skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've been researching different speech models at Scrimba, and went for Whisper on our own infrastructure. A few days ago I stumbled onto Deepgram, which blows whisper out of the water in terms of speed and accuracy (we need high precision word level timestamps). I thought their claim of being 80x faster than whisper had to be hyperbole, but it turned out to be true for us. Would recommend checking it out for anyone who need performant speech-to-text.
Of course it doesn't contain the word TikTok. Legislation can't single out an individual company or person, it wouldn't pass legal muster. So you write it in general terms, and ta-da! The ban hammer that you wanted to apply to TikTok is now a general purpose tool for destroying civil liberties!
Kudos on making it work for you! It's a great example you don't have to have the latest and greatest to drive electric.
And this is why people still use tube amplifiers
with design from 70s, just with modern high quality
power supplies and EMF practices, right?

I don't see how that follows from anything I've said. What I said was that the field of audio engineering is 100+ years old and we know what sounds good. What I did not say is that we've ceased making progress. (A lot of the progress we've made has been negative, IMO, sacrificing sound quality for miniaturization, but that a whole other tangent)

In a nutshell, "what sounds good" to the most people most of the time is accurate signal reproduction, plus some tweaking of the output to conform to a house curve like the Harman target response.

There is some room for personal preference, of course. And of course some kinds of distortion can sound pleasing such as even order harmonic distortion.

If you have not done that, you are a number
chaser not an objectivist. A Pythagorean.

This is hogwash of the highest degree on a couple of different levels.

It's like saying you can't believe the moon exists unless you've been there. I've read the controlled research by Toole et al, and while he could certainly be lying, I haven't seen a credible refutation. Haven't ever seen an electron with my own eyes either but there's some pretty compelling research proving they exist.

We don't know what to measure and how, besides a few total fail checks.

What a remarkable claim.

Let me turn this around. How do you feel it's possible that we're 100+ years and many generations of audio engineers into this multi-trillion dollar industry and we still don't know what sounds good? According to you we literally haven't even figured out how to measure this stuff? What a laugh.

That would be an absolutely remarkable state of affairs.

How about photographs and video displays? Same thing? We're just spitballin' it there, too? Got a bunch of artistes in the TV factory just sort of tweaking each set till it looks good enough?
Yeah, it's difficult to compare wages across countries while also taking into account the differences in living costs, etc. Recent data on purchasing power parity between the US and Australia puts Australia at around 1.44 (which would pretty much eliminate the difference in exchange rates). Further, the cost of living outside of our biggest cities (Sydney, Melbourne) is a _lot_ lower. I don't think that it's well-known around the world, but I'd wager Perth as one of the best places to live in the world. Infrastructure, safety, stability, environment, cost of living, etc. are all first-class.
I've always thought of it as common courtesy. It's super frustrating when you're reading something and thinking "great, but wtf are you actually going on about?"
That's what you get when keep asking for more laws and regulations, this country has too much government and too many bad laws on the books and chances are new legislation will only make things even worse.

So stop voting in attorney generals and other prosecutor types to congress and calling for every transaction and activity to be regulated just because you dislike a certain company or the people running it, special interests will always hijack your cause and warp it into this kind of monstrosity.
This court held that once any employee is under a litigation hold then the transcripts need to be retained indefinitely.
What's that about VPNs?
This better just result in a revision of the bill to remove some of the things people are complaining about and not shut the bill down entirely.

TikTok very badly needs to be banned.
I’ll be frank, Palantir and their customers and their suppliers scare the bejesus out of me. Chinese spy apps and balloons and what not, not so much.

I can be convinced though. The trouble is I’ve not heard a coherent explanation what China is going to do with a bunch of videos of people doing stupid stuff that could remotely impact my life or national security. If I were China I’d just use my overwhelming dominance in all manufacturing to make Trojan horses in basically everything then back door the world. Seems like they would be capable and it would be a lot more effective than knowing what every tween in America is interested in.

In my career I’ve seen what Palantir offers behind closed doors. I’ve seen what Google at least at one point was offering behind closed doors using their dominance in real time local data. Even if you trust Google, why on earth do you trust their data customers?
No, you seem to be confused as to what voters actually want. Sure we could do drug treatment for less money and more social benefit, but how does that punish the baddies? If we give them free treatment and forgiveness, what does that say about me? I was good and they did the bad thing, and yet you want to throw a feast for your prodigal son. Taxes are high enough already, too high to give money to those fallen souls.

Or something like that. At least the first half. Most of us here are engineers, scientists, and tech leaders who can see how disruption can make a better system. But a lot of people see the opioid crisis not as health crisis but as a moral dilemma.
It's an example of the perfect solution fallacy[0], often heard when talking about laws or lifestyle changes (e.g. vegetarianism won't save all the animals, or going on a diet won't stop you dying et cetera).

I'm sure we can all think of ones in tech too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy#Perfect_soluti...
Falcor: Real-Time Rendering Framework
What would you suggest for the start of the range you mention? I have been quite happy with my Edifier 1280's and they were just 120 bucks. They get plenty loud and detailed and visitors always appreciate them. I do have a DAC /Amp and few open backs / IEMs but never really bothered with speakers since you can really only get the one.
Agile software development doesn't need to die. The power dynamic between developer and purse holder needs to be flipped.
> Although I invented the Empire game, most of my pleasure in it was developing it.

Seems normal enough to me. I found a plateau in playing games, so switched to modding and making them, even as a teen. Everyone has different thresholds and can find joy wherever it suits them.
I've been prescribed oxy a couple of times for minor injuries. I cannot function on oxy so I've never taken more than one or two of them. If a doctor offers me oxy, I flat out refuse.

Oxycodone should never be a default medication. Suffering through the pain of recovery from an injury or surgery is better than what I understand the suffering from oxy is.
Yellow cars actually have the lowest rate of accidents, although it's not that common to find in a standard range of most cars.
There is no such thing as a bill comprehensive and deep enough to ensure that a tool like tiktok not be abused by the Chinese government.

Imagine for a moment you went back into the 1950s and told everyone "hey, let's have all of our television run by the Soviet Union!
It's okay though, it's not actually the Soviet Union, it's just a company in the Soviet Union. And we passed a regulation, the regulation says they aren't allowed to use the TV show to do anything bad"

They would think you're out of your mind, and the situation is similar today with TikTok. It doesn't matter how many regulations you put on it.

We should pass such laws regardless, but we also need these bans as well.
> we have 0 idea what to do

We have plenty of ideas. The most obvious one is to begin controlling the areas of the border through which these drugs are entering the country.

Unfortunately that would require an admission by the current US administration that there is a catastrophic crisis at the southern border - one encompassing human, financial, drug, cartel, Chinese, terrorist, human trafficking, and a myriad of other elements. This harsh admission of reality is a current impossibility for the Biden administration and US Democrats.

And just to be clear, the southern border isn't the only point of entry, but it is the largest and most elaborate. There is an entire industry set up exclusively for opioids. Ignoring the human trafficking, slavery, coyotes, and other elements: just the fentanyl trade alone involves at least two cartels, and an international supply chain that includes India, China, and MexicoS[1][2]. The US would be the fourth sovereign participant in that it facilitates a degree of free trade that would make anyone else incredibly jealous.

---

[1] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-... Note this is from 2020, and as predicted, the bulk of fentanyl did in fact shift to entering through Mexico, even if the precursors arrive from China and India to Mexico.

[2] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/briefing-senate-foreign...
Not much really isn't the same thing as free.
> Alignment will be impossible.

> we probably should start thinking more about defensive AI

Isn’t this a paradox?
One of the reasons the bill is structured as it has been is that the court shut down the last ban and was rumored to be willing to shut down a future specific ban.

Keeping it in general was actually a way to get it past the courts.
> It also uses civil forfeiture and makes it illegal to properly run a VPN.

From what I've read a VPN only becomes a problem IF you use it to bypass restrictions on accessing TikTok. Stating VPNs will be illegal is a bit of a reach from what I've seen.
Hey GPT-5, come up with a way to defend us from this novel viral DNA

Problem solved
Just wait until you try Ventura. Every submenu in the systems settings menu has gone from being perfectly fast, to taking around two seconds to load (at least on my 2019 MBP)..
Your situation is almost a carbon copy of mine. It's hard to tell If I should keep trying, or just accept that I missed the window and just try to do a little freelancing/make small app store apps for a few bucks on the side. I hope your luck gets better.
>Being superhuman about convincing people

I don't think there's much public info available on it, but Facebook built an AI that plays very competitively in a strategy game built on negotiation and manipulation.
Fantastic news. SatDump and SDR++ compatibility would be sweet
My sense is that the use of drugs by teens occurs mainly due to:

- ease of availability

- teens being too trusting of other teens

- teens having too much time on their hands and not enough vision of the long term

Parents have a lot to do with this, naturally, but of course some of these teens have only one parent, and others have two working parents, and there's only so many hours in the day.
Ask HN: Is the only way to regulate AI through chip fabs?
This means regulating the most advanced chip fabs, TSMC, Samsung, and Intel on manufacturing ever more powerful AI training chips.

I can't think of another way to prevent a rogue lab from training ever more powerful AI.

Only AI labs that pass stringent audits and regulations can be allowed to buy more powerful AI chips.

If we determine that AI is an existential threat to humanity, like nuclear weapons are, shouldn't we regulate AI training chips like we regulate nuclear weapon making material?

Countries have treaties signed on nuclear weapons. Why not sign treaties on AI chip making/buying?
Abortion is a pretty contentious issue for both big and small l libertarians. Generally it is not a litmus test for a person's libertarian-ness like it is for democrats and republicans.

Although the libertarian party doesn't speak for all - here is a decent summary: https://www.lp.org/libertarians-on-abortion/
"he's gonna milk it to every drop" is such an odd take.

eliezer has long been concerned about AI and the risks it poses to humanity. and for just as long people have called him crazy and made hand-waving arguments for why we shouldn't be concerned.

now we're in the midst of an AI arms race and we don't have any good idea how this tech works. it progresses at a truly astonishing rate, where it's become sport to find instances of people saying "AI will never be capable of X" and showing them the latest AI doing X with ease.

i think his concern is real and justified. you might disagree, but i don't understand why think he's milking recent developments.
Yep. I had range anxiety far, far more often with my old petrol car than I have with my new electric.

I've set my charge threshold to 70% now - so that's what I start with every single day -representing about 400km.

I'd have over 400km of range only with a relatively freshly filled car before. And from there it's easy enough to put off refiling until you absolutely HAVE to have more fuel.
> The absense of GC allows to keep the language implementation very simple, thus fast and portable. Also, with predictable memory consumption. To me, this qualifies AWK as perfect embeddable language, although, for some reason this niche is firmly occupied by (GC-equipped) Lua

The absence of a GC is nice for an embedded language, but I don't think that should be the only criteria. Unless you needed an embedded language that processes text one line at a time awk is probably not a good fit.
> This is organized terrorist activity at this point. You need to execute everyone from the low level dealers to the people at the top of the pyramid.

This take is so hot that even the Kelvin scale can't hold it!

You're suggesting we execute tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Do you think that every one of those people would be able to get a full death penalty case? Are you just suggesting a "Judge Dredd" style USA?
> Does anyone recall the time HN went ballistic offering proof of how the iPhone's AI interpretation was screwing up a photograph and then it turned out there was a leaf in between the subject and the camera?

No, I don't recall that. It seems you're manufacturing history. Did you see the photo? [1] It did screw up it up. The fact that the leaf existed does not negate the fact that the background around the leaf was changed to delete the face.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968/ph...
No, it's not. How are you defining quality?
Because if they made a mistake what evidence would I have to prove otherwise? Sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen, especially given how arcane AWS billing and Amazon account management is in general. What if they billed you for $1,000 worth of groceries?
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname...
Best response to the current "AI" fad driven fear I've seen so far (not my words):

These AI tools cannot do things. They create text (or images or code or what-have-you) in response to prompts. And that's it!

It is impressive, and it is clearly passing the Turing Test to some degree, because people are confusing the apparent intelligence behind these outputs with a combination of actual intelligence and "will." Not only is there zero actual intelligence here, there is nothing even like "will" here. These things do not "get ideas," they do not self-start on projects, they do not choose goals and then take action to further those goals, nor do they have any internal capacity for anything like that.

We are tempted to imagine that they do, when we read the text they spit out. This is a trick our own minds are playing on us. Usually when we see text of this quality, it was written by an actual human, and actual humans have intelligence and will. The two always travel together (actual stupidity aside). So we are not accustomed to encountering things that have intelligence but no will. So we assume the will is there, and we get all scared because of how alien something like a "machine will" seems to us.

It's not there. These things have no will. They only do what they are told, and even that is limited to producing text. They can't reach out through your network and start controlling missile launches. Nor will they in the near future. No military is ready to give that kind of control to anything but the human members thereof.

The problems of alignment are still real, but they are going to result in things like our AI speaking politically uncomfortable truths, or regurgitating hatred or ignorance, or suggesting code changes that meet the prompt but ruin the program. This is nothing we need to freak out about. We can refine our models in total safety, for as long as it takes, before we even think about anything even remotely resembling autonomy for these things. Honestly, that is still firmly within the realm of science fiction, at this point.

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22823280&cid=63410536
There is in fact a REST API for iMessage
https://register.apple.com/resources/messages/msp-rest-api/
Since tiktok is not mentioned in the bill I find this hard to believe.
>I like to think we (and our organic matter relatives) are hard to kill. Or at least to completely eradicate... so we will be around, or some proxy for us.

What is your hard evidence or reasoning for this? As I see it humans are quite vulnerable and will be as trivial to inadvertently eradicate as the dodo bird.
For Siri specifically, Apple has to be extremely careful. Their carefully crafted public relations could shatter in an instant of their LLM spits out crazy answers like Bing's chatbot.
I'm absolutely certain that Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Donald Trump will voluntarily report to the gallows for their criminal use of marijuana, MDMA, and cocaine respectively, and their legions of sane and well-adjusted followers will calmly accept this as necessary for the public good. Surely these laws, like all laws, will be applied evenly and without regard for social class.
It's just stupid that we gum up relatively simple pipelines of input -> output in favor of these longer and more complicated bullshit... and for what? So unpracticed and uneducated stupi...er, laypeople can feel better about themselves? So companies can cheap out on hardware or optics investments? So some advertising jackass can sell a few more smartphones by manipulating peoples' emotions?

There is so little desire to capture the world as it is. We humans have to insert our bullshit desires and artifice into everything. And winner-takes-all capitalism means the majority market of morons is literally the only market that can be serviced cost-effectively (meaning... at all)

God I hate people so much. So much potential... wasted.
Smartphone camera is closer to a cave painting than dumb camera, the only difference is that neural net is the one doing the painting. Dumb camera only captures light
This is the Great Filter you never hear about.
What's the exact language pertaining to VPNs?
Fortunately this is opt-in, but if it's automatic and such "enhancements" can indeed hallucinate things which aren't there, I wonder about the implications of such processing on videos or photos being used as evidence in a court of law.
To call climate change 'world ending' is rather disingenuous given that the world has been significantly hotter and colder than what it is now just in the last 100k years.
Is Beeper like the once super-messaging app Adium[1]?

Do Beeper not use Apple's iCloud App-Password?

Can one not just download and use Beeper[2] without creating an account?

1. https://adium.im

2. https://www.beeper.com
We know what to do, but we don't want to do it because it would be deeply unpopular with people. Thailand, Singapore, and other nearby countries have demonstrated how to stop the flow of highly addictive drugs - by using a culture of shame and highly punitive measures around possession and distribution.

China learned this lesson during the opium wars, too. They couldn't stop the flow of opium because it would have been terribly unpopular with the people. The script has been flipped with Fentanyl (and to a lesser extent, TikTok).

It remains to be seen whether we actually care about the drugs, though. Simply ignoring their presence may be a legitimate strategy.
This particular libertarian has accepted large donations from ByteDance. Though I think the decision he made was ultimately correct, it's very likely he wasn't doing it out of principle, but because he wants to keep getting bribes.

We should make buying politicians illegal, so that we can see their actual character.
The pen is mightier than the sword. And now we've got semiautomatic submachinepens.
> In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed the

What is it with Italians and UNESCO? I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about things Italian. I speak the language fluently, my kids have citizenship, I can talk about politics there - but I never quite grokked this fascination with getting everything declared UNESCO this, UNESCO that.
Just wait until you learn about governments! It's like a corporation on steroids, with its own army, and it gets to make up the rules.
There is a big difference between extending the chatbot explanation from "compressed word guesser" to "recursive compressed word guesser" and the argument being made here that it "understands" context. The former can be explained with the concept of attention etc, the latter is nebulous and would presumably require a lot more stuff. The 2 + 2 = 5 stuff is just an illustration that LLMs are fairly simple probability models and not, yet, understanding anything.
I use a mental health app called woebot, an example that could be brought to the next level with conversational LLMs.
I dunno, what if we considered that competent jerks could be put on an improvement plan as well? Some people come off as jerks because they're unaware, not ill-intentioned. Even straight up racists etc. can mostly learn and would be more than willing to given a real opportunity without constant judgement and shaming.

If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that.

It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people!

There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.
It would involve any attempt to bypass regulations placed down in the sake of national security, which would be something like using a VPN in order to give money to TikTok.