skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Metaverse was always such a bad direction. At the time, I was really unsure about my intuition -- I figured that if Mark Zuckerberg decided it's worth pivoting his entire company towards that goal, he surely must have some data to back that up. As it stands, my intuition (and everybody else's) turned out to be right.

It's been the same with crypto, for that matter. None of the reasonable people I know ever saw any grand value in crypto. Researching myself, it always just seemed to be a bullshit fractal. At the height of the crypto boom, I was beginning to doubt my conclusions and started to think that perhaps the societal nature of crypto is a force in itself. Like religion, if enough people believe in it, it becomes reality to some extent. But now we see that crypto was indeed bullshit all along.

Contrast that with the generative AI models revolution. It's clear to anyone from day one how useful those models will be, and that they are providing clear value right away. It's no wonder that all the companies are immediately pivoting towards it. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was just unlucky to decide on a company pivot two years too early -- I'm sure that if he had to decide on a direction to pivot to today, it'd be towards generative AI.
Amusingly, she writes:

> Once I became a principal engineer, it quickly became clear to me that my job involved a lot more than closing tickets and writing code to achieve things.

If we take this sentence at face value, are we to conclude then that _before_ she became a principal engineer, it was not clear to her what the role would entail? And if yes, then what would be the process that made it clear to her after she became a principal engineer?
Yes, I can't imagine that billions of citizens of China and India are going to signal the same amount of economic virtue as EU and USA currently does.

In additions, the recent revelations about how USA's ecological norms led to ever larger, power- and fuel-hungry vehicles effectively multiplies the USA's claims of ecological awareness by zero.
> Mr. Zuckerberg has made a big bet on the metaverse, an immersive online world.

This is one of those "Were there any adults in the room when the decision was discussed?" instances that I see all over the place, these days.

Like 3D televisions, immersive 3D avatar worlds have been tried -more than once.

They work great for games, but not for real-life stuff. There are a few "corner cases," where it's being supported (I think there.com is still a thing), but otherwise, it only exists in the minds of SF writers.
> the cuts expected this month will be the first to affect tech departments, including engineers, which has surprised employees

Huh? The earlier layoffs definitely affected tech. I know of a bunch of former colleagues in engineering roles that were laid off in the first round. Sure, recruiting was affected more, which makes sense when hiring was reduced to almost zero, but this is very much not the first time engineers will be included in layoffs.
This stuff often happens. I think in 2016 Brave Alliance had a Coup (actually they've had like 16 failed coups by now) where at midnight the CEOs of corporations that make up the Alliance held a vote when the current Alliance leader was asleep to change leadership.
It may not be as efficient but it won’t need replacement every 7 years. That alone makes up for it.

Plus it’s probably easy to repair. My Speed Queen is made of like 7 parts. Most people will have gone through 3 or 4 machines by the time mine is dead.
The metaverse pivot was a bold move that aligned well with their moto of connecting people. I always thought that the concept of the metaverse is silly but did think (and still do) that the potential of VR is huge if Meta can pull it off. For example, watching a live show or game in VR from your living room. (e.g., first row in a NBA game)

The technology is not there yet. The Quest is nice but gets boring pretty quickly. They still don't have a killer app. That doesn't mean they won't find one in the next few years. As we saw with ChatGPT, many years of work can turn to an overnight success with one killer app.
For some reason this seems really hard for people to accept: That religious people actually think there are consequences for their choices, even if no human being ever knows.
Yes, and it's not just basic quality but also a lack of thoughtful implementation. For example "smart" IoT lightbulbs that do firmware updates during the night, when having some light would be kinda nice.

I especially find it frustrating how software gets more sluggish while at the same time we're making 500Hz screens, VR etc which should actually encourage the opposite.
When you say:

> Why can't I just post about what interests me right now?

You mean you can’t post without probably messing with some bizarre algorithm that is running YouTube discovery?

Because I’m quite sure you can post about whatever you want.

The problem I see is that you’re mixing two aspects of the creation process.

There’s your desire and curiosity driving you towards creating videos on one end there’s whatever YouTube wants on the other which usually is keeping people glued on their phones to consume as much content as they can.

It’s up to you to decide what is more valuable here. If you want to play the YouTube game you have to accept their idiotic rules which includes posting daily, making stupid shorts, making reactionary content and all that.

OR you can decide that it’s more important for you to make videos you find interesting and stop caring about vanity metrics.

Side note: those three images in your post are completely unnecessary and add nothing to the overall quality of the post. I’d personally remove them and stick with just the content.

But that’s just my 2c
I use a zigbee smart outlet with power monitoring for this. If it's using power for awhile, set to washing. If power has been zero for awhile, and it's washing, set to done (and send text-to-speech event that goes out on all house speakers).

This is a little Node-RED flow on top of Home Assistant.
in fact their example of https://github.com/google/BIG-bench/tree/main/bigbench/bench... showed 0 emergent behavior in understating modified arithmetic even in large LLMs. the accuracy (and lack of it) in unmodified arithmetic is a simple token replacement heuristic that comes naturally from the transformer model of "attention".
That's a big maybe though...
Yes I can’t disagree but also cochinita pibil.
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/roberta-an-optimized-method-for...

As just one example, which was (is?) one of the most used flavors of transformers from the BERT era.
As an atheist, I think it would be interesting to see the experiment repeated with a group of (self-described) religious people.
> Many nuclear power plants wasted on the kernel.

iTunes could have reached greater heights had they allowed nuclear plants.
ManyCam dishonored my lifetime license
Yes, but it ensures that for all inputs of a given size, runtime will be the same.
Ten Ways to Bypass Windows Defender
we'll have to agree to disagree.

you don't need VR to "connect" with people. it's literally isolating. it's more or less a failure, hence the pivot towards AI.

per the article many employees working on it are skeptical. if they are skeptical, it's basically already dead.
a lot of big techs doing layoffs. you will find a lot of ex-employees got something to say about their former employer.
But that's because Go has a significantly worse ecosystem.

And those Go binaries aren't runnable across a wide range of platforms like JVM apps are.
You're the one who is trying to rope different arguemnts into the discussion here. That some people you detest who argue B also argue A is irrelevant when it comes to arguements for/against A.
Gravitational Waves, à La General Relativity or Scrambled?
That alone sounds like an enormous self-defeating ecological disaster, since anybody immigrating from India to USA or from Morocco to France quickly adopts the new, much higher, level of consumption and carbon emission. Nontheless, it is done on a grand scale with very few reservations.
I have to admit I don’t understand your comment. I’ve looked at the Golang stdlib and its crypto parts (disclaimer, I found a CVE in the math parts), and found the assembly code pretty awful. This was before filippo was working at Google. It’s all about performance, similar to how openssl has fast but unauditable code for crypto. There’s no documentation and it’s hard to understand how that code was produced.

From some discussions I had with filippo years ago it sounded like he agreed and was trying to clean parts of these now that he was working there. It looks like progress is being made, and if he can share his learnings along the way let’s benefit from that instead of being mad at him no? Sharing is caring.

I mean even in a world where he would have written that code originally, what’s wrong with being transparent about it? Everybody writes bugs.
that youtube video was hilarious and very clever... you're about to become a overnight sensation mate :-D
I would like to see an update to this article in light of recent events:
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/bearded-weightlifter-ident...
> I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim

It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
Can you give an example of a principle that isn’t made up?
Numbers games work the same, when people play the same number, they can't stop, because they'd hate themselves if that number was ever drawn! So sunken cost fallacy can definitely be a part of a gambling addiction. (Heard this on a recent 99% invisible episode)
Furthermore, with software built as a teetering jenga-tower of abstraction layers and frameworks the actual error often isn't even propogated as far as the UI - and instead of a description of the problem we get "Oops, something went wrong."

This inscrutability of modern software is one of my biggest pet peeves with it. There was a time when the resource-limitations of computers forced software to be much simpler - and the end result was that when things went wrong, someone with sufficient time and motivation could sift through the rubble, figure out what the problem is, and often lash up some kind of workaround. That's getting harder and harder to do these days.

Likewise, in the open-source world, the breadth of dependencies is getting out of hand - I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to build something and had to go on half a dozen side-quests to track down a particular version of a particular build tool because the version in my distro is either too new or too old.
just wondering, what are the main places where deploying on supabase is better than deno-deploy? what's the main integration story with the rest of supabase?
The article does not state it. But I wonder - do these layoffs are from Metaverse project? If so, what would those people expect? Did they really believe in the project when they applied and worked on it?
With all this consciousness discussion, and consciousness being a purely subjective thing.

Please explain why you assume by default that every human actually has a "real consciousness"? How do you substantiate this assumption? And, given mental illnesses, where do you draw the line? Is everyone capable of speech conscious according to your idea of the world? What is the differenece between an LLM and a human stochastic parrott? How would you determine the difference?

We are falling for the same error again and again. We consider humans something special, simply because we belong to that group, and would like us to be something special.

But given the language barrier to other animals--roughly the same barrier we would have if we'd stumble over aliens--I really think we have pretty much no idea how other living things work and feel.
I also honestly prefer the border example
No, they wanted a federal government without a state religion. Like the church of England. The founders saw it necessary that people have a religious based moral system. The same system and values that they based the government on.

The premise all men are created equal relies on religion to be true. Inalienable rights is a judao Christian idea. Try arriving there with reason. Otherwise the will to power is exploitation of man by man.

The French revolution was based on reason and had a Reign of Terror with a bloody guillotine.
The same would be true for the initial map:

Replacing

encountered := map[uint64]bool{}

with

encountered := make(map[uint64]bool, len(elements))

Should be faster.

Golang Hashmaps initially have one bucket with a size of 8. If more elements are added new buckets are created.

So giving a hint to initialize a correct number of things should always be faster.
Well, we know for sure that a human doesn't take just words as input, but also sensory input. And that a human can do and learn some more basic stuff even before acquiring a vocabulary (the way a baby can do certain stuff). And of course a human also has a feedback loop.

So, while an LLM might be capable of developing consciousness at a big enough scale, a human is not just an LLM, so human-like consciousness would need a different and more advanced architecture, not just a bigger training corpus.
Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_En...
I suspect someone paypal'd the original Flam Hill to buy his character when Flam Hill wanted to quit, extracted his skill points (the character went AFK in 2017 right? 2016-2017 was the time when skill extractors were new and it was profitable to buy character and skill extract them for a profit) then a few years later he discovered the char owns shares in a big corp.

If it was real money trading in exchange for the character then they wouldn't want to say it outloud.
you mean the same Chevy Bolt EV that's been recalled for battery failure? lol.

https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-recall

battery fires are cool tho

> Park your vehicle outside immediately after charging and do not leave your vehicle charging indoors overnight.

what a joke

also, the Hyundai Ioniq PHEV is cheaper for its class of vehicle than the Bolt EV, so looks like BEVs are still more expensive.
I thought it was awesome. It occurred to me when you mentioned tinkering with magic values that it won't be very tweekable for other users like that.

Instead of MediaPipe try training a simple NN with a quickstart asking new players to assume the positions for fine tuning? :P
The World Admires Singapore’s Benevolent Autocracy. Should It?
TPL is a library to create Tasks and run them. They can be scheduled in different ways, on (native) thread pools for example. They are commonly used together with async/await. They are very similar to promises in JavaScript.

I read about the approach without async/await, but honestly I don’t really get it. Seems to be very dangerous to me, if you give up control about scheduling. But sure, async/await is completely viral and it is everywhere now. Most functions tend to be async.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher – Use new macOS versions on old hardware
I've had the same day dream many times, we might be on to something. I even have this "playbook" about parts and branding and stuff, all while encouraging third party creation of spares.

It's hitting a part of the beast (current vendors) they can't defend against, because their sunk costs make it impossible to embrace repair and keep "forever" - tech.
> Social media told you to be angry about people that’ve been around forever. You chose to only pay attention recently and get angry.

Again, no. It's only when they started telling children it was a good idea to sterilize themselves. Just don't do irreversible damage to children, it's that easy. Find other shibboleths to identify good communists that don't involve chopping bits off kids.
I can see why Elon is hysterical. An actual long-form publisher, with content creators, with proper "blue checks" and a customer base paying for more than vanity badges. I spent a few minutes on it, and yeah, it IS a Twitter clone, and it's a real threat.
The biggest win by far IMHO is a performant alternative for io intensive applications for async frameworks.
Not using an async framework tremendously simplifies your code.
Code complexity has an enormous projection on everything else, especially when talking on the business level. First and foremost the cost of development and time to market rises. And then comes the cost of maintenance.
China Could Dominate Sodium Batteries, the Next Big Advance in Power
MS bet on OpenAI is one of the biggest tech success stories of this decade for sure. Now everyone wants a pie of it but it seems that they are way behind for some reason (for example Google Bard is nothing compared to OpenAI implementation)
I'm sure this will become a bigger debate in the future, but I absolutely believe consciousness itself is worth protecting.

We ourselves have just sprung into existence. I should hope that as consciousness of any kind comes online, whichever world they may mind themselves in (earthly or otherwise), there is a compassion for the existence of the other.

I often feel fortunate that the extent of human suffering is a relatively short lifespan. If I were to exist in a state of suffering that didn't have such a fixed expiration, well that would be hell.
> I have always held Carl Sagan in high esteem without actually having read his books.

Here's a tiny excerpt from Pale Blue Dot. This excerpt elevates the book to high art,

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

There is nothing more humbling than to stand on the surface of the moon and blot out the Earth with your thumb. Just another world in the vast cosmos. You cannot study what Dr Sagan did without finding the true humility of the cosmic perspective.

We're starstuff on a tiny speck dreaming self-important dreams and — occasionally — pondering the stars.
You are just literally making things up at this point…
The base integer types have always been open ended since C89. It has always been wrong to assume an exact size when writing code that depends on modular wraparound. The code is wrong.

Prior to stdint.h there was no portable way to address this but new code should be written using the type system as intended. Open ended when the minimum is sufficient and larger storage is inconsequential. Exact size when the algorithm requires it.
I'll be first in line for an old fashioned reentry fire and Venusian brimstone pulpit pounder of a sermon.
Excellent, I'll reach out! Your balloon game looks a bit more like my face keyboard interface: https://github.com/everythingishacked/CheekyKeys#readme
I think Zuck pivoting meta to the metaverse would be like Steve Jobs pivoting Apple to AI in the 80s.

A metaverse-like concept is conceivable, but a long long way out.
>Would you be okay not affording a conscious thing rights?

Sure.
I rewatched that part of the video and don't see where he made fun of him. Are you referring to when he mentions that Claude Chappe was "big-brained" and zooms in on his head? If so, that sounds like a compliment to me.
The load speed on Sublime Text is worth the price alone.
The approach may be similar, but in this case you can at least separate the individual pages, whereas the Herculaneum scrolls are lumps of carbonized papyrus (lower quality than parchment) where you can't even be sure where the writing is located, so a much bigger challenge...
Consider cashing out your 401k before Biden takes it away to give more money to Ukraine and/or to fight climate change
Why is that a “more balanced take?”
While generative AI may be useful, to what extent is it useful to Facebook right now? I mean as a new business model, as opposed to helping them do better software development or moderation?
NT borrowed a lot form VMS, I'm sure. But Apple took NeXTStep, a Mach kernel, did a facelift on the UI, and put Carbon and a Mac OS compat layer on top.

On XP, well, MS's reaction was not as calm. They had to release Vista with tons of FX as OSX looked much better than XP. Everyone copied OSX' interface, even under GNU/Linux/BSD and Fluxbox envs.
This is exactly what I suspect is the problem with a lot of sound engineers, where over-loud top-end frequencies damage their ability to hear those sounds, leading to an escalating increase in the volume of those frequencies. I've been to venues where the top-end is literally painful to the point of having to leave, and I'm always baffled that nobody running the place seems to notice or care.

Saying that some venues do cheap out by over-loading the top-end to seem "loud" instead of spending more money on more expensive low- and mid-range speakers.
>You “know” you are? Who is doing the knowing, exactly?

Doesn't matter who is doing it. It's enough that it's doing it.
While it would have helped jumpstart Notes, I disagree. A lot of content creators have their feet in both puddles, waiting it out - and with this and the non-stop Musk antics and tantrums, we are looking at an actual stampede away from that hellhole.
Erasure's not the end of the world, but it'd be nice to have access to the generic class without having to pass it in.

Collection<Foo> values = ...
Foo[] array = values.toArray(Foo[]::new);

Not the worst, but not the best either.

There are many situations where the code I implemented could have been far cleaner with reified generics.