skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language?

Because Rust brings none of the benefits of the BEAM ecosystem to the table.

I was an early Elixir adopter, not working currently as an Elixir developer, but I have deployed one of the largest Elixir applications for a private company in my country.

I know it has limits, but the language itself is only a small part of the whole.

Take ML, Jose Valim and Sean Moriarity have studied the problem, made a plan to tackle it and started solving it piece by piece [1] in a tightly integrated manner, it feels natural, as if Elixir always had those capabilities in a way that no other language does and to put the icing on the cake the community released Livebook [2] to interactively explore code and use the new tools in the simplest way possible, something that Python notebooks only dream of being capable of, after a decade of progress

But they do not not stop there, the documentation is always of very high quality, even for stuff not coming from the core developers, and they also regularly release educational material that is worth a hundred times a gain in speed.

They've set a very high quality standard and I noticed how much it is important only when I stopped programming daily in Elixir and went back to other more hyped or establish ecosystems.

That's not to say that Elixir is superior as a language, but that the ecosystem is flourishing and the community is able to extract the 100% of the benefits from the tools and create new marvellously crafted ones, that push the limits forward every time, in such a simple manner, that it looks like magic.

Going back to Rust, you can write Rust if you need speed or for whatever reason you feel it's the right tool for the job, it's totally integrated [3][4], again in a way that many other languages can only dream of, and it's in fact the reason I've learned Rust in the first place.

I must also say that the work done by the Rust community looks refreshing as well, if you look at the way rustler works it was very well thought and made writing NIFs, something that seemed arcane and distant, only for the proverbial mad professor to try, a breeze. Kudos to them.

But the opposite IMO is not true, if you write Rust, you write Rust, and that's it. You can't take advantage of the many features the BEAM offers, OTP, hot code reloading, full inspection of running systems, distribution, scalability, fault tolerance, soft real time etc. etc. etc.

But of course if you don't see any advantage in them, it means you probably don't need them (one other option is that you still don't know you want them :] ). In that case Rust is as good as any other language, but for a backend, even though I gently despise it, Java (or Kotlin) might be a better option.

[1] https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon

[2] https://livebook.dev/

[3] https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

[4] https://dashbit.co/blog/rustler-precompiled
>which 50%
The 50% that doesn't give me what the advert promised.
- more aero bicycle? Bollocks.
- car with no traffic? More.
- perfect burger? Soggy mess.
Fool me once...
The crazy thing is that the story is quite old now ... at least ten years?

Edit: Oh ... It's from 2021? Feels like ten years to me : - (
IMHO a 'rusty C' wouldn't need to cover the entire memory safety feature set that Rust provides, it just needs to be 'close enough' and otherwise warn in areas where the compiler isn't entirely sure. It can also do some checks at runtime at the cost of a slight performance hit (but again, in old C tradition this should be controllable by compile options).
Its more like have some $millions for including all of our crippleware BS PhysX/Gameworks/Hairworks/RTX in your products wink wink.

Did NVIDIA cripple its CPU gaming physics library to spite Intel? https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/07/did-nvidia-cripple-it... https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/3/

Ubisoft comments on Assassin’s Creed DX10.1 controversy https://techreport.com/news/14707/ubisoft-comments-on-assass...

AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/amd-says-nvidias-game...

AMD Dubs Nvidia’s GameWorks Tragic And Damaging, Fight Over The Developer Program Continues https://wccftech.com/fight-nvidias-gameworks-continues-amd-c...
I had a short conversation with GPT-4 about a unicorn. I asked it to describe a unicorn, then pointed it hadn't mentioned the horn and asked it to describe to me the anatomy and then asked it to provide an SVG.

I got this: https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/yldwue0Q

I would argue this is better than what they're achieving.

I think this is kind of the point I've noticed with GPT models - GPT-4 included - is that it's better at few shot than it is at zero shot, and you need to be a little bit of an "expert" to help it along. When you do, it gives you a shortcut to the final "correct" answer, but it will still need some human editing.

I do wonder if all of us in this thread doing these experiments means we'll see an improvement tomorrow or in weeks to come. I'm also keen to see what GPT-5 looks like in this regard.

EDIT: I noticed some people asked to "make it better" and it did. I tried, but got nearly identical output, so I moved along a bit:

Me: That's too similar. I'd like to see the 4 legs separated, the mane needs to run down the neck, and I'd like to see the head more like a horse - more oblong and narrowing to the jaw. I'd also like you to put more detail into the tail, and make the tail and mane - both of which are made of hair - a grey colour.

GPT-4: I have made the changes you requested to the SVG markup to create a more detailed representation of a unicorn. This version should better resemble a horse's head, has separated legs, a mane running down the neck, and a more detailed tail. The mane and tail are also colored grey, as requested.

https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/WQcdOhVP

That output is... better? Maybe? I mean, it's followed my instructions (apart from the legs), I guess...
It may or may not. I mean it’d be pretty hard to increase yields of GPU fabs or data center sizes another 100x. There are logistical limitations. Unless some Apollo level mission is created by a superpower, we will hit bottlenecks. Algorithmic innovation is the only long term bet.
Is this trickle-down economics at work?
> that the EU made this cookie banner mess

It didn't.

Companies not willing to comply with GDPR did. As they didn't want to comply with Do Not Track header and used it for fingerprinting.
You don't seem to be interested in a meaningful debate and you're assuming I'm one of the 'holier than though' crowd.

I know my lifestyle has a high carbon footprint and when I used to eat meat that it caused suffering and contributed highly to environmental destruction. I'm trying to reduce all that as much as possible - that's the goal. Total avoidance will become easier over time through technical advancements and more sustainable lifestyles.

I looked at my own behavior, looked at scientific findings [0] regarding industrial animal farming and the damage it causes and more importantly looked at the behavior of animals when they are about to be slaughtered. They experience fear... in the words of Carl Sagan... they are too much like us. Even farmers say about their animals 'there is someone in there'.

If you have or had pets like dogs, cats etc you know they are sentient, have feelings, mood swings and want to experience joy. Other animals like cows, pigs, chicken etc experience the same - they are not just some meat bags. So why raise and breed Billions of these animals that will only suffer and be treated horribly - only because we want ta burger?

The single best thing an individual can do to reduce our environmental impact is to give up or reduce as much as possible the consumption of meat & dairy. The Oxford Uni researcher himself gave up meat & dairy after he concluded his study.

So if you're open minded then I'd encourage you to have a look at all the links I already shared.

[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme...

P.S. Again if you need meat to survive because you live in a place where there is no other food, e.g. desert, Antarctica, jungle etc or because of medical reasons then ignore the above. But for most of us that's not the case.
It’s incredible to think about the implications of these new findings on the moon’s water content. Not only could it potentially aid in future space missions and colonization efforts, but it also raises questions about the moon’s formation and history. The fact that the water in the glass beads is of solar wind origin adds another layer of complexity to the moon’s story.
> but you assume that your opinions aren't formed from a preexisting body of knowledge from which your past self has learnt and internalized.

I think the OP's argument is, the ChatGPT can only average inputs into an output, as opposed to a human mind that can extrapolate.

Regardless, the obvious difference is we humans build bigger understanding, a complex structure of ideas based on our inputs, and so not only we have a lot more ideas to combine, but also we use acquired ideas to rule which ideas we preliminarily choose to combine and how we combine them. So as to quote the meme

> We are not the same.
> $COMPANYNAME is using illegal bribes in the Middle East and Africa

/thread.

> A former colleague based in Saudi Arabia who had become upset by what he saw taking place at Microsoft began forwarding me emails and documentation—and I learned that the corruption went much deeper than I had suspected.

Great, the guy just confessed receiving the internal documents from a company sent by an accomplice.

> This decision maker on the customer side would send an email to Microsoft requesting a discount, which would be granted, but the end customer would pay the full fee anyway. The amount of the discount would then be distributed among the parties in cahoots: the Microsoft employee(s) involved in the scheme, the partner, and the decision maker at the purchasing entity—often a government official.

Yep, the most straightforward and easy way to get some additional money.

> In a 2015 meeting with members of the Nigerian Parliament, the president of the Senate complained to me that the government had paid $5.5 million for Microsoft licenses for hardware they did not possess. This should never have happened, because Microsoft’s standard practice was to meet with the National Assembly’s IT department and financial controller to check the number of computers needing licenses before submitting any proposal.

This is not MS' problem, it's the problem of some corrupt paper-pusher who managed to convince all parties what there was a need to spend $5.5M.

> Likewise, auditors discovered that Qatar’s Ministry of Education was paying $9.5 million annually over seven years for Microsoft Office and Windows licenses they weren’t using—as they didn’t even have any PCs or laptop computers

Again, this is not MS' problem.

To sum up: the guy lived in the bubble for 20 years and suddenly he understood.
A friend told me about the project last week, so I did some Googling and discovered the GitHub repo by searching for AnimatedDrawings and Facebook.
Yes, I agree with that about raising them, but I think that improves the chances and well short of guarantees it. One of our first cats was very unfriendly and hated being held, grumbling the whole time until you put her back down. As kids, if we managed to convince her to sleep on our bed or sit on our lap while watching TV, it was an absolute triumph and moment of pride. Then you'd move your leg slightly and get scratched in the face.

My delightful cat meanwhile had to be stopped from constantly trying to nuzzle you!
How do we square a former president of the Harvard Law Review and Constitutional Law professor who has been faithful to his wife and devoted and loving to his children? Who actually wrote most of his own speeches. Who was not born wealthy but through hard work and education made it to where he is today. An 8-year presidency where no one in his administration was indicted let alone convicted of a crime. Zero pictures and video with him partying with Epstein. Practicing Christian who went to church even when the cameras weren't rolling. (Got pejoratively called a Muslim regardless.) Compare him to…

…a guy whose dad bought him through college at a school conveniently of the same name as a famous business school (Wharton) to make people believe he went to the famous one when he really went to the far less prestigious undergraduate. Professors on record calling him the dumbest student they've ever had. Born into wealth and every advantage. Cheated on every woman he married, including with a porn star he paid to have sex with when his youngest child was born. (The hush money came later.) Who took little to no part in raising any of his children. Ran Miss Teen USA pageant to (by his own admission) look at scantily clad underage girls including in the dressing room. Will throw anyone under the bus if it suits him. Bankrupted multiple casinos even while his dad was buying chips to keep him afloat. Siphoned money from multiple charities to the point that both he and his children are now legally forbidden to ever run a charity again. Multiple indictments and subsequent convictions in his administration including members of his cabinet. Mueller even wrote in so many words that the ONLY reason Trump wasn't indicted by the DOJ was because he was a sitting president. Faked his way through every hymn whenever he had a photo op in a church. And on and on.

-----

You're asserting their main substantive differences and the relative hatred for them were their political parties? If Obama had done even a tenth of the stuff we can prove (not speculate) Trump had done, Obama would never have been elected as a senator let alone president. Hell, he'd be in prison.

The ONLY reason Trump could get away with half the stuff he did was because he's white and rich. Black and rich would not have shielded him so effectively nor raised him to the highest levels of the GOP.
> No, it's pretty clear what tracking means.

Having worked on the backends of some of these systems, I think I'm fine with being tracked, especially in the general analytics sense. The issue I have is in being targeted or getting content that is too personalized based upon the tracking.

> the companies that benefit from tracking users also build web browsers

It is generous that they still refer to it as a "User Agent" in their self serving standards. In a functioning market, things like AdBlock and Privacy Badger would be default features in any respectable web browser and the browser would actively attempt to frustrate efforts at fingerprinting.

What ever happened to Opera as a paid product? I guess I'll have to click through their cookie preferences banner to find out...
For a lot of the usecases that involve summarizing some form of input data (for instance the article mentions book summaries, math walkthroughs etc), how can I trust the output to not be hallucinated? How can I reasonably judge that what it tells me is factual with respect to the input and not just made-up nonsense?

This is the problem I have with the GPT models. I don't think I can trust them for anything actually important.
Caveat, I have no experience in ML and a few parts of that article went over my head. However, this seems sensible for application specific ML models, as societal changes move the goalposts. My follow up question is: if a much more general ML model becomes so fundamental to daily life that it steers a human population’s attitudes towards a large amount of the questions they face, would the ML degrade or would it be possible that the population’s behaviour stays within some performant bound for that ML model? For example, could an airport delay remain accurate for a long period of time based on that same huge model controlling many of the outputs that are the inputs for that model? Obviously this doesn’t mean the absolute results remain static, just that the inputs to the model stay within a performant domain of values for the underlying model?

Edit: I guess this would describe less of a model describing a prediction of some external dataset and begin approaching more of a system that controlled the inputs. So perhaps this questions isn’t really relevant to the utility of most (all?) modern ML, which is predicting changes in data that is fully “external”.
I’d second this sentiment and encourage the previous poster and some of the other replies to consider fostering for a local shelter.

We started fostering early in the pandemic, a few months after losing a very special guy, and it’s been very fulfilling. You‘ll get a chance to help some cats or kittens get out of a cage for a few weeks and find new homes - and I’d be surprised if you don’t eventually find one whose home just happens to be yours.
I'm assuming the model has a hand writtn "prefilter" and "postfilter" which both modifies any prompt going in and the token that are spit out? If they discover that the model has problems with prompts phrased a certain way for example, it would be very easy to add a transform that converts prompts to a better format. Such filters and transforms could be part of a product sitting on top of the GPT4-model without being part of the model itself? As such, they could be deployed every day. But tracking changes in those bits wouldn't give any insight into the model itself only how the team works to block jailbreaks or improve corner cases.
If you think this is shocking, wait until you dig into the history of US and UK weapons sales (and ongoing highly paid contractor support) to the Saudi military and "police" forces.

Software licensing bribery and kickbacks are peanuts and crumbs on the floor by comparison.

A great deal of it is justified under the concept that because they're definitely not on good terms with the mullahs in Qom, anyone opposed to the Iranian ayatollahs as a regional power must be our friend, right?
One of the funniest things to me is that the EU organs that made this sort of thing ALL HAVE tracking cookies and analytics on their websites and ALL HAVE these annoying banners. To the last one.
Igalia is working on it. It is unclear if they are doing it speculatively or on contract.

https://www.igalia.com/technology/browsers
that goes against the narrative
If we assume the central banks lower their reserve ratios (you know, like they already did), no deflation would happen. If the reserve ratio stays the same, then deflation would eventually happen. However, even if there is deflation, people will still be willing to lend out cash as reducing their cash holding means they reduce the amount of tax they have to pay. You would most likely always see full employment according to "Say's Law".

This is a much better idea than having a zero lower bound and an endlessly growing welfare state.
I mean, imagine if you didn't have to pay for municipal garbage collection. You would produce more trash than is optimal as someone else is eating the cost. A guaranteed legal minimum wage that is excessively high (think $50 per hour) also encourages more workers to apply for jobs than is optimal.

The zero lower bound not only contains a price control, it also contains an implicit subsidy that guarantees that the government has to subsidize the difference between the interest rate on the capital market, which may in theory be negative and the guaranteed interest rate on cash. It may not sound like a subsidy since no money is being paid, except if you don't pay the subsidy you get something like the great depression. The economy grinds to a halt. The subsidy has to be paid indirectly, the government has to guarantee to keep borrowing enough money until the interest rate is above 0%. I.e. the government has to take on more debt than is optimal and then it somehow has to recycle it back into the private economy. It will have to micromanage more and more parts of the economy simply because of some illogical decision to say "the private capital market ends at the zero lower bound". This is why I am in favor of negative interest rates above some threshold like $250k.
No. And corrects it’s very difficult to avoid it. And often more expensive. And sometimes you have to simply not do business instead of paying the bribe.
Protip, you can order converters from pretty much any power tool battery to any other brand from Aliexpress (or from a reseller/dropshipper on Amazon/eBay).

I sold all my Ryobi stuff except for their air compressor and switched to AEG. Bought an AEG->Ryobi adapter for, I think, 10€ and it works just fine with the Ryobi compressor.
Having a completely Free and Open Source toolchain for a CPU architecture is a great thing to have, which means one can develop tools and other layers on top of it which can be Free and Open Source as well.

Many processors and platforms die because of lack of GNU licensed tools if they fail to be adopted by a critical mass or the developer of the platform doesn't feel like supporting it anymore (Radxa Rock comes into my mind).

So, having an unencumbered and free toolchain ensures that the platform can live on no-matter-what. It's very valuable in my eyes because of that.
These diaries are adapted from Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan and translated by Ryan Bloom
Education has a negative impact on society, because we are forcing young people to waste years of their lives that they often neither enjoy nor do those years make them more productive. They don't get those years back, and even pay dearly for that privilege.

Individuals benefit from getting more education, but only in the sense of getting ahead in a signalling.

Perhaps an analogy helps: an individual tree benefits from growing taller than its neighbours, but the 'society' of trees scarcely gains any net benefit from that arms race.

Research is an entirely different topic that I didn't want to broach here.

For the sake of argument, let's accept that research is good for society. But we could get plenty of research without having to cross-subsidize it via education spending.
Has culture become culturally redundant?
> Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five.

Wow.
Think more along the lines of the degrees that companies like McKinsey require. They usually just say 'any degree is fine'.
Did one single test with phind.com.

It literally just copy-pasted me code from the top result blog it found on the sidebar - and it didn't solve my question in the least.

GPT-4 on the other hand was correct on the first try.

The question was about controlling Home Assistant remotely with Python. Phind's solution included RedisMQ just because the blogger had set up one as their home automation main bus. [0]

GPT-4 just gave me the code how to use the official homeassistant python package to control entities.

The correct code is literally 3 lines:

from homeassistant.remote import API
api = API('http://localhost:8123', '<api_token>')
api.services('light', 'turn_on', {'entity_id': 'light.kitchen'})

[0] https://www.phind.com/search?q=how+can+I+control+lights+on+h...
I'm sure he knew a party officer would read the letter and he wanted to ensure his widow's loyalty wouldn't be questioned. Such was life in the Soviet Union.
The entire point of an OS is to handle low level unsafe stuff so the user doesn't have to. Writing in a lower level language doesn't just make sense, it's straight up necessary. Rust is the only "modern" language that's anywhere near the stability and maturity required, but it's still quite young and rough.
We need living datasets for computer vision.

There is no current mechanism for updating something like ImageNet. There is no place you go to point out problems or contribute changes to keep it in line.

We really need to make datasets social. This has a whole host of challenges like copyright, ownership, versioning, and even hosting costs. Even with all that it is a tractable problem though.