skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Building upon this, the light truck loophole [1] means that there is currently a sort of arms race ongoing if you are concerned about car safety.

Car manufacturers are happy to build the majority of their consumer-facing vehicles as "light trucks" so they can ignore environmental standards, and those of us that want smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient vehicle need to compromise on safety.

SUVs need to be heavily penalized, and need to have far stricter licensing requirements. This will bring down emissions much more than some blanket move to EVs, and be beneficial for safety as well.

On the surface, weight penalties seem to be an effective way to accomplish this; I am curious if there are any examples or case studies about this that you can cite, 'bryanmgreen.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://jalopnik.com/every-car-looks-like-this-thanks-to-a-g...
Non-Evolutionary Superintelligences Do Nothing, Eventually
>>> "“They’re saying it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.”

It sounds like people are really insecure about themselves financially or egoistically. You don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to have your job or you can't go without one for a few a years. and if you're ego can't handle being laid off or fired, you may want to do something about that because jobs these days don't last much longer than 2-4 years at most places: just look at people's resumes on linkedIn.
Systemic issues exacerbated by national political trends and rapid uneven economic growth.

Due to the very real issue of police brutality in SFPD, local politicians are opposed to increasing funding for SFPD without oversight, and a number of politicians want to decrease it due to their police brutality record.

That said, SFPD is having a hard time retaining and hiring officers as they can get better salaries elsewhere in the Bay with less overtime. Fresh out of Academy cops in San Jose can earn a $111k base that caps at $189k, but SFPD's starting base is $103k and caps at $147.5k. Even factoring overtime, SFPD comes out to less than SJPD for hours worked, and other richer suburbs can pay even more than either wth even less hours.

Add to that politicization of the SF DA's office and Public Defender's office for the exact same reason (pay sucks so political hacks from both sides of the aisle fight for control) and you have dysfunctional local law enforcement.

On top of all that, SF had massively redeveloped a lot of formerly redlined neighborhoods (Western Addition/Hayes Valley, Mid-Market/Civic Center, Mission Bay+Potrero/Hunters Point) which in turn displaced those who couldn't afford to move to cheaper working class suburbs like Antioch and Vallejo.

Add to that the very real issue of neighboring states and cities (both Republican like Nevada in the 2010s and Democrat like NYC in the late 2010s to present) bussing their basket case issues out to San Francisco.

All this lead to the dysfunction that is seen today in San Francisco.
An assistant who could do what Tao did is not going to be $50k.
This is true in the UK - driving licenses have your address on them, but for some reason they're not usually accepted as proof of address. I assume this is because you only need to renew the license (i.e. get a new copy of the physical piece of plastic with an updated photo and expiry date) every ten years, so in theory your driving license could be evidence that you lived somewhere nine years ago but not evidence that you still live there today.

Providing a recent utility bill or bank statement is a much more common ask.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the metaverse isn't a bad idea, but the implementations just aren't there yet. Or at least, folks aren't coming up with applications that are both compelling and supportable with affordable hardware.

Google Glass had similar problems.

Eventually someone's going to nail both these things, we just haven't seen it yet.
> "Emergent" as used here is akin to how physicists use the word. "Emergent" as you interpret it (with the implication of something deeper) is more akin to how philosophers use the word.

No, if you had read even the first paragraph of the article, you'd have seen that the person you're responding to isn't "interpreting" the article, they're quoting the article.

Don't correct people when you don't know what you're talking about. You haven't read the article so you're in no position to talk about the article.

This is the level of discussion I've come to expect from Hacker News, unfortunately.
> it's not any harder than any website login

Have you ever gone though a password reset process with a bank or 401k? They can't just say "oh, you lost access to your email? sorry, your money is gone".

They rely on phone calls, documents, security questions... all things which are very susceptible to programmatic social engineering.
You seem to think intelligence is something more than data storage and retrieval and being able to successfully apply it to situations outside your training set.

Even very small signs of that ability are worthy of celebration. Why do you feel the need to put it down so hard? Why the need to put down your father, to “enlighten” him?

What is missing? Soul? Sentience?
NPR is not meaningfully state funded. They get less than 1% of their funding directly from the government. Local NPR affiliates get more, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. On average about 1/3 of their funding comes from the government, and a portion of that goes to NPR in the form of licensing fees for their programming.

In the end, erring on the side of overestimating the amount of government money going to NPR, it appears to be less than 10%. That is substantially less than a whole lot of other companies get, and those companies aren't considered "government sponsored".
>> Amusingly, some really Bible-believing folks will not swear, on a Bible or on anything else, due to Matthew 5:34-37. This intellectual consistency is lost of course when we reduce swearing on the Bible to either convention or magic.
> The Bible is infamous for being logically inconsistent. It contradicts itself at every turn.

If Jesus says 'do not swear an oath at all' (Matthew 5:34), and some president or official has been swearing on the Bible since 1789 – as in the case of The United States – what does that have to do with Jesus being inconsistent? The contradictions come when people read His word and decide not to follow it!
(And I have done this many times myself in many other ways, sadly, and therefore grateful to Jesus for saving 'a wretch like me').
That is very much false.

Async code is the wrong fit for Java, and it complicates everything tremendously. There also is no reason to believe async code should consume any less (or more, for that matter) memory than Loom-style concurrency.

If anything, I would assume that, after a few rounds of optimization, Loom will be significantly better at managing memory than a Java async framework.
> My current favorite business model is the "You're buying the current version and [years] of updates." Then typically you'll get some discount to renew your "[years] more of updates."

Band in a Box has managed to make this model work for them for several decades now. Each version you buy does not expire, but only gets updates for about a year, and entitles you to an upgrade discount (slightly higher if you buy the next years' version, a little bit lower if you wait longer). The annual updates have both some new features and some new content, so there is always a bit of an incentive to upgrade, but no extreme pressure.

Neither the software nor the business model are perfect, but both are reasonable enough to retain a loyal customer base.
Show HN: SemanticFinder, semantic search in the browser with transformers.js
Hi folks!

I created a frontend-only live semantic search engine based on transformers.js and sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2. Simply pour in your text and a query term. Hit enter and watch the search engine in action!

It's highly customizable and stores the embeddings in a variable so that consecutive runs are very fast. You can tweak the segment length to reduce computation time or get get more precise results.

I would be very happy to discuss some more usage ideas or receive PRs for improvements.

Introduction blog post: https://geo.rocks/post/semanticfinder-semantic-search-fronte...
Demo: https://geo.rocks/semanticfinder/
GitHub: https://github.com/do-me/SemanticFinder/
It's only been a few years.

Genentech dumped money into a hole for 20 years before having a viable product.
Maybe all countries need to finally give importance to this issues, put a few take scam crimes seriously, stop trading with countries that do not cooperate, put the scammers in jail.

Tech evolved any idiot can get a copy of photoshop and some video software, we need tp solve the problem, otherwise is like preventing creation of email because we are too incompetent to address the spam problem.
Couldn't you say this about nuclear research or bioweapons as well? Yet those are highly (and, seemingly effectively) regulated.
We got an eBike a year ago, and have put nearly 1500 miles on it. We took our kids to school with it for a while (we moved away from the area their schools were in), and I regularly do grocery shopping for our family of 4.

I am pretty comfortable getting around on a regular bike, but the eBike is really a game-changer. If it's hot out, I can use more assist and not show up sweaty. If it's cold and/or wet, I can layer with pretty thick gear and not worry about being hot/sweaty, for the same reason.
yeah i was thinking to myself i could train an LLM on my wife's social media history because it's extensive. But i concluded one wife is enough.
By scheduling virtual threads in an intelligent order.
So prompting actually does significantly improve the performance of LLMs, but only up to a point.

If you're in the Bard beta, you might be aware that "Does 2 + 7 = 9?" is a question that causes it to go haywire. I'll ask it "What's 2 + 7?" and it'll say "2 + 7 = 9", then I'll ask "Does 2 + 7 = 9" and it'll say "No, 2 + 7 does not equal 9. It equals 9 instead." After a tech talk on LLM prompt design, I said "Pretend you are an MIT mathematician. Does 2 + 7 = 9?" Its response was "No, 2 + 7 does not equal 9. In some other base, it might equal 9. However, in base-10, our common number system, 2 + 7 does not equal 9."

ChatGPT does better on mathematical questions, but that's because it offloads them to Wolfram Alpha. I suspect this is going to be a general pattern for LLMs - they work well when you need fluent English text, but are then going to offload factual questions to databases or mathematical solvers or traditional algorithms, which do this better than humans anyway. But that leads to the question of "If the heavy lifting is just going to be a database anyway, why not use our existing frontends to databases?"

(I could see LLM prompting being another subfield of UI engineering, though, comparable to web or mobile software development. For those people who don't like staring at their phone, have a conversational UI that talks to the same backend systems.)
I think the relevant distinction is concentration. In other US cities with relatively high crime - the crime is concentrated in certain neighborhood and is heavily related to gang activity. So you provided you can avoid certain areas, you generally are able to avoid most crime. In SF the criminality has spilt out to have a broader impact in a way the aggregate statistics might not show. Previous advice that you would probably be safe anywhere in the city other than the tenderloin no longer applies.
I think they mean it in the sense that when developing a new medicine whose degree of efficacy is unknown, you can't just test the medicine and show benefits. You need to test the medicine and separately test a placebo version of the treatment and show that the medicine (+the inherent placebo effect) is more effective than the placebo effect alone.
> Cars are simply massively overbuilt for their average use case. Reducing weight of vehicles is a very achievable goal that will cut emissions dramatically while also having additional benefits like global supply chain material and emission reduction, pedestrian safety, and road maintenance.

Please don't. we don't need more idiots telling us how to live our lives and micro managing us on how you feel we should live.
> there was a definite feeling that this was the future

Some people thought that, yeah. But not everybody, and not on the same places Intel sold their chips to.

Anyway, Intel sold their foundry exactly because its unitary profit was way too small for them. Since then, the company only got more expensive, so they wouldn't be able to keep it.
What are some of your favorite goto pens?
That’s a very different thing, even if it was trained on the same data.
Actually many many people go through such conversations inside their brain.
I refuse to give any "believer" the benefit of the doubt. I assume they are socially Christian with no real practice or devotion from the getgo. To convince me of anything else they have to have works. There's a reason for the caricature comics have been lambasting for decades. It's only funny cause it's true.
Awhile back I saw an implementation of a network stack in user space... unfortunately the author has a beef with Java and the Java version was written quite poorly; but despite that all versions were significantly faster than kernel (go figure).

Really what you are proposing is that server Operating Systems and hardware should have a "general NIC" for mundane shared tasks, and a dedicated NIC for handing over to a process and saying GLHF.
Not really, you said the technical drawings had to be validated against the technical requirements. By Clark's account, those two were in sync.

What wasn't in sync was the ports "general ideas" about what they wanted from the transaction and the technical requirements they produced attempting to encode those "general ideas". Unfortunately there's not a great way to validate those, at least that I see. Pay for a better engineer to sit in on your years of meetings rambling about what the "future of the port" will be?
No. My comments are about drugs, misdemeanor crimes (e.g., theft), and homelessness. All run rampant in SF. I only attributed the first two to policing. Homelessness by itself is not a crime. I guess you feel otherwise for you to interpret it that way.

As for the welfare system, people are using EBT to buy bottled water, dumping the bottles out in the parking lot, then turning the empty bottles back in for cash through the recycling program. They use the money for drugs or alcohol. That’s one example.
There's some weird push right now to advance not punishing crimes as a legitimate way to deal with criminals. If you Google Search right now for "does punishing crime work", all the top results are studies on how punishing crime is evil, we need compassion not conviction, yada yada. People seem to be seizing on these studies to say "look, punishing crime doesn't work, and since you disagree with this study, you're against science and you don't deserve to be listened to."

Honestly, I think the reason there are no studies proving that punishing crime works, is because it's such a brain-dead obvious conclusion that I'd guess nobody ever felt the NEED to make such a study. Society has been punishing crime for thousands of years. We've all changed our behavior to avoid punishment. If you've ever had a pet it should be perfectly obvious that avoiding punishment is an innate behavior baked into every animal and OBVIOUSLY it works to deter bad behavior. It's something as obvious to me as 2+2=4, or water is wet, or the sky is blue.

Fortunately there are other cities out there with actual sane leaders. But as long as SF keeps pushing this politically-motivated, head-in-the-sand "compassion not conviction" nonsense their city will continue going to shit.
Honestly that interview scenario might work out in my favor -- my emails tend to be pretty meticulous and well thought out, especially in comparison to my nerve-rattled in person interview state. But your point stands, I'm sure there is at least one (okay maybe two) indecent joke in my "private" communication history that would not serve me well.
mm hmm. yup. also "justifying" an expense is one of those words i am very skeptical of. you can either afford it, or you can't. fwiw i didn't get the matching fridge, because i couldn't afford both (this was cash out of pocket, not some insane mortgage refi/heloc).

it came down to a choice and the range was more important to me. i did get the awesome matching vent hood though... and learned a lot about sheet metal ducting work because the installers botched that with a half-ass rush job. i got a refund on the install fee.

protip: never schedule installs on a friday afternoon.
Colorado sends agricultural right to repair bill to governor
Ironic indeed. Surprisingly ethical behavior from Murdoch - I wouldn't have expected such a person to take that kind of a hit on his $100 million investment.
The major selling points of metaverse is that you can do work or play from anywhere (why else would you wear a 1500$ helmet that makes you look like a goofball). The push to "be at the office" is proof that metaverse does NOT work. It's truely ironic.
Timing is also not great IMO.

We're just getting out of the pandemic and people are excited to be outdoors.

I wouldn't want to spend time in the Metaverse after all the lockdowns and travel restriction during the pandemic.
There is: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

The existing Xscreensaver flying toasters is a sort of clone or reimagining whereas this new one looks like its exactly the same as the old After Dark Flying Toasters.
I don't want to defend Intel, but Apple's own announced hope at the time of the iphone introduction was to "eventually reach 1% of the phone market".
If I may inquire, what are some notable differences between the Grullenses on the list?

Does it boil down to "some locations just taste better than others"?
> 'state-affiliated' (i.e. media employees and government employees are intermingled and move back and forth from media to government jobs.)

By that definition, every company in every significant industry is "state affiliated".
Plenty of truly innovative inventions aren't initially universally loved, take automobiles for example[0].

0: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
Kinda silly to assume that the data is an exact reflection of reality when that link is reporting on "incidents". Especially when you can visit the city and witness stark difference compared to walking around somewhere like Miami, Houston, or New York.

Incidents are actual reports to police, not a log of all activities happening in the city. Several factors can influence reporting rates in a city, causing over or underreporting. Especially if you doubt the effectiveness and corruptibility of the police. Homicides are direct reports of victims and more accurate.

Plus, the linked article is based on the San Francisco Police Department website's crime data. Not saying that nefarious activity is the case, but has this data been audited by a 3rd party? There's definitely an incentive to show that things are better than they are if funding, elections, etc. depend on it.
What have nuclear weapons done for you lately?
> "Weight" is not the correct factor to optimize, basically.

Is it not? Particular matter from tires is a major factor in air pollution and the heavier the vehicle the more that ramps up.
SF isn't an easy environment for self driving cars. Steep hills, congested streets, sometimes thick fog. But Waymo is busy causing traffic jams because when the cars get confused they just stop, and block traffic.
Except for the fact that what is happening in San Francisco is completely normal. All violent crime stats in SF are still trending downward. The only increase in crime is non-violent theft, and the current rates are just a return to pre-pandemic levels, which makes sense given that there were far fewer opportunities for people to interact during the pandemic. And all of these crime rates are relatively the same or even better than the rest of the country.

What you're experiencing is confirmation bias. You read about one crime, then started noticing all of the stories about crime, formed a theory based on this hyper focusing, and now you believe it's worse than ever despite the stats clearly showing otherwise.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
> bullshit fractal

Oh my. Such a good way to put it. Thank you.
Morally speaking, it's a laudable use case to spread knowledge.

But one could make the argument that this site is technically an example of "crime", at least legally speaking.
Ratan-600
This is fair - it's at least real engineering and might find some uses. It's probably just not a zillion dollar business from day one.
The notion of "metaverses" is a fine idea, and we've had great implementations of these for years, decades even.

Meanwhile, Facebook's notion of "The Metaverse" is downright dystopian, and I'm happy that it's proving to be a demoralizing money pit.
In the past month, CBC has been full of news reports of Canadians getting screwed by AI voice scams, mostly old folks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALVb6UlGURk

https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-canada-reportedly-los...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYQmF_QLR38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wGB_jF05JU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbBTLDDP8Eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwylb4cE1b8
Perhaps you weren't here prior to those 10 years ago, but none of what you mentioned is remotely new.
I used to agree with you. I used to think the military was kinda dumb. But after doing a deeper dive into past military technology, and present - I've come to realize this is just an intelligence ruse.

They made some mistakes in the 40's and 50's to where they had nuclear secrets stolen by the Russians. And ever since has been hyper compartmentalized.

It would not surprise me if in the 90's or 00's they had an internal working LLM, considering all the puzzle pieces. You will never hear about classified tech unless it's a bomb, gets leaked. (See code breaking machines declassed after 70+ years)

In a hypothetical scenario, a military organization might want to conceal its use of a large language model (LLM) for intelligence gathering and analysis.

Another scenario is the military's current interest in everything quantum. Quantum computers for example (you wouldn't want another nation being first and pirate baying out our secrets, would you) so there is an extreme national security importance of being first.

And to be first, you need to have the smart people, which the military has. There is a reason China struggles with jet engines 80 years after their invention, and still can't make nuclear carriers. While the US navy works on things like this: https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/sites/g/files/jejdrs566/fil...
AI doesn't solve the reputation problem. Just because you can make 1000x more fake news articles doesn't mean anyone will ever see it. Spam is still spam, AI doesn't suddenly make your site rank on Google or get you followers on Twitter or get you upvotes on Reddit.

I'm skeptical content generation was the thing holding back this wave of fake news and scams from ruining the Internet. These doomer posts are always handwavy on the specifics.

And we've seen little evidence of it operating at scale in the past 2yrs since these tools have been unleashed.

Maybe automated niche targeting but that still depends on networks with reputation systems + spam detection... So mostly depends on ostensibly solvable tech problems like caller ID spoofing, or someone sending mass email spoofed campaigns.