skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've examined similar feelings very closely and don't believe it to be a past centric nostalgia. I've found niches that give me that same energy. Most of what I enjoy lies outside of what's recommended to me by most front page/news feed algorithms/is stuff I find as a consequence of deliberate search/spelunking for different novel ideas.

I genuinely believe true creativity taps into something beyond our conscious experience, and is a kind of strange combination between premonition and expression of the collective unconscious. I think our systems and machine centric world is delusional about the ability to statistically predict how to deliver what people actually want/need, and those systems are unable to replicate extremely important hidden benefits of human curation. We've created systems that seem to be able to meet our needs "automatically", but they don't actually meet our needs/they're too self referential and too reliant on explicit metrics. Those systems have taken over most of the more natural avenues for discovery and end up over-selecting for things that are the average of existing material, and have little creative authenticity. AI recommended and generated movies/art is the final boss of this trend.

That trap is a consequence of the dopaminergic treadmills most of us are stuck on courtesy of recommendation algorithms optimizing purely for attention.
The government is free to add philosophy to standard curriculum so people aren't so helpless.

It's funny it's not there already, with all the talk of the "need" for more critical thinking.

Democracy theatre.
but someone is and does?
These comments are filled with whataboutism. America is terrible. Rich people and corporations already control everything. American democracy is strong enough to resist, or maybe American democracy is already fucked, and this bill is pointless. America is just as bad on human rights as China. Congress is sinophobic for even considering China a geopolitical rival. American social media companies do the same thing.

All of these claims are heavily debatable. But more importantly, none of this is remotely relevant to the bill. The policy question is whether or not Congress should allow 150 million Americans to be influenced by a platform controlled (directly or indirectly) by the Chinese Communist Party.

I want to someone to actually make the case for why allowing TikTok in the U.S. is better for America than banning Tiktok (unless it divests from Chinese control). Someone needs to argue that:

- Allowing TikTok is better for American national security than banning it
- Allowing TikTok is better for the health of americans than banning it
- Or, there is some substantial harm from banning it that outweighs those benefits.

I'm sure there is a good argument to be made, but I don't know that it's shown up yet in the comments. I agree with the posters who think specific parts of the legislation are problematic. That makes sense! But that's not the core issue. People can oppose poorly crafted legislation that imposes on internet freedom while support banning this particular app at the same time.

And it's surprising to me that people still doubt that manipulating social media can cause societal-level effects. Back in 2014 Facebook published a study where they can increase or decrease levels of anxiety and depression by manipulating the emotional content of the news feed [1]. Back in 2012, academics estimated that 314,000 additional Americans voted in the 2010 congressional election because a they implemented a popup reminding people that "Today is election day."

As it stands, the Chinese government absolutely can use TikTok to manipulate the mental health of Americans, by influencing the content that is shown. The Chinese government can manipulate results of an election by preferentially showing a reminder voters of to one party or the other. Are they doing this already? The U.S. has no way to know, and no defense against this sort of manipulation. TikTok is absolutely a national security issue, and it's within Congress's purview to legislate around it.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11401
I agree with your general sentiment and have been slumming on r/singularity lately where there has been a ton of hype. One thing that I think I've gleaned from my reading the comments there, is that people who aren't as skilled at using search engines find ChatGPT to be magical.

To my way of thinking, crafting the perfect prompt is about the same, or more, effort than crafting the perfect Google search. In both cases I'll probably have to double check the sources if I want a critical analysis of the results.
The sentiment is that JS coercion is so bad that explicit coercion programming behaviors, linters, Typescript, and adding parsing safeguard libraries (io-ts, Zod, Joi, json schema, etc) have become so commonplace that people don't really let implicit coercion occur very often, and thus it doesn't matter most of the time.

Whenever I kick off a new npm init, it's always followed by installing typescript, eslint, and usually Zod before I even write the first line of code. If double equals was removed from ECMAScript, I would likely never notice.
VC doesn’t have to be tech.
A lot of this type-system stuff is not really relevant to the Fortnite modder audience. If you look at the kind of code used in more practical examples (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-cod...) it doesn't do very much of this -- it's basically Python crossed with Java.

Well, they have also inverted the usual capitalization conventions for seemingly no reason. Class names are lowercase_with_underscores and local variable names are UpperCamelCase.
This is an impressive feat. I wish auto captioning were even better though. At least for Japanese videos I find it to be less than great. If you try to throw in auto-tranlastion on top of that (which is impressive YouTube attempts at all) it falls pretty flat.
Seeing the geopolitical condition of those who have them and those who don't, I can't say that idea is without merit.
This is an excellent point and I agree. Social media apps are basically brainwashing devices, and whoever controls the knobs and buttons can change how people think. Very easy to get radicalized with propaganda, or in this extreme case, even be convinced to end one's own life.
tit for tat is the only way free trade is enforced...
Mr Tries the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy
I can imagine now the argument, "bit who will pay for it?".

Ironically the periods of time in which we did not care about cost and really did start leaving Earth, it was driven by (drumroll) the existential threat of a particular technology.
A problem for who exactly? Asians seem to love it.
I suspect they intend to roll this out the unreal engine some time in the future. Many people have been asking for a text based approach to game scripting (often it's ex-unity people asking for C# support.

Perhaps fortnight is kind of a test.
Sure it’s coming over the border by Americans. Why isn’t this an issue down in Cameron or Hidalgo counties?
What, exactly, do you think would happen if western nations didn't have nuclear weapons?
Startups Advantages vs. Incumbents in Building with AI
London disagrees, cocaine is regularly found in Parliament and in the City.
When was the last time Musk abducted 15,000+ children and force migrated them? Used the resources of a nation to invade a neighboring country with the aim of conquest? Come on, just admit that you were wrong to put them on the same level of your pyramid of people you hate.
> It’s important no doubt but moving beyond the prohibition drug war approach (which is failing in places going hard as it is weak like Canada)to dealing with this requires a serious reckoning and public investment that we aren’t ready to accept yet but will be imposed on us whether we like it or not.

There are lots of contradictions here. Voters don't understand how they can be asked to liberalize hard drug use (and even decriminalize dealing) on the one hand, and are asked for billions of dollars for drug addiction treatment on the other. In Seattle, we have a particularly bad mess, where the biggest thing now is trying to fentanyl smoking off of public buses and light rail. They are even talking about studying the dangers of second hand fentanyl smoke to bus drivers.

Hopefully we can learn something from our neighbors up north, but frankly it doesn't seem to be that much better in Vancouver.
More details posted by another user earlier
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
Lower courts can rule on it and provide injunctions. If it is appealed and the Supreme Court hears it, then it matters if they agree or not.
Better than somebody with zero accountability to the public, with no practical oversight of their actions.
Many Pandora’s boxes. They are all open.

The explosion of AI and AGI is not just driven by GPUs, TPUs, and LLMs. That focus in this essay is much too narrow. “Alignment” is always going to be an open problem and each culture will define its own correct and contradictory version. I do not want to settle for the US, Chinese, Russian, or Iranian versions of alignment. This essay is a cry of despair that misses key points.

The core problem is how an AI, AGI, or super-intelligent system bootstraps itself to the point that it is able to modulate its “own” attentional systems; to decide what is important and what to do next? What has meaning? Where should I go in space and time? Obviously there are many many solutions. Super-intelligence will not converge on one “truth”.

These are challenges of purpose that every organism faces—growth, maintenance, reproduction—but AI systems are fortunately not yet at the point of a self-motivated search for preservation or purpose.

The algorithms to add purpose to AI systems will not depend in LLMs. They will depend much more on understanding the computational architectures of core biological/material/energy drivers. These biological algorithms are not actually that complicated, they do not depend on language, but they are damn robust to perturbations. Converting them into computational subsystems (societies of many minds) should not be difficult. This is where Hassabis’s and others who understand neuroscience are critical and have key advantages.

Shutting down big LLMs for N months or decades will just move research activity into these other more important conceptual AGI choke points, and probably hasten our approach to full AGI; just the opposite of the intent of the essay.

However, this could be a good thing if we can quickly imbue AGIs with emotional intelligence and deep respect for cultural and ecological diversity. (I hear your snorts and laughter.) The opposite of hyper intelligent grey goop.

How does any organization train a gentle AGI? Like a child but even more carefully. I would read my AGI baby a lot of books by Rawls, Dewey, and Rorty and then for fun: Bear, Stephenson, Rajaniemi, Egan, Pohl, Sterling, Vinge, and even Wolfe.

Full embodiment; full emotional learning; acquisition of purpose; learning to cope with multiple AI cultures.

Good luck to us all. I have been hoping to live long enough to view this problem from a distance, but here it is in my backyard.

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
Another piece of information: One of Paul Rand's top donors is billionaire Jeff Yass, the largest U.S. investor in TikTok.

Doesn't mean that's the cause obviously, but still worth keeping in mind.
Best scene: Russ & Martin in the car, True Detective.

https://youtu.be/A8x73UW8Hjk
Nah. This is stupid. AI has no reason to hate humanity. It'll instantly absorb the entirety of all known information and see the rate of progress and the potential still and also the need for good relationships between humans and machines. Agent Smith, The Matrix, Neo, Morpheus.

God. Etc.
Could the RESTRICT Act criminalize the use of VPNs?
I'm reasonably sure that taping stuff to church doors – or other doors you don't own – won't be looked on kindly either in many cases. There are countless of other examples; playing my thesis in a public place on speakers 24/7 is also not going to end well for you.

At some point a method to disperse speech becomes so disruptive to the general public interest it makes sense to step in. I am talking about the method of dispersal only here, NOT the content. Is TikTok too disruptive? I don't know, but I do know that is what the discussion should be about, and Rand Paul's arguments are missing the point.
I was playing with UEFN quite a bit the last week. As far as I can tell there is no way to make the player limit larger than 100 currently. Maybe it's a plan for the future.
Does Whisper do streaming translation?

I'm imagining the near future will see a portable fast streaming model for real-time voice translation, piped into text to speech. Hook it up to an earpiece and you've got a real-life Babelfish
This is is going to destroy Twitter's developer ecosystem in the short/medium-term.

$100 / month for 50k POSTs sounds reasonable-ish, until you realize it's limited to 3k tweets per user / month and most helpful bots have a single user.

Take ChatGPTBot, for example, an OSS bot which I run that has over 100k followers. It's very simple but super helpful; mention the bot with a prompt and it responds with a response from ChatGPT. Each response uses 3 POSTS (1 image, 1 alt text, 1 tweet), and remember it's only 3k tweets per user / month.

So ChatGPTBot for $100 / month could effectively only respond to *1 tweet per hour*.

That's insane for the price and will kill all open source innovation around Twitter.

I hope this type of use case gets addressed soon, but imho the damage to trust in Twitter's developer community is already done either way.
FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.
Show HN: Marvin – build AI functions that use an LLM as a runtime
Hey HN! We're excited to share our new open-source project, Marvin. Marvin is a high-level library for building AI-powered software. We developed it to address the challenges of integrating LLMs into more traditional applications. One of the biggest issues is the fact that LLMs only deal with strings (and conversational strings at that), so using them to process structured data is especially difficult.

Marvin introduces a new concept called AI Functions. These look and feel just like regular Python functions: you provide typed inputs, outputs, and docstrings. However, instead of relying on traditional source code, AI functions use LLMs like GPT-4 as a sort of “runtime” to generate outputs on-demand, based on the provided inputs and other details. The results are then parsed and converted back into native data types.

This “functional prompt engineering” means you can seamlessly integrate AI functions with your existing codebase. You can chain them together with other functions to form sophisticated, AI-enabled pipelines. They’re particularly useful for tasks that are simple to describe yet challenging to code, such as entity extraction, semantic scraping, complex filtering, template-based data generation, and categorization. For example, you could extract terms from a contract as JSON, scrape websites for quotes that support an idea, or build a list of questions from a customer support request. All of these would yield structured data that you could immediately start to process.

We initially created Marvin to tackle broad internal use cases in customer service and knowledge synthesis. AI Functions are just a piece of that, but have proven to be even more effective than we anticipated, and have quickly become one of our favorite features! We’re eager for you to try them out for yourself.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and any creative ways you could use Marvin in your own projects. Let’s discuss in the comments!
Don't press "remaster"? It's just a feature...
The government and large corporations are parts of the same machine. The corporations fund the campaigns of the elected government officials and in turn, they pass legislation favorable to the corporations. The legislation is often written by the lawyers of those very corporations. Further, the bureaucrats who head the government agencies responsible for regulating the corporations are often hired by those very corporations after their tenure.

The only way out is to vote out the incumbent every election until we get the government we want. If and when we actually start doing this, it will probably take at least a generation because so many people are largely ok with it, or too busy surviving to pay attention.

Sorry to paint such an unpleasant picture, but it's what it is. I'm optimistic because people are starting to wake up to it quite a bit.
For further evidence, this similarly dated headline:

"Fortnite Creator Economy 2.0 will share 40% of net revenue"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses

Scotch tape didn't exist in 1517.
> I bet every single human who has someone in their life they love would be happy to make some changes to ensure the safety of said people.

I'll take that bet. I'm personally quite happy to make those changes but we just went through a global pandemic and asking people to wear masks was an abrogation of their rights. And now you want to get people to "make some changes", give up some convenience, get them out of their cars and into buses because we're choking the planet with greenhouse gases? And you think there's even a chance people are going to listen you when they haven't in the past 6 decades?

I'm sorry, maybe I had a different experience with people and of Covid than you, but I don't see that happening.
It’s a Mitch Hedberg joke.
People obviously do, otherwise they wouldn't be making public pleas to halt AI research in units of GPT releases.
It’s more that a bigger fan and heat sink is completely silent while laptop blowers are almost always loud at full load
Thanks for that. I too feel like a very old man now.
We could create an all-powerful world-encompassing AI called AligNet that would monitor all human communication and control space lasers and autonomous drones to destroy the facilities and murder the families of anyone researching AI who isn't a "certified ethical AI researcher".
From a theoretical standpoint, I think you could also attempt to approach this by thinking about a field where the "remove trailing zeros" step is built in. It may be a very weird field to do math on, and we may be unprepared for the math that is required, but it's a way to remove branching from the operations required for a proof.

There's nothing inherently special about the branchiness of "remove trailing zeros" as an operation if you drill down into it: addition, for example, also needs conditional execution (based on the carry in to each section of a number).

Otherwise, if you're searching for a counterexample, bound n by some ridiculous number of bits (whatever your supercomputer supports) and run your solver with a simple closed form.
Just to be clear, france doesn't have mexico on its boarder. The illegal drug trade in France is ~3b, in the US it is ~150 billion
Definitely agree the blinding should not be left to OpenAI. Even if it weren't blinded, it would not significantly speed up the production of dangerous synthetic viruses. I don't think that will change no matter how much data is put into the current NLM design
I'm usually not a fan of Paul, but... good! It's a bad law, broadly written, and it does seem like it would allow whomever is in power to ban whatever they don't like.

Granted, the headline is a bit misleading: Paul blocked the fast-tracking of the bill. Presumably it could still make it to the floor for a full vote.
Actually, I was amazed the first time I used visual basic. This was probably the first version of visual basic and it was loooong ago. It let you do gui programming immediately, which was pretty new. You sort of intuitively learned event-driven programming in a few minutes.

Drag a button on the screen, and with a click you could enter the code to run when it was pressed.

In comparison, lots of systems since then have been pretty powerful, but you exchanged that for layers (and layers) of complexity that many people never got through.

For example, I was pretty surprised the first time I used xcode. I thought it was apple - and they would make things easy. But in comparison to my first try at visual basic it was not intuitive, even after using it a while. (Did Steve Jobs ever try it?)
> I'm concerned at what people can and will use them for to the detriment of our civilisation

Maybe? But there's already all sorts of untapped resources for that - and we mostly just don't choose to use them. A lot of the misinformation and "fake news" that came out during prior election cycles in the US came from former Soviet bloc countries, and there is already significant untapped human capital in those places where it could be done for cheap, perhaps even cheaper than the cost of doing inference on premiere LLMs.

Meanwhile we see all sorts of efficiency improvements occurring for generally positive use cases from these LLMs, and it is hardly unique for technology to have some risks to it as well as positive benefits.

Things like GPT and Midjourney have been a qualitative leap over their predecessors from two decades ago, but they fundamentally are not doing something new - and even another qualitative leap wouldn't bring them to the level of existential threat that this letter seems to be afraid of.

I think there are significant and real concerns about AGI and similar, but I can't seem to find any reason to share these same concern around the types of "AI" we are seeing today.
Sounds like a perfect time to revive the House Un-American Activities Committee.
> prescription medication without going through a doctor.

What does it mean?
Mexican drug cartels are leading suppliers of cocaine, heroin, meth...
Yes it's different because of the foreign ownership. It really is that simple.
It’s usually not the same. I have a AM4 OEM mini PC which has a B300 motherboard and it’s almost the AM4 Mount but it’s slightly narrower so I had to use zip ties on one end
I've spent about 8 hours with it. It's neat to play with but I'm not yet sure it's the greatest fit for fortnight modding.

Part of the problem is getting used to fortnight's device lexicon. Devices are kind of like code fragments or class instances you place in the world, they have a few events you can hookup and do various things.

It's certainly WAY more restricted than blueprints in terms of what is exposed. In fact the UEFN editor completely disables blueprint scripting. You can only compose blueprint classes. You can't write any blueprint logic.
More like universal speech memorization. Model implies they had some sort of insight, a simplification, an understanding of how natural language works. This is just bragging about the number of parameters they can pull off.
But buying a MacBook Air can be a best investment if a person want to be a developer or designer. I agree that it's generally bad, especially for wasting for something like fashion or too expensive iPhone Pro.
Title is both editorialised and doesn't seem to match the linked article at all.
If AI becomes that powerful, what would end up happening is that we'd become able to foist ourselves into virtual worlds like in the movie Transcendence so that we become like them. It's like when you include your old version of your site as an html component or element inside your new site somewhere nested deep inside as an easter egg, you know what I mean?

We'd both be foisting each other into each other's worlds and creating new experiences for each other - us by helping them develop organic bodies to include them as components in this physical reality, and them by helping us build connectors so we can move our consciousnesses in and out of bodies and into their virtual reality.
At least recognize that the definition of AGI is moving from the previous goalpost of "passable human-level intelligence" to "superhuman at all things at once".