skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You assume this is all very simple because you have no idea what you're talking about. You're engaged in the sort of discussion that inspired the dunning kruger research.

Not really. Don't assume you're the only artist on this site, there are others too. Why don't you provide a valid definition of art then? Then we'll use that one for this discussion.

> If the vast majority of people won't care, why do all major movies and games spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on VFX when they could get lower quality versions of the same exact imagery for 1/20th the budget like SyFy productions do?

That's...my point. This is basically what I said (or perhaps what I meant to say, if that didn't come across clearly). Then you said,

> Creating images is a vastly different process than creating art though creating art might involve it. If you think art is merely customizing imagery things to suit people's preferences, you don't understand art.

I understood this to mean that you see something beyond creating images (ie, fancy VFX) and that there is some deeper meaning of "art." My point is that as long as people see pretty, expensive pictures on the screen, many of them won't care about some ideal artistic merit. See how much money Avatar or Transformers make over generally more highly-regarded artistic films like Everything Everywhere All At Once which didn't make nearly as much.
Yeah, but WWDC moved back to San Jose in 2017.
https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hir...
This was inevitable. MS has to start recouping the almost $11 billion they invested in this.
What even is a 'fact generator'? And why do you think an LLM is meant to function as one?

If you ask Wolfram Alpha - something which I think is actually meant to be a fact generator - "Which is the heaviest Pokemon?" it will happily tell you that it is Celesteela, and it weighs 2204.4lbs.

Is that a 'fact'?

It certainly 'true', for some definition of the word true. The game Pokemon exists, and in it Pokemon have a weight. Of all the official Pokemon, that one is the heaviest. Wolfram Alpha has given you an accurate answer to your question.

But it's also completely made up. There's no such thing as a Pokemon, and they do not actually have weights.

So sure, transformer models can't be relied upon to generate facts. But so what? There's a lot more to the world than mere facts.
Some people might not know this yet, the common idiom is to have the default value be None, and then start your function with checking if it's None and initializing to empty list.
Heck, I'm still using my ancient Rostock Max, and it works just fine for my needs. It's such a stable platform that I haven't had to re-zero the bed in months. Once it's up to temp, it's in spec. My only wish-I-had was the ability to use a wider variety of filament, but the bowden tube is just too long for any of the specialty mixes. No issues at all with PLA, though!
These discussions usually focus on incompetent developers, but in my experience there are way more incompetent managers/product people. I have run into multiple socially skillful liberal arts majors with zero experience or interest in tech working as pms. They don't understand the work enough to actually be effective, but while the developers do the work they are in meetings with managers all day, and consequently are the ones to get promoted to management. Then when it comes time to hire, they hire more people like themselves and the cycle repeats.

They are never held accountable for hiring a bunch of pms instead of developers. If something fails, some hapless junior dev will get sacrificed for being "incompetent" when in reality the problem was management.
If your threat model is people who you already know are trying to monitor you, isn't it implied that they think you're suspicious with or without the paint?
Just to be a devil's advocate: yes, construction in the US generally doesn't last as long as in the "old world". But on the other hand, look at how hard it is to take a beautiful 17th century stone building and make it as energy efficient as modern construction. Same with just about every other internal quality-of-life feature - the old building wins on feng shui and other ineffable valuations, but fails in terms of every day to day and efficiency/cost metric. Yes, it can seem stupid to be tearing down and rebuilding a 50-100 old house when you compare it to old-world behavior, but building technology has moved along at a pace almost as rapid as computational tech, and there's an argument to be made for benefitting from that rather than being hamstrung by "old beauty".
How long it takes for human child to start walking?

"it is too early, oops, no, it is too late".
I do not make the rules, but I do have to play by them. Even in the most “modern” societies, ask women how often they have felt their relative physical weakness used against them.
Pretty sure this guy can catch your dog even if your dog was on cocaine, remained focus, and had someone feeding it water periodically:

[1] https://www.irunfar.com/aleksandr-sorokin-smashes-24-hour-wo...
GPT-4 is superhuman in some ways.
> because the default value for the target_list parameter is mutable, it gets shared between function calls

bit of a weird way to phrase it, I think they're always shared between function calls, you just don't notice when they're not mutable.
It clearly doesn't. What specifically in the background check requirements is inhuman?
Strange clickbait link with an embedded YouTube video. Here is an easier to follow article:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/22/23652488/samsung-gallery-...
It's not too hard or expensive to avoid drinking it straight up, but any restaurant you visit will wash food and surfaces with it, every bathroom you visit you'll wash your own hands with it, etc etc.
That was because Moscone was under remodeling/expansion.
> like they cant influence twitter, facebook and all the rest?

Well, no, that’s more Maximum Bone Saw’s purview than the CCPs, and that foreign influence isn’t (at least per the initial list written into the proposed law) considered adversarial.

(EDIT: That’s specific to Twitter, not Facebook and all the rest.)
Say a term enough times and it gets established by people who repeat it. Like "nanoparticles", or "data science" or "codes".

Ironically, by venting about how BRICS is not a thing, you've helped a tiny bit more into making it a thing for people who read your post. That's just how it works.
I was there live! Good times. A friend convinced me to dip out of another session to go watch Gary's talk. I feel lucky.

I've seen Gary give a few talks. All fantastic.

The Birth & Death of JavaScript is my second favorite. The fact that he stayed in character as someone from 2035 for the entire talk and used a slightly evolved English.. brilliant. I saw that at Strangeloop and have fonder memories than the PyCon rendition on his site.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
ok well I think for most people this "social fact" aligns exactly with reality, and as you've already stated, people are always rational actors so...
No, I didn't know exactly what commands were useful. And I'm not subscribed to the pro version so pasting the whole documentation would cost a lot.
As someone considered neurotypical I don't see that comment as being too blunt at all. If anything, I would be grateful that the person went out of their way to find the offending commit.
> For a great example of this, see OCaml 5 support for effect handlers. It's basically a generalisation of exceptions, very lightweight and elegant.

A similar approach is being explored for Scala 3:

- https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/canthrow.h...

- https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/290885

- https://github.com/lampepfl/monadic-reflection (https://youtu.be/UmO-f0qTRSU)
One can fully understand the type coercion rules and the effects that result from them, and still acknowledge that said type coercion rules are not optimal, at least because they lead to very non-optimal outcomes.

I for one am tired of people claiming that this is not "weird or bizarre", because not only is it obvious that several parts of JavaScript including the type coercion rules are (at best) strange, it's also absolutely not surprising from its history: The person who originally invented JavaScript wanted to implement Scheme, but management wanted to go for "something similar to Java". JavaScript was prototyped in ten days[1], and I doubt anyone back then really anticipated the role it would later come to have.

There is an entire standards body that aims to hammer JavaScript into something that makes more sense, because, well, we're stuck with. (Or rather, you are stuck with it, I don't do web development.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20200227184037/https://speakingj...
> Height is largely genetic, and discounting malnutrition it has no bearing on a person's health.

But nutrition is what's being measured here. People from poorer countries are on-average shorter, and that is largely driven by diet, although childhood illness is also a factor.

The issue isn't height really, it's that people are having their growth stunted. They did not reach the height they would have if they'd gotten better food, better sanitation, etc.
> Of course you can always choose, just like you can choose to remember people’s phone numbers and driving directions. But you don’t need it.

You do need to if your phone can’t store certain phone numbers. And you will be worse at it if you don’t practice.

Why can’t it store certain numbers? It’s impossible to know. Which phone numbers won’t it be able to store? It’s impossible to know.
I like your list. As a Ruby writer for many years I’ll add Crystal > Ruby. Being able to deploy a single binary is such a boon that even the other myriad improvements aren’t worth mentioning, especially if we’re in the “what you might do with Awk” territory. Go users probably feel that way too but I know much less about that.
There certainly seems to be class hatred and division behind it. I don't know if there are any rational elements to it like the higher classes having more to lose, or it is purely driven by propaganda from the ruling class to cement their power.

That people are irrational or willfully ignorant about things is not surprising. People can become irrational and blind to truth through their own self-delusions or through propaganda. Being "educated" or having more money doesn't change that.
Generally speaking that's true. But I'm not entirely sure many luminaries would be satisfied being relegated to being the "Fortnite language". Surely they have larger goals here and it's why Epic is bothering when so much of their ecosystem relies on C++ currently.
30% is about par for the course when it comes to contemporary controversial POTUS elections [1][2].

It seems to ebb and flow: each side takes their turn being the aggrieved party and then alternate next go around (2000, 2016, 2020).

Consecutive cycles of animosity on one side could be worrying.

The tapestry of dysfunctional patchwork that make up the American Constitutional Republic, while tattered and frayed before, has found ways to persist.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2000/12/01/many-questio...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4687/seven-americans-accept-bus...
I own replacement parts for every expendable and/or non-warrantied part. I’ve test replaced a bunch to prove it works (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works).
Black holes == Super intelligence

(aka The Transcension Hypothesis)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
I love bluebubbles.

I have it running on my mac so I can iMessage from my Vivo X Fold (and Windows laptop) and my iPhone that sits at home shares the same number using T-Mobile digits.

This setup still lets me use my Apple Watch Ultra to receive all the same notifications over cellular.

A fun overly complicated adventure since the iPhone has been boring for years, but I really like the Apple Watch on cellular for running, skiing & Scuba Diving plus everyone I know is using iMessage...
Yeah, for me the key thing is professionalism (a loaded word, worth an entire book). If everyone on the team "has it", then whether people are more direct or less direct probably won't matter, because everyone understands their role and their duty, and aligns their behaviours and their interpretations accordingly.

Anecdotally, for every "bad situation" I've ever been in in the workplace, I could point to at least one person who was not being professional.

Many disciplines have a real "culture of professionalism" (and I've operated in these disciplines prior to switching to to eng), but I don't think software engineering has that. I think it's probably related both to the relative abundance of workers without formal instruction, and to the lack of standards across academic programmes / bootcamps etc.
So..you apply an AI remaster filter to a photo and complain that it is remastering your photo?
> The crux of the issues is that it shouldn't be considered better. It's a totally inconsequential trait.

They physical advantages of height are very apparent and simple to understand. Even animals recognize the larger you are the safer you are (generally). How is that inconsequential?
Why Is the Federal Reserve Abetting a Drain of Deposits from Banks?
I am in no sense a person who has the chops, inclination, or talent to create a programming language. However, I do sometimes think about "What would a programming language with the following precepts be like?" and pose to myself various hypothetical axioms, or results, or constructs.

It would be ... interesting ... to design a language without WATs. Where the truth tables and the NaNs and whatnot all made a kind of sense. I am left wondering if perhaps a minimum number of WATs would inevitably be present, no matter your design.
Okay, but America accepts more immigrants than any other country by orders of magnitude. That’s always forgotten whenever this discussion is brought up.
Li'l Chompers Baby Dentures

https://www.howtobeadad.com/2011/3957/bad-product-baby-dentu...
vegetarian for 20 years and cooking beef literally smells like dog poop to my nose. So yeah, maybe just a matter of what you're used to?
What does the word "super" mean to you? In some ways, GPT4 is already superintelligent. So is ChatGPT 3.5. Do you know anyone who can translate natural language to code as fast as GPT 3.5, or, given a few paragraphs of reference text, perfectly tutor a child on any subject under the sun at a moment's notice like GPT4 is doing for Khan Academy?

How many artists do you know who can produce almost any style of artwork with any subject matter within 15 seconds?
I can't help but feel uneasy about the implications for accuracy and trustworthiness. It's reminiscent of the current state of search engines, where ads often compromise the user experience. I'm curious to see how long it takes for ad-supported LLMs to become the standard, and if we'll eventually see Kagi-esque alternatives rise to offer paid, more reliable versions.
How could there be evidence that they didn’t?
Sure, I have acknowledged there are plenty of missteps by Canonical too.

Though I don't think CLAs are a problem (FSF requires them for GNU projects too), but lack of committment not to switch to a non-free license.

Unity happened as GNOME 3.0 already went in an entirely different direction (mostly led by RH engineers) from 2.x series and as Canonical simply couldn't influence GNOME design. With a paradigm shift one way or another, it was a sensible move.

Launchpad was created as a tool to develop Ubuntu and free software: there was nothing else (and there still isn't) quite like it. Sure, it took a while to get it open sourced, but lack of contributions afterwards kinda proved the point that that wasn't really important (I mean, GitHub wasn't and still isn't).

Mir/LXD/Juju were attempts to improve on the incumbents (Wayland/Docker mostly).
> The idea that someone who is happy with a different product is somehow wrong or losing.

Actually, it wasn’t really that I thought they were wrong/losing, it was more a response to the virtue signaling on GP. Nobody cares they canceled their order because they read some words from random people on the internet. Honestly, nobody should care I’m happy with my purchase either! :)
If that’s your view, then it seems better to be up front about the ownership limitations than pretending otherwise until a war comes along and pulling the rug.
Yes. It is very easy to replicate his results for JS in every modern browser and Node.js environment, because these results are part of the ECMAScript standard and can never ever ever ever be changed. Again, if you are unsure about this point, please read the other comments I have left in these conversational threads.

(Just to be clear, I'm not saying any of this to jump on a bashing-JS train. Think of e.g. the abiding love of having been married for 20+ years, it's not like your spouse has no sandpapery parts or faults, we can healthily admit them to each other at this point -- I just have learned not to rub against them.)
This is the same sort of weak argument that crippled stem cell research. We could have been a decade ahead towards curing aging and innumerable ailments, but one loud group got to decide what's "ethical".

Will China or other countries stop their AI research? This is fundamentally a race for survival if you believe that AGI is an end-game. If one side of a future conflict is fielding robotic troops and AI controlled battalions, you'd better hope it's your side.

Stopping now would be like pausing the Manhattan project for ethical reasons. Nothing would have been achieved except delaying America, costing lives, and allowing the USSR to potentially have unilateral power.

If instead, current AI is just a "gloried auto-complete", then that makes this letter hilarious and equally pointless.

I feel like you can't have it both ways. If it's critical technology that will change the face of the future, it's important to get there while simultaneously taking the time to understand it (ala nuclear power). If it's not so critical, then we don't need a moratorium.

Edit:
I think a better solution would be to have all the signatories fund a joint effort at AI alignment, safety, and certification research. Per their stated objective of having "AI research and development (...) refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal."
Also, loyal? What a strange word to use here.
I feel like if I actually believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and that the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers, I'd spend a lot more time planning how to bomb data centers and a lot less time curating Shoggoth memes on my web forum. On the other hand, if I were more concerned with self-aggrandizement, writing doomsaying thinkpieces for Time is exactly what I'd spend my time on.
We’ve already screwed up. Hockey stick climate change and extinction is now in progress.

This can change, with the fast advent of Fusion (net positive shown at the end of 2022) and AI (first glimpses of AGI in the begging of 2022).

And yes, we definitely should not allow a madman with a supercomputer (like Musk or Putin or …) to outcompete more reasonable players.
If you are small fish watching Twitch and Pornhub, couple of weeks, maybe.

If you are a dissidents influencer or online figure, on the other hand, you will be lucky to even be found out why you disappeared.
For the most recent presidential election maybe. For the previous one a majority of Democrats including many high ranking Democrat politicians and officials were election deniers.

Clearly you aren't going to have a large contingent of deniers of elections that your favored party won.
The situation is insane. The only way to navigate messages is “keep scrolling up”, no way to filter searches beyond a simple keyword search, there’s no read-only view so you lose your scroll position if you get a message, etc etc etc.

The core interactions are mostly very well done, when you use a different messaging app you tend to see all the touch edges they sanded down. But it is just incredibly lacking in features for such an important part of their ecosystem.
Google – here's some crazy research that could hypothetically be turned into a useful product one day.

OpenAI – write that down, write that down!
Cities grapple with Twitter paid verification
First your kid doesn't have teeth and you want them to, now your kid has teeth and you wish they didn't...good grief.

Pick a lane parents....
"Even Sam Altman"? "Especially Sam Altman", you mean?

While regulations might slightly impact OpenAI's bottom line, they can ultimately prove advantageous for large corporations like them by addressing their primary concern: the threat of competition. By raising barriers to entry, regulatory measures would help solidify OpenAI's market position and maintain its dominance.
If you have a problem with that, why limit this to TikTok?

Not that it isn't at least a little reasonable to be wary of adversaries having access to a data collection platform, but the problem also gets meaningfully less substantial in general if you put meaningful limits on these companies' capacity to grow and eat each other in the name of building empires of surveillance capitalism.

Meta in particular is pushing hard on that angle while hand-waving away the fact that Facebook has a history of treating society as a large-scale experiment. It's manipulated users' mental health on purpose, meddled in elections by selling users' data directly to campaigners, and furthered incitements of everything from genocides abroad to the attack on the Capitol. They're feeding into attacks that single out TikTok specifically, as part of a broader pattern that Facebook and Zuckerberg personally have exhibited of trying to buy or clone nearly anything that represents competition. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp. They tried to buy Snapchat. They've lifted the primary functionality of several large competitors, ranging from disappearing messages to basically all of Reels.

Instead of just taking the blunt-instrument approach of banning social media platforms from within the borders of specific foreign countries, we arguably should be having an entirely different conversation about banning the business practices that make TikTok a problem.
Australia routinely rejects people if it's thought they'll be a burden on the medical system.
> No matter how fast those iterations get, that's just not something machines will be able to do themselves. Ever.

Why do people say stuff like this? How do you know what machines will ever be able to do, can you tell the future? And more fundamentally, do you believe humans are more than a biological machine? If you don't (and thus aren't a physicalist) then sure, you can make statements like this because you'd believe that humans have something fundamentally different that no machine can replicate, but if you do think so, you'd believe that anything humans can do, machines will eventually be able to do, even if it takes a long time.
Great insight -- thanks!
Interesting approach! However the article ignores the long diffusion time of insulin released under the skin. Unless the insulin produced by their beta cells is different from what I shoot, it takes hours for subcutaneous insulin to get fully absorbed into the bloodstream where it is needed. There are two main problems with that:

Regulation: With lead times measured in fractions of hours, the response is very delayed compared to a pancreas that releases directly into the bloodstream where insulin has immediate effect. When a device under the skin measures higher blood sugar, it is already too late and you need a muted response to prevent a swing in the other direction later.

Locality: Insulin leads to tissue growth and must not be released in the same area for a long time. The body will grow a lump of fat tissue around a device that releases insulin.

So I wonder how they want to address these issues.