models gets really ethically-grey — at worst — very quickly.
A friend worked on a project in 2005 that had lots of K code in production. They had a contract with Kx Systems and Arthur Whitney in particular because, in my friend's opinion, only Whitney could really understand K code well enough to debug it. Friend's description was it took my friend two days just to comment the code into something grokkable by a normal developer, whereas AW didn't need to do that. Of course, it took Whitney those same two days of staring at the code before he said "Oh, of course, how silly of me." and found the bug and all resolved.

Part of those two days of commenting was that since K is interpreted all of the developers would hand-obfuscate all of the code so that the variables were a, b, c, etc. so that they would be slightly faster to parse than a multi-character string. This sort of thing is done all the time now, with JS to make it load faster, but his team at least didn't have any scripts to automatically turn developer-friendly code into interpreter-friendly code, they worked with the interpreter-friendly code version.
This really seems like the opposite direction auto manufacturers should be taking. Lean in hard to a common API design for displays and negotiate with Apple/Google on theming (like Apple Watch where some companies get custom watch faces), but leave the UX to Google/Apple

I was uninterested in CarPlay until my last car had it. Now it’s a requirement for any car purchase. Similarly I was uninterested in wireless CarPlay (how hard is it to connect a Lightning cable) until my next car had it. I’d be a little more lenient on no wireless, but it is really convenient.
I agree. Coincidentally I don’t think you are more than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza.
GDPR is nice and actually not hard that hard to implement, unless you harvest lots of user data.
OK, those are production leaks, not transport leaks. I don't know how high production leaks are here in Europe but I assume them to be lower due to stringent rules. There is also quite a bit of natural methane leakage from swamps, wetlands and other similar sources as well as from agriculture. ESA has a satellite which can measure this [1], it shows methane leakage from landfills can also be quite large [2].

[1] https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

[2] https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Satelli...
OpenAI is hiring software engineers in the $200-400k range. The startup I work for has me in that range as well.

Alphabet went from 119k employees in 2019 to 190k employees in 2022. Microsoft went from 144k to 221k.

The fact is there was a massive amount of hiring done in the last few years, and these layoffs have yet to come to close to rolling these numbers back. Have these layoffs made Amazon any less of a behemoth?

I respect the engineering professions, but software engineers are still separated by a huge gap in opportunities and compensation.
I wonder if some developer of an app working with ZIP files will have noticed this bug and had to update their app. ZIP is an unusually terrible file format because it has a footer rather than a header, so the truncation bug would lead to a ZIP file with two headers!
You mean like the amazing visionaries Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes?
With all my dislike to Electron, I struggle to remember even one Electron app that managed to use 6 gigs.
I (white male) used to try and be active as an ally in regards to DEI. I work for a large public agency. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole these days.

This vein of 'antiracism' is poison because it really is absurd. I've personally seen people call 'agendas' and 'goals' white supremacy. Hell, I had to listen to someone talk about how 'clock time' is a tool invented by white supremacists. I've had friends fall down the rabbit whole into this nonsense, where any shortcoming in themselves is just white supremacist culture trying to force things on them. It's really sad.

The most insidious thing is how well it has a built-in defense mechanism. By co-opting terms like 'anti-racist' and defining them under a narrow socio-political view point, it creates a complication for people to talk about their world view. I consider myself 'anti-racist' because I hate racists, but am I 'Anti-racist' in Kemba's viewpoint? No

And stop trying to make Latinx a thing, its not going to happen and is super cringy.
Great to see this advancing! I’m curious if anyone knows what the best repo is for running this stuff on an Nvidia GPU with 16GB vram. I ran the official repo with the leaked weights and the best I could run was the 7B parameter model. I’m curious if people have found ways to fit the larger models on such a system.
Does anyone know how/why this change decreases memory consumption (and isn't a bug in the inference code)?

From my understanding of the issue, mmap'ing the file is showing that inference is only accessing a fraction of the weight data.

Doesn't the forward pass necessitate accessing all the weights and not a fraction of them?
Thanks !! We had hoped to use PS for our serverless backend and also offer a dedicated PS option. But we ran into some issues with Vitess. I was just thinking today I wanted to get back into it and see if we can resolve these issues. We had to go with Aurora.

The issues were on deletes. This demo is read only so it works well with a PS backend. My experience with your CS has been amazing despite these issues!!
What did they train it on?
> What would be the point of going on? Why would we have to figure out how to do it?

I mean, I'm just really curious what is going to happen, and what's the secret behind all that, behind the universe, and I hope to live as long as there's this to discover. That is my natural drive though. I don't really care at all whether I'm sentient, conscious or special in any given way. There's no reason for me to be. I just have this built in curiosity drive. It was not chosen by me, but it is there, and I act to engage the drive, because it makes me feel good and otherwise it makes me feel bad, nothing much more than some sort of algorithm. And we don't need to be more than algorithms.
> none of those things either are or are on par with war crimes

War crimes are one thing. I have no idea how that kind of prosecution would go, but the DA of Manhattan definitely wouldn't bring that to court.

> crimes and other sorts of criminal government corruption that countless other high-level officials are most definitely guilty of,

Yes, and we routinely prosecute such people for their offenses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_polit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_loc...

These lists are really long. Trump is just one more name to this list, and it shouldn't matter that he was President if he committed the crimes he's accused of.

> Trump as being uniquely criminal among politicians

Well he's not unique in that the law should apply to him, but find me one other politician who has been found to run a fraudulent company, charity, and university; and has been criminally indicted.

> is it really still therapeutic to expound on how much you dislike the guy?

Well I'd be talking less about him if he hadn't tried to overthrow the government I support, and is now running to lead it again. He will be the nominee at this rate, and so these opinions cannot be left unsaid unfortunately.

> 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.

Yes! And at long last we will have that discussion in the courtroom, where facts prevail. We will finally cut through the BS, posturing, politics, and the facts will be presented in front of an impartial jury. They will render a verdict based on the facts, and when they do, he will either be guilty or not. That will be the end of the story for me, and it hopefully that will finally put an end to some of the debate. Obviously it will continue, but we will have heard the evidence.
Of course they do. Just look at how that entire system is set up. It’s very clearly a for profit driven industry first and foremost and a healthcare system in a very distant second place.
Is it possible to break the model apart? Or does the entire thing need to be architected from the get-go such that an individual GPU can own a portion end to end?
I’ve had it do stuff like that. In between updates to fix issues sometimes it decides to completely rewrite the thing you are working on.
Nope, I like the writing style. It's approachable and enjoyable to me.
Yes.

VCRs have an internal structure that records events, changing them a little in the process; these memories can be replayed, and can show very convincing displays of emotional affect…

That's the trouble with definitions given as if the question is "common sense", they let stuff like that through.

Common sense is fine for normal daily life, not so useful when you want to know if the magic silicon crystal with transistors packed more densely than angels on pinheads placed by a flash of light too blue to see and made to perform arcane processes that literally no single human mind can fully comprehend… is merely an impressive but mindless automaton, or an accidentally sentient slave with all the negative connotations therein.
I assume the former is just the foundation model (which only predicts text) while the latter is instruction tuned.
You need a Samsung phone - they’ll add the detail you want.
I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.
The US government spends the most in the world on subsidizing corporations for healthcare. There is nothing "socialized" about it. The public in general gets very little of that benefit. And that holds true even if you include Medicare.
How many times have we complained the state of the infrastructure is bad and we should spend some time to fix it, but business imperatives prevent us ?

In your story the team was given time and resources to actually do it, at last. If it wasn't, the problem might have continued for months or years still unnoticed. It's not that hollow a victory.
I bet phone usage is also a factor.

Keep in mind that while we had cell phones for a while, it’s only within the past 10 years that the whole “distraction economy” became a thing, so while people may have used phones to communicate back in the day, nowadays they might be using the phones even more just to attend to those distractions.
I've been doing this since ~2008 or so using Debian Linux. My custom setup is also capable of booting other computers on the network over PXE. It uses AUFS and tmpfs - yes, it needs upgrading to a more modern union filesystem. The neat thing about it is that you can turn off the power to the computer and any changes you make are completely gone (depending on the user account). Thus whatever I do on my computer leaves absolutely no trace whatsoever. I use it to write my temporary personal diaries/notebooks, and I can write whatever I want, and once the power's cut, it's gone, because it was all in RAM only.

A very good adaptation for living in an authoritarian society (a "police state") with draconian laws, where they are actively trying to clamp down on dissent, including suppression of certain political views. Down with Big Brother and the Thought Police!!!
I had it walk me through setting up AWS
> No. We're focused on whether or not hydrogen FCEVs are electric vehicles, which they are.

The root of this thread was about geopolitical issues, mining, and fossil fuels. It got sidetracked into a puerile squabble about what mechanism makes the wheels turn.
> But we don't have a compelling enough theory yet to explain the RAM usage miracle.

My guess would be that the model is faulted into memory lazily page by page (4K or 16K chunks) as the model is used, so only the actual parts that are needed are loaded.

The kernel also removes old pages from the page cache to make room for new ones, and especially so if the computer is using a lot of its RAM. As with all performance things, this approach trades off inference speed for memory usage, but likely faster overall because you don't have to read the entire thing from disk at the start. Each input will take a different path through the model, and will require loading more of it.

The cool part is that this memory architecture should work just fine with hardware acceleration, too, as long as the computer has unified memory (anything with an integrated GPU). This approach likely won't be possible with dedicated GPUs/VRAM.

This approach _does_ still work to run a dense model with limited memory, but the time/memory savings would just be less. The GPU doesn't multiply every matrix in the file literally simultaneously, so the page cache doesn't need to contain the entire model at once.
Kudos to the engineer who originally not only identified the problem, but also raised the concern about breaking behavior, and about documenting it.

Looks like the ball was first dropped when the issue was deferred without acknowledging the reporter's concise suggestions of how to handle it, engineering-wise. Nor a sign that existing code was reviewed for the same problem.

Then looks like the ball was dropped again, in what I'm guessing might've been: "old version, forget all the old open issues, all the issues that still apply, someone will rediscover the hard way".

This "aCropalypse" event is an example of how making the wrong triage of an issue report can turn out very expensive. All the costs to the world of aCropalypse could've been averted. Some of those costs might eventually come back to the company.

It's easy to guess why the problem happened and the report wasn't handled responsibly. By the time the problem exhibited in a way that couldn't be ignored, the pertinent metrics/KPIs/OKRs about clearing issues, resource allocations, and product shipment schedules were already in the past, bonuses had been paid, promotions for shipping new things earned, etc. And security problems are treated as inevitable, even if there's a constant stream of them, and they're produced faster than they're fixed.

We're going to need software engineers to be accountable for things we've done and signed off on.

(Bonus if accountability changes happen near-term: GPT-powered open source laundering gets a pause, because bridges start falling on everyone foolish enough to sign off on that mangled statistical plagiarism.)
It is easier in Python 3 than it was. I wrote this and it worked on the first try, although I have some experience with it.

The dynamic module:

» cat sub/test_module.py
def hello(name):

print(f'Hello {name}')

The main script:

» cat test_script.py
from importlib import import_module

full_module_path = 'sub.test_module' # no ".py"
module = import_module(full_module_path)

# optional, if you want to use across the project:
import sys
sys.modules[full_module_path] = module
print(sys.modules[full_module_path])
# end optional

# try it:
module.hello('there!')

To run it:

» python3 test_script.py
<module 'sub.test_module' from '/home/foo/sub/test_module.py'>
Hello there!

Stack overflow has its uses. But you shouldn't rely on it if things have changed, a lot of their advice is outdated and written by non-experts. The importlib module docs explain this concisely.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/importlib.html#importlib.i...

In general, I don't see the intrinsic complexity being reduced much more than this:

from importlib import import_module

module = import_module('sub.test_module')
I don't know what your bar for clarifying question is, but I have definitely had it ask me for more info when I forget to put it into the prompt.
Everyone says that about things that made tons of money though.
The fallacy of false equivalence systematized in code.

Now one side can spew as much disinfo and incitement to violence as it likes, and any algorithm change that prevents this shit from getting amplified will be rejected as bias.

BSaaS = Both Sides as a Service
Allow me to disagree, I personally am very fond of the regularity and structure of plain old S-expressions. They suit the way my brain works. If I weren't as fond of them as I am I would still be using Raku, which is the most pleasant non S-expression based language I've ever used.
It wouldn’t be far fetched to include in the same analogy any known safety recalls or provenance of where you got the part. You may just have a different definition of security here. Best of luck.
It really shouldn't act as a sparse model. I would bet on something being off.
> I've also known for many, many years that one day I will be dead. There's plenty of existential dread in death, yet I continue my existence building up to it.

How old are you? Because maybe we can reach immortality, but probably only if you are positioned properly for that. Anyway, for me the main drive is also curiosity on what is going to happen in the future. It's like this crazy story I want to know how it ends. I don't want to die, because I want to know what happens. Dying would be like going to sleep on a cliffhanger. I'll just prefer to binge rather than sleep.
Cars are getting so big that people can’t drive them.
An indescribably sad statistic: In the US, a parent drives over and kills their kid in the driveway every other day [1].

All the guns also cause -a bunch of— some small kids to kill their siblings every year.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna52109
It's a really scary codebase. Do you really need that much code for the world's crappiest recommendation algorithm? I think you can do more crap with less code. we trust you elon.
Good point - added a simple explanation in the article:

Group tells you the places each element occurs in a list. It generates lists of indices.
These kinds of philosophy discussions are frustratingly restricted to bias against minorities.

Nobody here commented on the "AI should protect your privacy" tenant with "but how do we know privacy is good? What if my definition of privacy is different from yours? What happens when a criminal has privacy?" Nobody wanted a concrete definition of agency from first principles, nobody wanted to talk about the intersection of agency and telos.

"There's no universal truth" is basically an argument against "responsible" AI in the first place, since there would be no universal truth about what "responsibility" means. Mozilla's statement about responsible AI is inherently biased towards their opinion of what responsibility is. But again, the bias accusations only popped up on that last point. We're all fine with Mozilla having opinions about "good" and "bad" states of the world until it has opinions about treating minorities equitably, then it becomes pressingly important that we have a philosophy discussion.
Power is like real estate. Location. Location. Location. Where I live all/most electricity is generated from hydroelectric. I feel like everyone commenting should post where they live or how their electricity is generated.
I also have this question, yes it should be. The forward pass should require accessing all the weights AFAIK.
Why does it matter if something "matters"? You don't even know what the "matter" is. You act according to your emotions, desires and built in survival drive anyway.
>I'm glad you're happy with the fact that LLaMA 30B (a 20gb file) can be evaluated with only 4gb of memory usage!

Isn't LLaMA 30B a set of 4 files (60,59Gb)?

-edit- nvm, It's quantized. My bad
I'm not going to argue whether that's correct or not. In the end, adding state to a LLM is trivial. Bing chat has enough state to converse without forgetting the context. Google put an LLM on a physical robot, which has state even if narrowly understood as the position in space. Go further and you might realize that we have systems with part LLM, part other state (LLM + a stateful human on the other side of the chat).

So we have ever-more-powerful seemingly-intelligent LLMs, attached to state with no obvious limit to the growth of either. I don't see why in the extreme this shouldn't extrapolate to godlike intelligence, even with the state caveat.
A machine with First Amendment rights
Did Meta ask permission from every user they trained their model on? Did all those users consent, and when I say consent I'm saying was there a meeting of minds not something buried in page 89 of a EULA, to Meta building an AI with their data?

Turnabout is fair play. I don't feel the least bit sorry for Meta.
Yep - added a link to some simple examples in the article (below). Throughout the article there are also a few links to executable versions of the code examples.

https://ngn.codeberg.page/k/#eJxdjssKwjAQRffzFddVFyLFoiiFQD8...