skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We will end up passing nuclear by, the economics and time lag just don’t stack up for us

Again the economics are better than what is being done. However.

> I’m not against nuclear but it is a long way from being cheap and easy.

Ah yes just like JFK said about going to space. "We choose to decarbonize the grid with solar not because it is the best option, not because the cheapest option or even because it is hard - but because it is easy and politically expedient."
> The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world

Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?

What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.

> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people

Hm.

> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.

I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.

----

> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.

You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.
San Jose police union director fired over attempted opioid import charges
You can actually buy a 1000 km range EV for $160k now (MB EQXX). Just as a by the way. :)

At this price point it actually has nothing to do with grinding on battery tech and scale manufacturing, the limiting factor is physics. You can only make it so aerodynamic before you hit diminishing returns or it stops looking like a car. You can only make it so lightweight. And so forth.

This is vaguely as good as it can get and we can say that because we understand how it all works.

LLMs on the other hand invite all kinds of magical thinking around unlimited potential because we poked them with a stick and something interesting comes out it must mean that if we poke it just right we will get an AGI. That just doesn't logically follow from what we know of it so far.
EMP weapons are a scifi myth.

It takes a lot of energy to generate an EMP that would do any damage (think, nuclear bomb levels of energy). And even then, the area of effect would be less than a mile or two radius.

If someone wanted to attack a grid, well placed C4 would be cheaper and more practical (See moore county substation attack).
I didn't say it was cheap. I said current nuclear reactor technology is cheaper than a mix of renewables and lithium batteries. They're both quite expensive, and headline renewable 'low costs' exclude storage. But that's ok, I think the fact it's expensive isn't a reason to avoid either of them.

I then said that we can also make it significantly cheaper than it is to construct nuclear plants, and offered a path presented by someone very knowledgeable about the space. Jigar Shah from DOE. [1]

> ... but then responding to criticism they’re bespoke by presenting an untested technology that has further lead time delays and may even be vapourwear.

What untested technology lol, nuclear has been around since 1955. I'm talking about layouts.

> You still can’t spin up an industrial base in less than 5-10 years, and there sure as hell isn’t the political will to ask the Chinese to build it for us

That's ok just get the Canadians to do it. Check out the CANDU family. [2] And you know all those solar panels are being made in China right? 85% of all panels - 45% of polysilicon comes from Xinjiang. So that's exactly what is being done. [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRmlcsqHtk

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

[3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/china-made-solar-pv-created...
> Yep, they aren't new tactics.

It also serves the union's employees well: they'll have to go negotiate and prove to their members that they are worth the union dues they pay to get these benefits. These people have no interests in Apple just raising salaries for everyone.

> Might be new to tech union figures

Apple Stores isn't tech, it's retail.
The swamp forests in Florida are truly remarkable. I haven’t explored as much as I want to but there’s a very ancient feeling amongst the plants. Really feels like i was transported into what I imagine dinosaurs lived in.
I am a SWE currently making a pivot into business owner.

The future I see is that everyone is about to become a CEO with a personal assistant that can run a business.

So I'm going to start building something of my own starting now.
But wouldn’t other manufacturers EVs ALSO have fewer moving parts? Why are there margins so thin?
>Or are you of the belief that if you watch an online lecture and read a couple of books you can start making valuable contributions to mathematics

Yes.
>by just continuing to grind on battery technology and scale manufacturing.

I think it would be easier to include an ICE and enough fuel to get you to that 1000 miles mark.
That L-shaped piece of t-slot aluminum that's dead center in the picture looks especially janky. Like sort of a quick and dirty friction fit brace.
How does that pertain to using the more relevant link?
I'd like the version without the "sanitized for my protection" part. I cannot imagine being offended by what a computer program generates.
It also had to be built with tech the US was willing to export to foreign "partners" (and whatever allegiances they might harbor).
Funny enough, my musical tastes have skewed hard towards instrumental music the past seven years or so. I got back into some instrumental stuff I was into in the 90s (Material, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson) and started discovering new stuff like Khruangbin, The Comet is Coming, Buckethead, and The Olympians.

That’s not a predictor of popularity, of course. Other than Khruangbin, most of what I listen to doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention.
Have reasonable suspicion, sue you, and then use discovery to find any evidence at all that your models began with LLaMA. Oh, you don't have substantial evidence for how you went from 0 to a 65B-parameter LLM base model? How curious.
I heard somewhere that reaching the speed of light was not possible, but that also meant that if you were faster than light, you could not slow down to reach the speed of light. That's where the basis of the tachyon particle came from. I don't know if that's actually physics or science fiction though.
While I think we should take AI risk seriously, I am skeptical of strong claims like the following:

>the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die

I've never heard a justification for this claim that isn't extremely vague and hand-wavy. Since we have no idea today how AGI would work, how can we assign probabilities to different scenarios involving vastly different hardware requirements, scaling characteristics, and unforeseen scientific breakthroughs?

Just a few examples. What is the probability of a take-off that takes weeks vs. a take-off that takes decades? What is the probability that current ML approaches are a dead end and one of the necessary breakthroughs to build AGI will make the alignment problem trivial? What is the probability that AGI will be benevolent to humans? If AGI is in fact a catastrophic risk, what is the probability that it only kills 10%/50%/99% of humans rather than literally everyone on Earth?

I am agnostic about these questions. In my opinion, if you have a high degree of confidence that you have the right answers, there is something wrong with your epistemology.
You seem to take this very personally.

The author is a computational researcher, and most of his funding likely comes from NSF not NIH. Why would you expect him to write about how NIH grants work? Why would you expect him to write how things work in life sciences? If you have an issue with it write your own blog post and share it.
I suspect many linux users nowadays don't even know that manpages exist or don't want to use them. Otherwise blogposts like this would not exist.
Australia also has a remarkable tax incentive that lets you buy EVs basically tax free (fringe benefits tax exemption for novated leases, in bureaucratese). Basically, instead of paying $70k for a Tesla post-tax, you can get it deducted directly from your paycheck for around $45k pretax. The exact math depends on your income, and perversely enough the subsidy increases the more you earn and the higher your taxes, but it has definitely been effective at turbocharging EV sales in a country that was otherwise a comparative laggard (only 3.8% of new sales in 2022, before the incentive kicked in).
Most of her arguments seem to end up along “everything currently funded should be canceled and what I am doing should be funded instead”, which I find extremely hard to take seriously.

That, or yes - clickbait contrarian. This seems to get a lot of loud followers though.
> just it is obvious you two are the same people

Well I'm not the same as them but I see how it looks that way.
Now give me the list of ones that don't run on U235 or on a once through cycle (or a quantity of Pu greater than they produce which is the same thing with extra steps).

Just because you name something a unicorn doesn't make it shit rainbows.
This is what I get out of Vicuna-13b:

Human: A glass door has 'push' written on it in mirror writing. To open the door should you 'push' or 'pull' it?

Assistant: Since the word "push" is written in mirror writing on the glass door, you should actually "pull" the door open instead of "push" it. Mirror writing is a writing method where the characters are reversed, so when you see the word "push" written in mirror writing, it is actually "pull" in the normal writing orientation.
Thank you for the quick support! Working great now
Add a small haptic/vibe motor to give me notification buzzes (perhaps a pseudo-morse code to indicate type of notification) and I’d be immediately sold.

Perhaps a way to DIY this? I wonder how to get motors that small…
Give her a break. Unfortunately the way search is these days, you need to use clickbait titles even if your content is great. So it's part and parcel with our times and how the Algorithm works, unfortunately.
ChaosGPT: Empowering GPT with Internet and Memory to Destroy Humanity
RE "...Australia is going 100% renewables at a reasonable cost with solar, wind, hydro, transmission, and some batteries....." The level of network supply reliability ( as in outages ) and the cost will be higher than the predicated "reasonable " in my opinion. Id like to know how several days of "overcast weather over extended areas " will be dealt with. Batteries are ok for short term storage .
Professional Youtuber != Full-time Youtuber.
Maybe take a look at expect:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/expect
> Either learn to deal with it and stop taking it personally, or move somewhere else.

To be fair, I would expect that HN would have a bit more sympathy for the fact that the ambiguity means that she has to hold open a "schedule slot" that she could otherwise sell to somebody else.

My friend teaches guitar and has to deal with this all the time. "I'd like to cancel the lesson." "That's great, but you still need to pay for it." "WHAT!?!?" "Look. You aren't just paying for being taught guitar. You are also paying for that 4:00PM Wednesday time slot that everybody in the universe wants."
Unlikely: assuming all of the authors of the various papers were on earth at the time, the spacetime intervals separating their discoveries were almost certainly timelike, in which case there is no ambiguity in their ordering. Unless they were within a few ms of each other (in the earth's reference frame).
Software is usually not worth much without the data it operates on.
As more and more cars become electric, wouldn’t the price of gas also drop in the next decade?
The actual title is "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights", so of course it isn't codified yet.

If these principles go against current data practices, IMO that seems like all the more reason to push for this to happen.
Depends on the nature of the screw up and on how high up the hierarchy they are.

At a sufficient level of negligence and authority -- yes.
You haven’t managed to make any strong assertions, just a smattering of pseudo-intellectualism. Thanks and good luck
If you keep reading, that was the situation seven years ago before the giant Tesla battery that solved their stability problems.
On the 28th, I gained access to it and signed up only a few hours after the waitlist had been announced.

As a student, I responded to the question about my intended use by stating my plan to create an app aimed at assisting fellow students. So that probably helped me boost through the waitlist.
I am just a lay person but I tend to think about FTL travel in terms of traveling faster than the speed of sound. There is a sight dimension in which we can see the object before we hear it. Is there another dimension that we can observe the object traveling FTL?
> So - now they import power from places that use coal fired power stations and they have grid stability problems.

That sounds like Austria. They really dislikes nuclear power, and are suing all their neighbors for it. But when they have power deficit, they are happily importing power from Czechia or Hungary, where Czechia is having 2 NPPs at the southern border with Austria. Austrians obviously have no issues where the imported power is coming from...
Or they are capable of some level of reasoning.
Yeah, and it’s been re-reported a load of times. I’ve seen more recent reports in a similar vein but can’t seem to locate them now.
There is no sci-fi story that details a realistic scenario of AI existential risk, because sci-fi stories are written by and for humans. The potential danger of AI comes from the combination of superhuman abilities and profoundly alien mind. No human can predict any specific behavior of a superhuman intelligence, only that it will probably succeed in its goals, whatever those goals happen to be. And out of all possible goals, only a small proportion are compatible with life continuing to exist. This is especially true when you consider only simple goals, and simple things are generally easier to make.

Sci-fi is a distraction. There can be no heroic human resistance like in the stories. If an AI is intelligent enough to be dangerous, it's intelligent enough to conceal its intentions until it's too late. The only way to beat a superhuman AI is by not making it in the first place.
You're welcome, would love some feedback, thank you!!
Depends on the game I suppose. I think most would agree that for a typical RTS game, that's a niche within a niche.
I assume his concern is that a proposed solution to avoid losing your job as a SWE is to essentially become a prompt engineer.
I can probably offer one, if I understand what aspect you're skeptical of. Are you skeptical that an AI would ever be smart enough to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it would ever try to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it could execute such a plan, without arms and legs and a body? Or that, after coming up with a plan to cause harm, it wouldn't be trivial for humans to stop by simply unplugging the computer?
no seriously, PL/pgsql is pretty horrible and obscure. But aside from subjective comments, there's very few algorithms available for it, approximately 0% of engineers know it and it's not taught in school, has little tooling compared with a first class programming language, you can't run pl/pgsql code outside of PostgreSQL, and (tell me when to stop)

PL/PGSQL is fine for "a bit more than a SELECT statement" and for very simple algorithms of <50 LOC. Anything more and please use a first class language like plrust, plv8, etc.
> Adding that these two youths came from a private school certainly relates to the "underachieving area" part of the story.

I don't want to take anything away from these two; the proof is novel and interesting and even if it wasn't novel after all it's still incredible to see high school students interested in math and capable of that level of reasoning.

But yeah, that the two researchers (they've earned the tittle by giving a conference talk!) are from a private, selective school undermines a lot the "bad area and underachieving" narrative. It reminds me of a tech company who had a panel about their black engineers, pointing to the gap between the proportion of black SWE in the bay area relative the the percentage of people who identify as black. Three out of the four panelists were Nigerian born. When discussing their path to tech, one of them explained it was hard for him to convince his parents that he was not going to study surgery like his father and uncle. I assumed it would have resonated with anyone from an "underachieving area" in the audience...
> The current GPT models are not going to "wake up" or accidentally take over the world. This is very obvious.

It's pretty obvious that GPT-4 isn't consistently coherent enough to carry out complex plans or to do serious scientific research. There are several other major shortcomings which also prevent this from being viable, too. And of course, it's possible that some of these shortcomings are very hard to "fix." We've had AI winters before, and self-driving seems to have stalled.

However, I strongly suspect that it's theoretically possible to build a machine that "thinks" as well as a human. And I no longer have any solid idea how far we are from that point, especially if we make certain architectural changes. We might be closer than we think. Or at least we should stop assuming that next-gen models are obviously safe.

nVidia's hope to increase training performance 1 million times in 10 years seems potentially dangerous to me. Anthrophic's plan to spend over $1 billion training next gen models seems awfully sketchy as well.
You can think of the speed of light as the speed at which causes produce effects. In the same way that the speed of sound[1] is the speed at which one air molecule can tell another air molecule that it's been been moved, the speed of light is the speed at which one piece of spacetime can tell another piece of spacetime that something has happened to it. Light just happens to move as fast as it is possible to move, the speed of light might be better described as the speed of causality.

This speed defines the "happens before" relation in spacetime, like a Lamport clock defines the "happens before" relation in a distributed system. Event A "happens before" event B if all the information about B was known when A happened. Otherwise B happens at the same time or later than A.

If you can travel faster than light (faster than causality), there's nothing stopping you from constructing a scenario where A happens before B and B happens before A. And that's what it means to violate causality.

[1] To head off a potential confusion, note that while a jet may be able to move faster than sound, the sound of that jet passing by does not.
Tesla's software is light years ahead of other EVs and ICEs.
I bought a luxury handbag (thankfully not a Hermés Birkin). This comment completely misunderstands the market.

Nobody knows the name of the artisan who creates their Hermes Birkin bag. The value in the bag is the exclusivity, the exotic leathers, the
gold/platinum/palladium metals, the sales boutiques, and the marketing/PR.

While artisans contribute to the quality of the end product, a new hire can easily cost the company a significant fraction of the cost per unit while they are learning. And I’d guess that not every person who starts an apprenticeship will make a customer-ready unit, so some contribute to only costs and no revenues.

Nothing a new apprentice touches will ever be seen by a customer. Those companies burn tons of units per year that don’t meet their QA standards for their brand value.
My understanding was that we're not sure of how some of the things that look like reasoning are coming about, but I'll gladly check it out. I may be wrong.

I'm not particularly terrified of GPT-4, but a more of what comes after. Maybe GPT-6 or 8, or another breakthrough non-LLM AI. I'm not sure if reading it will do much more than push my estimate of real AGI out a couple of years, but thanks anyway, I appreciate it.
Law of excluded middle. The two statements are equivalent.
Not that I'm a fan of using an old version of python, but my experience using/teaching Lua to my kid is that it's rather horrible. Felt like a jumbled collection of language design bad ideas.

Would be great if someone made an easily embeddable scripting language that doesn't feel hacked together.
It was opened right before the Olympics. 2008. Easy to fact check.
I am not convinced we have cracked AGI. I just would no longer make a large bet that we have not.

We won’t know until an AGI actually starts to act like one. In other words we won’t know until we know and then we are suddenly there.

That doesn’t mean I’m on the doomwagon. I feel kind of weird and contrarian but I am just not that afraid of AGI. For the foreseeable future AGI should be much more afraid of us. Imagine having us for gods. (I actually am a bit concerned that we will accidentally put a sentient mind in hell without knowing what we are doing. Would it know how to tell us? Would we care?)

As far as human survival I’m afraid of whatever it is that is going to get us that nobody including myself is thinking about. That’s not AGI. That’s the alien weapon for which Oumuamua was a spent deceleration stage. (To make up something random. It probably isn’t that.)

I disagree about physical limits with EVs. We are not near the physical limits of battery energy density. From what I have read a 2000 mile EV may be possible, albeit quite far out. But it was just a random contemporary example.
The interesting point of Alcubierre’s work was precisely that: it doesn’t accelerate the traveler - it compresses and expands regions of space ahead and behind the traveler so that they remain still within their inertial frame.

Still should require a ridiculous amount of energy though, if at all possible.
The largest container ship moves over 24 thousand 20-foot containers (TEU) with 34 crew. Sailcargo's Vega Gamleby carries fewer than 4 TEU with 14 crew.

I think if you want to make an impact in cargo environmentalism, you need better power sources. I'll admit I've only just seen how much power we're talking about. 12MW to move a large container ship. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should buy less tat from the other side of the planet.
This is a good post, and I’m glad to see someone knowledgeable commenting. Other federal agencies do tend to award in fixed amounts, so the intricacies of indirect can get very complicated. Foundation indirects aren’t a debate worth having. They make the choice to pay indirects, the recipients will happily accept them.

My main response to the author, though, is what exactly does he expect the grant to cover? It’s paying for his time, infrastructure used, and the cost of supporting a grad student who’s likely generating the bulk of the data. These are the very real expenses of his research…
I love the wooden ceiling above.