skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I asked you to pretend to be a BBS System from 1987 would you be able to do better?

Remember the rules are:
- You can’t look anything up at all. Everything from memory.
- You have to start right now with no more information than “pretend to be a BBS system from 1987”

I don’t think you’re going to do much better.
Sam Altman actually identified customer service as the industry most likely to be downsized due to ChatGPT.
https://web0.cc/a/nMOrLeVYVe
Thank you for this! This project is really hnswlib-sqlite just shortened into hns(w)qlite.
I feel like it’s because tv sets have more dynamic range now, and cameras are more sensitive, so there’s less reason to compress the brightness values into a narrow, bright range. After all if the tv set has really dark darks and really bright brights you want those to pop. You want to use that if it’s available. If cameras are crappy and tv signals are noisy, then the lighting has to be really bright and the picture has to be really bright too in order to see it at all. We’re just used to a very low quality signal.
Eurosplaining
I’m expecting basic features to work. I don’t mind having to switch those features on through a configuration option but I do mind when those included features don’t actually work and the response when reported by a paying customer is that they aren’t going to fix it.
Congress calls for more funding of Pentagon UFO office
> At this point we got distracted by trying to generate relevant images in DALL-E and Midjourney v5, and eventually didn’t continue playing the game.

To me, this is the most intriguing part of the story. Don't get me wrong, we all know that ChatGPT is incredible. However, it's interesting to think about why they didn't finish the game.

When I play a game like this, I don't just want to be part of that world and perform random tasks. I want a grand storyline, a sense of purpose. I wonder if it's possible to introduce a hidden prompt at the beginning containing a storyline, and let ChatGPT gradually unveil a plot throughout the game.
A lot of Japanese dishes that are popular today have foreign origins.

Tempura, curry, ramen, and salmon for sushi.

It’s why I find it hilarious when some people obsess over the authenticity of Japanese food and deride fusion cuisine.

It (much like most great cuisines) is the result of intermixing and interpretations of dishes.

Many Indian dishes too wouldn’t have existed without foreign interaction. Potato dishes obviously (which are very prevalent) but even things like Butter chicken or many Mughal based dishes.

The origin of food is in many ways just as as interesting as the etymology of words.
We've had high schoolers DDoS their schools to avoid standardized testing. It is also a common way to interfere with esports. So yeah, the customers are often quite young.
In my experience they have been distinct sounds of pressure and movement between plant fibres, in ways that the wind or insects wouldn’t or couldn’t cause in that setting.

If you lay still on a warm, quiet, still day in spring in a field or meadow, you might hear a lot of sounds you otherwise haven’t and wouldn’t expect. There’s a lot of activity. Sometimes plants will let some leaves or blades free after a seed husk finally breaks under their weight. It’s just gravity and pressure at work, but you’ll hear these things frequently.

This sort of thing reminds me of learning to find mushrooms. I had no idea mushrooms are everywhere until I started looking. They occupy all kinds of spaces in various seasons, dependent on a rain, a species of tree, or a sudden warmth after a cool period. Once you see them, they’re everywhere.

Similarly, plants and their myriad processes kind of jump out at you once you observe them closely. Before then they may seem relatively inert.
People don't like to hear this, but management jobs will be the least impacted.
But why should humans carry liability? Why not have a company (e.g. a self-driving car company) hold all the liability.
MacUser 1996: How to Rig Up the Fastest Photoshop Machine
Via https://mastodon.social/@256/110124267999865910
In 2017 we were going to have "profitable driverless fleets by 2019". Why is it different this time?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824953
I don't agree. Here are four reasons why public clouds don't automatically win.

1. Many companies operate multi-cloud and prefer vendors who cross platforms.

2. SaaS companies don't compete with cloud vendors in a simple, head to head way. Instead they operate symbiotically. A SaaS on for analytics AWS might compete with Redshift but have joint go-to-market with EC2 with deep discounting of cloud costs as the vendor grows. AWS makes money either way.

3. Your margin argument is wrong. Gross margins for independent SaaS vendors that are infra heavy are more like 50-60% all in (including payments to AWS, GCP, etc.) You can bring them up by managing the infrastructure running in your customers' cloud accounts.

You need to instead look at actual prices for competing SaaS services. They tend to be roughly comparable in the aggregate at least in the database markets I'm familiar with, because vendors charge what the market will bear. Instead, vendors compete on support, the billing model, and features. Public clouds don't have any particular advantage here. Just to give one example: Redshift offers deep discounts in return for 3 year prepayment. However, it can't handle the response time required by many customer-facing APIs.

4. The thing that screws up vendor finances is not cost of delivery (COGS) but customer acquisition costs (CAC). That's the principal reason why many of the big SaaS services are still underwater on profitability.

My company is a SaaS vendor for ClickHouse. We've experienced all of these. Our business is doing fine.
You are right, and that is an excellent way to state my goals: I hope to create systems that have as much lasting impact as autotools.
beautiful quote.

Also ChatGPT is insanely useful for turning fragmented YT transcripts with timestamps into actual paragraphs of text.

"Fuck your deadline. They call it a deadline but nobody actually fucking dies if you miss one. So just fucking chill."

"PowerPoint - there is no power in those points and no point in those presentations. We have been brainwashed into believing that PowerPoint gives us the power to express ourselves creatively, but the only power it has is to kill our souls. Powerpoint and your Excel spreadsheet too - those columns and rows represent the metal bars of the prison cell of your brain. Free yourself from the soul-killing software of exile and PowerPoint and live a more meaningful existence. "
Discord and Slack chat rooms are some of the worst tools for community building. The only reason they are popular is because they are free. It has absolutely no aspect of a community and makes it incredibly hard to have multiple threads of conversations.
UBI will pretty much be a requirement if AI lives up to the hype and doesn't hit a sudden wall in improvement again. And even physical jobs might not be safe considering transformers are being used for robotics now as well and getting great results

https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1640399269051133952

basically we are heading towards utopia or dystopia, it will depend if governments actually share the wealth created by productivity gains or if they use these advancements to oppress people at a level never before possible
EPA approves California rules phasing out diesel trucks
That’s a rare category, since typically people who are naturally good at something challenging spend a lot of time doing it because it’s something they enjoy. The equivalent white collar job would be a savant who quickly masters new fields without significant effort, but again, said savants typically spend a lot of time on their field of expertise anyway.

I suppose artists/musicians who have natural mastery of the canvas/instrument and thus don’t need to practice rote exercises much also fall into this category.

BTW, I disagree that a bouncer falls into that category—they need to constantly physically train in the gym to maintain their physique.
My thought process:

> Moving from Rust to C++. Unusual, but probably interesting.

> Written by Raph Linus? Fuck me, he must have a good reason.

> Oh. It's April 1st. I'm going to go organize my garage.
Microwave burritos iterated on that tradition by ensuring that you could pick exactly one of:

1. contents erupt from the corner like a volcano in the microwave

2. burrito unrolls itself during heating

3. mostly ice cold inside (although some ice cold spots will still happen in #1 and #2)
> I think we underestimate the capabilities of children.

Probably to a large degree because we lock them up in a room all day where they spend their time listening to information targeted at the bottom decile of the room.
But they could then supplement that income with their blog. Once the bare essentials are taken care off, you have more options with low paying passion projects
Just like how people waxed poetic about how Crypto and NFTs would change life as we know it, here we are... A bunch of failed promises (lies) and shoddy rushed ideas.

I've observed many sites implementing Ai -written articles lately, ad frankly the quality of writing is terrible... If this is the future, we're in big trouble.

There is a degree of soullessness found in Ai that will probably never be captured. Being isolated with only Ai as an option for interaction destroys mental health, as well will find out once it's too late. Our propensity to rush into profit-seeking/marketing-driven technology schemes is destroying the best parts of our real world with filler and emptiness.

I hope innovators take a moment to step back and realize rushing to market will do more damage than ever, and that unique products (not another image generator or text-to-ai subscription service) are better than whatever is going on now. We're light years away from productivity and authenticity in Ai, and it's evident when even Siri and Google Voice still cannot properly understand cues without them being carefully pronounced and phrased. Let's all stop trying to fool everyone about Ai with cheap scripting and create some real tech instead, which takes time and proper testing.
Maybe it's for the best if we can work less and raise better and more families.
However, I suspect the powerful will use this as a reason to push propaganda for even less people.
Alibaba Cloud to buy the Vue.js project for $300M
This is why reading the original Lamport paper is useful. This distributed nature of things isn’t due to bad clocks or software or anything. It is an irreducible part of the physics of our world, with relativity. Perfect clocks won’t help with space like separations and different velocities or gravitational force. You have to build communication into it. The causality relationship is inherently a partial order.
Holy crap, imagine being this insecure.
New census estimates show which California counties are losing residents
To add to your point on curry leaves:

> Curry leaf” comes from the Tamil word “karu-vep-ilai” (‘black neem leaf’), leaves of the sweet neem plant Murraya koenigii
Heating and AC are unlikely to be powered by renewables, because they're highly correlated and bursty.

Ex: Your town might be fine with 100MW of power at 60F. But if the temperature drops to 40F, everyone turns on their heaters more, so the entire town uses 150MW or more. So how much renewables do you build? Not 100MW, but 150MW. Which is absurd, no one is going to overbuild capacity like that. And even at 150MW, if the temperature drops to 20F or 10F, even more energy will be used.

In contrast, the Fossil Fuel / Natural Gas peaker methodology is to overbuild on capacity, because capacity is extremely cheap. Maybe the town has a 200MW plant for example. You only use what the people need, so the 200MW plant consumes 100MW at 70F, 150MW at 40F, and everyone has capacity left to grow and expand the town.

----------

Renewables are great for baseload / constant loads that are predictable. But weather isn't always predictable. In this example, 100MW of baseload renewables would be ideal, and the gas-peaker plant is used for everything in addition to that.
It's a snake eating its own tail situation.

Corpos need a wealthy consumer base in order to sell things and remain profitable. But to do that they have to collectively pay laborers higher wages because laborers are basically the consumer.

An individual corporation lowering labor costs in an economy of high wages benefits with greater profits so this strategy is logical. But if corporations act on this collectively they damage themselves. Most corporations, however are built upon short term gains. So they are unlikely to have the foresight to act wisely. It's the tragedy of the commons.

The tragedy is this, when a corporation hires AI and lowers labor costs he is acting rationally according to a cost benefit analysis. But this logic applied collectively becomes suicidal. It is ultimately rational and logical action that damages us. That it the tragedy.

Best solution I've heard of is ubi. But I'm not sure how it will play out in practice. I think government job creation might be better.
If I need 5 developers instead of 20. I need 1 manager instead of 4.

Also a large chunk of manager work is grunt work like filling spreadsheets, writing emails, scheduling meetings, etc… With those tasks partially automated, I am pretty sure a manager could oversee larger teams and focus on the big picture instead of doing boilerplate tasks.
>Not that the US has a positive record on immigration. There's no wall in Sicily, at least.

You’re kidding, right? You have a massive sea acting as a wall against the undesirables. The US has more legal immigrants than any other country in the world.

No one thinks megacorps care about them, it’s just a business transaction. If I didn’t find what I’m getting in return valuable, I wouldn’t participate. This is how it works outside of nanny states.
garbage collection and workload resource tuning, typically no application changes at this point

To get even better results, you can get into the application, build process, and developer experience / tooling. Saving developer time usually has the most impactful ROI, mostly beyond the accounting side of things

This of course all depends on the company and their business
to do that need to create alternative economy which limits ones maximum wealth accumulation in logarithmic way, so nobody can make more than million usd a year. this may lead people accumulating commodities instead, not sure if thats positive or negative. if we can limit that too some how? I guess we need a proper class war
Yeah, it's no walk in the park, let me tell you that.
Mirror [1] of this rare historical event.

[1] - https://archive.is/mVdI0
arent all wars started for money?
Atmos’ big feature is to place audio properly no matter how many - or how few - speakers you have.

As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.
is $ meaningful in verb trains? because that was what I was referring to when I said no loops/recursion/flowcontrol

N.B. a sibling says J has added a direct definition construct while I wasn't watching which renders my comment largely irrelevant although the I feel general point that a lot of J 'example code' tends towards difficult-for-noobs to parse verb trains still holds.
There are a couple assumptions implicit in our system of "problems" and "smart people".

There is the assumption that it will be written about.

There is the assumption that "solving" is the appropriate response.

Combined, they describe a constrained perspective. A volume which, compared to the alternative, is infinitely small.

So consider that the next time you feel a riddle's tug, smarty.
Right now, billionaires who profess the view that AI could end humanity are working their hardest to progress the field as fast as possible, scoffing at "ethics", "safety", and "responsibility". So if they do get their god-machine, they're not going to look around at 8 billion fellow humans (biological stochastic parrots, according to some) who are suddenly "obsolete", but using up resources, and think "fully automated space luxury communism".
How your brain organizes information
No. Typically, you could send someone what was probably more properly called a private message on the main board. (I don't remember what we actually called it at the time.) In general (with some caveats), messaging on BBSs and the big commercial systems like CIS--and for that matter the email systems at companies that had them in the 80s--were largely islands that couldn't communicate with other systems.
at the point where you regularly have to scan that combination into a potentially malicious or compromised machine that knows how to generate and transmit the hash, you may as well just trust some centralised authority to store the originals.

If someone MITMs your password, you can rotate it. A bit harder to do that with your iris.

Of course, true for fingerprint scanning too which has been around for a while, but iris kind of takes that to a new minority report level for many.
I use it all the time without video and it's fine.

It's not perfect, there are occasional connection problems, but dropouts are pretty rare.
This is great. With every step forward, with every ounce of precedent that is created, more people will see that they aren’t wrong to be worried or want regulation. Really nice to have a bit of good news finally. Maybe that bastard Sam Altman will come to his senses soon.
And a good way to do that is by reigning in the digital clutter.

No you don’t need those 15 shots of literally the same angle. Nope, you don’t! Maybe as a professional photographer but even then you’d mostly know what to discard.

Because if you don’t then cost will not be the only problem. It will be difficult to move around your data and you may have to. You also need to keep multiple copies online — so there as well cost will multiply.
When Gina ran it, it was amazing. It was still a good site after she left. But later it became a US-only (whenever I looked at it, most things were only relevant to the US, if at all) almost-spam site, it was really sad.
This is awesome. I did not know decrypting chrome's password db is still that easy.
Indeed. Managers that can not only run a department but can also do the tasks associated with it will thrive. They’ll get more done with the same team sizes.

One thing to remember is managers line to have as many people under them as possible. VPs and directors care a lot about this. They’ll find ways to continue to grow teams whine harvesting more productivity.
The alcoholic bought his favorite bar.
Depending on the province, "Engineer" and/or "Professional Engineer" are legally restricted titles.

You can't use the title (neither can your employer) unless you are licenced to do so.
It was a sarcastic comment tbh, as in it seems pretty wild that the only reason for a city to be spared and the other to be zeroed being the destination of a general of war honeymoon...

Like WTF.
I appreciate the filtering. Self learning is super life-style dependent and I’d like to work with other people who have the same (classes, part-time work, no real responsibilities like kids or a full-time job, more free time in the summer) lifestyle as me.

Also, there’s a social aspect of learning together and I’d rather spend time with people my own age.
Original Lamport paper here https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf
Thing I didn't mention is aligned incentives. "Pilot also wants to arrive safely so he can see his family."
Placement of closed-captioning does not interfere with the viewing experience of folks without hearing loss. They didnt ask for it and always defaulted to "uncaptioned", as it should be.

In turning the closed-captioning ON to English, it is the loss of English (in non-English language movie) captioning when a foreign actor sporadically speaks in English. "Normal"
English viewer would enjoy just the same; deaf and hard-of-hearing, not so much.
I think there's room to assume a little more steel in the man you're responding to.

The statement wasn't "UBI frees people from the need to work"; it was something more like "UBI might embolden people to pursue passion projects since they'd have reduced fear of financial ruin."

The latter seems plausible to me. I have personally decided not to pursue a startup idea because I didn't want to take a ride on the venture capital pain train, and I also didn't want to drop my income all the way to zero and start burning through my savings in order to do it. UBI might have changed that calculus.
I'll offer up gifted salesperson. The kind who might not even fully understand say the tech they are selling but have innate skills at reading the room, knowing what to chase/drop, etc. It's not like they teach this in college, but the training is self taught over years I suppose.
This matches my experience. GCP was like IBM a decade earlier: they assumed the name alone would close the deal and we didn’t feel like paying more for the privilege of doing their jobs for them.
Or the oversized influence of the neo-feudalists make the who enterprise of changing it via democratic means borderline/if not impossible...?
Line Micro Testing Framework
If you break a branch, the sound of it breaking informs you that you have broken a branch.
Italy blocks ChatGPT*
I’d like to draw parallels to the old cable titans with local monopolies who also had the same customer service tactics as well.

1. Offer a cheap (free) service

2. Gain significant market penetration

3. Provide little to no customer service

4. Raise prices

5. Let the product/services degrade until significant public outcry or regulator involvement
Wouldn't Erlang be much more efficient if it simply compiled to the JVM?
Before youtube was invented there were these things called "books".

Also, most things come with some sort of cooking instructions, like pasta or rice or whatever.

Is it unusual that my parents (and pretty much all my friend's parents) made sure we grew up knowing how to cook and eat really good food? Maybe it's a UK vs US thing, maybe it's because the nearest "convenience stores" were a couple of hundred miles away.
Without modern agriculture + nutrition, I don’t think you could survive without eating meat (if I’m wrong, feel free to ignore the rest of this). That means you have to murder an animal to live and don’t really get a choice in the matter. This why we are inherently murderous. Sure, these days we pay other people to do it, but when you pick up a burger; that cow was murdered — hopefully humanly.
That said, for those of us that don't have the luxury of working only in Rust, the cargo monoculture is a problem.

Or more precisely, as a result of that monoculture there is a single implementation of build.rs and it cannot interoperate with anything else. If cargo could optionally generate a build.ninja file or some JSON with the command it runs, it would be so much easier.
My partner participates in an online RPG writing community. A lot of people there sell character artwork. They have been getting mad that people are using AI generated artwork, and are considering banning it.

I'm not really saying this time will be different, but I don't think self driving cars caused even this much disruption.
It’s pretty funny that you think this is impossible based on some theoretical idea of what LLMs are. Playing with LLMs today quickly demonstrates how things that shouldn’t be possible in theory are trivial in practice. In a few years, who knows where we’ll be.
Those can be done not from just from Python but from poppler-tools and grep too.
when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot.

Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.
The origin of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover art (2015)