skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're correct on both counts. Independent and self-published artists will be more powerful, but the usual 'idea guy' hustle bro types are already abusing AI art generators to mass-manufacture nominally "unique" art to spam on various marketplaces. Artists that are trying to actually build one good, high-quality work have to compete with thousands of very well polished turds.
> Evolution has had billions of years to do it, and for whatever reason the conclusion is that either it's not possible, or the cost is not worth it.

To be fair, in the "eyes" of evolution, once you stop breeding, you are effectively dead weight and a resource sink - there's been no benefit to evolving hyper-age solutions. I guess mayflies are the ur-example here - they grow, they breed once, they die and leave all the resources to the new crop.

Even if you kept breeding, as your age goes up, your ability (absent modern medicine and luxuries) to get your children to breeding age goes down (a 20 year old has a much better chance against a sabre-tooth tiger / flu / cold weather / etc. than a 70 year old...)
Saying stochastic instead of random doesn't make you seem smart, just pretentious
Its one third of 16k. That's far off.
i kind of wonder if in hindsight, not thinking in this pattern (pass math to a solver, etc.) was an oversight by... OpenAI? is that who/what is responsible for widespread popularity of LLMs?

asking ChatGPT says LLMs got popular when GPT-2 was released by OpenAI in 2019
I have personally witnessed a few assaults in NYC that I am sure went unreported. I don't think it's the same kind of thing you're thinking of: these are things like fights that happen in bars, which are usually handled without police involvement, not random attacks on the street. And claims about unreported crime are falsifiable - see studies like this one https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
Wow this is crazy. Now I feel like I don't need to know anything more. He was an awesome programmer and an awesome guy. I think we can just leave it there, no?
Is there much evolutionary pressure for a longer lifespan? As long as you have offspring and live long enough to raise them, there may not be much pressure to increase lifespan.
You're putting this as a known fact, but it fully relies on Elon being truthful. The Substack CEO denied this, and since he doesn't have a history of lies over the last months, I don't see any reason to give Elon the benefit of the doubt.
Point taken, but still it's adjacent enough that I think something or other should percolate here. And there should be some measure of shared interest all the same.

Eg, the Linux kernel is under the GPL and I don't see anybody really complaining about that. Pragmatism tells me that even if the philosophy isn't to your liking, the code works and you can often make use of it anyway.
i'm not sure what you call the situation where someone just says something with 0 basis but wants to sound like they are making some kind of critical point. it's akin to journalism where they ask a question in the title, and because it's a question, they're legally allowed to post it even if it's completely incorrect and has a 99% chance that the answer is "No"
Are the same people now being let loose writing titles.
This is exactly what I've been looking for. Purchased! One request if you get time/ it's easy: can you add a Chromecast option to the mobile app? At least on iOS I don't see an option.
> _2600+_ comments on it, most of them hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city, including current faves Austin and Miami]

On this list of homicides per capita [1], San Francisco ranks far higher than Austin in incidents per capita of "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter": 2.57 per 100,000 people in Austin, vs. 6.35 per 100,000 in SF.

It also ranks higher than New York, Portland, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
The satnav effect: Is AI stopping me from learning?
It should be obvious that `Thing` generating tools/machines will displace/replace `Thing` generating humans as soon the tool meets the employer's threshold of affordability/quality/speed. This is how capitalism works and you don't have to be a communist to understand or accept that.

With that said... Forty times! ... Seventy percent?! ... This seemed a bit extreme, so I had a look through the source article[0] to try and find out what these claims and figures (40x, 70%) were based on.

The 40x productivity spike is drawn from a professional illustrator's claim that without AI tools, an illustrator could draw one piece in a day, but "with the help of AI, they could make 40 a day for their bosses to choose from." (quoted from article, not direct quote from the illustrator)

The 70% job loss is similarly based on a single individual's claim. They reckon that illustrator jobs (listings?) dropped by 70%, with no indication of how they arrived at that figure. Furthermore, although they are assigning blame to the AI tools, they think that "regulatory pressures and a slowing economy" are the primary causes.

To be clear, I'm not saying that either of these people are doing anything wrong. The reporting could be a little more critical, but this is not unexpected these days. The readers could be a little more critical as well...

[0] https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...
Yes. That's why the comment section is here.
>hysterical about SF crime [of course, completely divorced from actual stats, i.e. that SF has fewer homicides per capita than almost every other American city,

You’re doing the same thing in this thread, where the very article we are discussing shows that murders have been on the rise in the past 5 years.

Your comment was good, then you used the edit to spew your confirmation bias.
This is not about amortization but about low-emission capacity
Charles Frazier Wants You to Wait Before Reading the Classics
> Technically every time you update gcc your compiler might produce a different underlying program for your source code.

Individual versions are deterministic though. Two identical prompts to a LLM at the same time can give drastically different results, because the the responses are probabilistic. You can't assemble complicated systems that way and expect them to behave consistently.
Doesn't hurt to try, but I don't think giving money to a depressed isolated person will change their ways. They've "pulled back" and somehow manage to get by financially without putting in any effort.

Anyway, I recently read that if one is to project SK's birth rate far into the future, the country ceases to exist: 94% population decrease. There was also an article describing a rural area where for the first time in 25(!) years, a baby was born.
Well, you have to establish chain of trust to use ANYTHING. By using whatsapp, you trust:

1. FB Won't push code that relays your messages somwhere

2. Google won't backdoor your Android

3. Some networking driver does its job

4. Broadband manufacturer hasn't introduced hardware backdoor

5. Hope GOV won't ask things to FB

Sure there are tons of more points. But the good thing is, everything else out of this circle has a really hard time penetrating your privacy.
What was the previous suit by rockstar.
I have seen suits where people were selling mods that circumvented DRM.
tldr; bumble works better than fish, and the author is confused why.
It's not a good thing, but what else do you expect in a capitalist system? The whole system is tilted toward the "business" construct that even human beings are forced to incorporate in order to remain competitive. What chance do Universities have?
It is unfortunate that no one has found a way to replicate or imitate the lifestyle of living on a college campus. I very much miss dormitory style living and the social aspect of it. While I'm happy to have my own living space that is much larger than any dorm room, I miss all the novelty and variety that the dorms brought to my life.
If this wasn't normal-ish people wouldn't be going out in it.

Like don't you think the lazy southerner the white collar internet loves to stereotype would call out of work at the drop of a hat?

Floods (usually flash floods or hurricane related floods) in Florida happens many times a year, just not over such a wide area or at this time in the season. To them it's no different than people in Boston driving in 6-8" of snow (to those not aware, driving in 8" of snow in a state that gets snow and has plows implies a 2ft+ storm). The reason this is a 1:1000 event is because it doesn't usually happen in April. It would be like people in Boston commuting in snow in May.

Is there a discussion to be had about the role and responsibility of humans in climate change makign these events more frequent? Of course. But that is completely tangential to the point I am trying to make which is that the hand wringing about "omg I can't believe they're going out in that" is just that, hand wringing.
From the headline I actually thought it was talking about Chad (the country in Africa) and Virgin was a random name. I didn't expect to see this meme on HN.
They can't hide all the backdoor stuff that way. Closed Source is clearly a much better and the obvious choice for a privacy-invasive platform.
You could really stop speeding by limiting the car's max speed based on GPS location, yet this means reducing the speeding fines revenue to a net zero.
If we can guess when a key was added in relation to another, it may even be possible for us to deduce who has initiated a conversation with whom ?
Thank you, I’ll need to look into it more.

The report is about the use of user number fraud and illegal transactions to enable key early insiders to cash out and leave the company in decline.
That said, it looks like most of the accusations in the report are after he left the company.
A ton of people care about property crime and I don't think you should look down on them.

SF has 3-5x the property crime of most major cities in the United States. I imagine most violent crime is targeted (i.e. the victim is not a random person walking down the street), but property crime is scary because it can happen to the best of us, our friends and our family, in even the "safest" neighborhoods. We all know friends whose cars have been broken into. And it's easy to imagine --- what if my kids were at home during one of these home break-ins? (Note that burglaries are not classified as violent crime in SF)
Is the claim that IQs don't (even roughly?) measure intelligence or that intelligence doesn't vary between people?

Why would almost any intelligence test we derive seem to converge -- people who score high on one score high on all others and same with low/low results?
It feels a bit like you're championing a narrative of "See, it's not so bad! You'll just get your stuff stolen and your car vandalized!" I wouldn't feel so smug about that.

I lived in SF for ~15 years, experienced multiple car breakins (when I had a car) and one weird guy who walked up to me on the street and said "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" (which I somehow calmly ignored). For the record, I didn't comment in that thread and I generally don't feel the need to bash SF in public - I just simply moved out.
Thanks for the detailed and informative writeup!!

I love learning about different experiences than my own, especially if they're specific to a time/world that doesn't really exist anymore. Know the past to better prepare for the future, etc. :)

The link to CORECOM (and other countries' equivalents) was fascinating! I'd never heard of them, but assume literally everyone from eastern parts of Europe would instantly recognize them.

I read through "Why?!" and somewhat wrapped my head around it -- necessity for hard foreign currency for trade purposes demanded it -- but it still seems incredibly destabilizing, if one were trying to run a communist country. At the end of the day, I guess economy >> politics, though.

The "fake" glimpse / distortion point is also fascinating. I always thought of that as a Japanese thing in more modern times -- broad cultural awareness of very specific foreign things, but with a different meaning, that would be confusing to the actual origin country's citizens.

And as you said, at the end of the day, a kid with a toy is a kid with a toy. :)

Some things are universal. Every kid wants to have the popular/rare thing and show it off. And assuming there's food/shelter/family, whether it's a Coke can or the most luxurious Western consumer good doesn't really matter. I try and remind myself to me more childlike when it comes to happiness.

Thanks again for sharing!

And PS: Computer game magazines were the same for US kids. Until the late-90s, computers fast enough to run good games well were still pretty expensive, so most kids window shopped via game magazines. Or later, the demo CD-ROMs that occasionally came with them.
This data is from 2019, pre-pandemic and almost 5 years ago. Things have changed.
The Scarcest Thing in the World
>I got a page not found error going to that link.

In that case, try this[0] one that another HNer posted. It even allows you to sort by type of crime.

> In addition it is known that homicides among the homeless, of which SF is known to have many, are underreported.

Uhhh...Have you ever been around a decomposing corpse? They're not so easy to hide or dispose of, and the population you're talking about isn't likely to have the resources to do so.

As such, you might want to check the "source" of information you're relying on for that assertion. That said, I could be completely wrong and SF's homeless community has a bustling trade in disposing of bodies. But that seems pretty unlikely, don't you think?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Edit: Added the missing link.
I made https://random-character.com

Yeah, it's the perfect use case for generative AI. I worked on it because it seemed like a hard and niche enough problem, and yet not important enough that someone else would try to solve.

It follows certain patterns, aka tropes. Story tropes have been around since Classical Greek civilization. It uses procedural generation to make sure that characterizations don't conflict. It uses some techniques to make it easy to get into the character rather than just being a third party description.

As you can see, it's far from perfect. Search traffic has gone down about 50% but direct users have gone up by about 30%. So it does appeal to a niche.

I've been using GPT-3 as a kind of "pre-render" because it's so damn tiring to write descriptions of someone being brave. But it's not quite good enough, and ChatGPT can just do the whole thing quickly and for almost free.

ChatGPT has a huge weakness here though - it doesn't quite know what makes an interesting character, and usually the people asking it don't know either. It's about setting up tension. There's intention and obstacle. Plots and characters usually need to be simplified to make the story easier to follow.

With GPT-3.5 being so cheap, we could actually plug in AI directly here on a free app. But at 5 cents per character it still adds up to $100/month.

Then again, there's interesting stuff, like more directly relevant content rather than this genericness. It can generate incredible detail on articles of clothing. And so on.
Preventing aging is in most cases not beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint and it appears some animals, like octopi [0], have evolved self-destruction mechanisms [1] because normal aging mechanisms takes too long to kill them.

[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-figure-...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenoptosis
No, it’s not. Expecting to download content freely from a subscription-based platform, where the creator/producer has ownership, is an unreasonable requirement.

Go buy a DVD, or convince YouTubers to release MP4s for money.
It sounds like this information wasn't released publicly by the local authorities.

The article has a link to a LinkedIn profile. The writer indicates that the name and city of the LI profile matches the information on the person they were "told" was arrested this morning. Even the name of the company of the person indicated is explicitly referenced in the article.

My professional world doesn't allow for ambiguity. As a journalist, how sure do you need to be about the accuracy of this information before going public?
You're describing exactly the problem that key transparency helps to solve.

With this rolled out, the WhatsApp app itself will be able to detect, by default without any manual verification, if FB attempts to MITM the connection.

While this doesn't make it technically impossible for Facebook to modify the app and servers, it does make it organizationally almost impossible to do so secretly. Such a move would require the involvement of numerous individuals across multiple teams and would be noticeable to security researchers through changes to the app.

This approach is taking off in a bunch of similar problem spaces (web PKI, code signing, etc), so very exciting to see it applied here.

Randomly, and somewhat weirdly, Facebook actually offered one of the first Certificate Transparency monitoring tools, which made it possible to monitor all certificates issued for your domain using a very similar approach: https://www.facebook.com/notes/3497286220327506/
Also we are all so proud of being rational and data driven while ignoring the actual murder rate in SF, which is well below average in America. Now you can say that it's high relative to the rest of the world but most people here want to shit on SF relative to the USA too.
That data is sourced from the FBI's UCR program (https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-an...) which relies on _voluntary reporting_ from law enforcement agencies.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/richard-stallman...

I was out of the loop about what Stallman was being smeared for.

"Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it," Stallman wrote. "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
The article says they were driving together in the same car, before a dispute ensued, which resulted in Lee being stabbed by Momeni.
Hell is the life lived, not the end of life, it's on you if you choose to spend your remaining time dwelling on your most painful experiences

I couldn't imagine someone having that reaction at the end of their life
Show HN: FictionGPT: The AI-Powered Tool for Writing Compelling Fiction
It's a pejorative according to Twitter. According to their own definition, it applies to state-controlled media that don't have independent editorial control, and tweets with this label are not boosted the way other tweets can be.
Iconic image of M87 black hole just got a machine-learning makeover
Aren't most schools on Chromebooks?
That could be the partial exception that proves the rule (partial because there seems to be no "great(N+1) grandmother effect" as great grandmothers would start to compete with grandmothers, with low to none returns to human species).
Are there other examples, besides high level primates?

Moreover, that precise example hints that it shouldn't be so difficult to tweak the human substrate to improve the lifespan since Nature was able to do it in such a short time.
I don't think the world would be a better off if the Bezos' and Gates' were to live forever.

Death provides an opportunity for change. Often in the form of upheaval to political structures but more frequently in opening up social opportunities.

Removing death from the equation introduces either: stagnation, if it is made available to everyone; or a new kind of inequality that I can't comprehend being accepted.
Yep. 16k is $1.3k per month before tax.

Taxes vary but 16k usually falls in the lowest tax bracket. The marginal federal tax rate at that bracket is 10%. Minus various deductions your take home is still 4 figures.
The irony is apparently lost on all westerners that the car is what is causing the problem in the first place. You are all sitting in the machine that destroys your own future. Time machine to hell!
People want wireless charging, that isn't changing. MagSafe is a more efficient version of that compared to basic Qi charging like every other device offers because the magnets ensure perfect alignment.
> including current faves Austin and Miami

Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.

But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
Varies by distro. On Gentoo a python binary exists.
I love the few seconds to minutes of fiduh-fiduh before someone realised and gets up to flip to the B side, or choose the next record. I think that's a nicer, more relaxing transition than any playlist or DJ could muster.
> I'm not defending anything (I called them clueless!), I was stating the actual scope of what we're talking about. It's true that subcommittees compose the whole organization, but at the same time, what happened was that the whole organization was judged as if it were the small subcommittee.

You kinda are. You seem to be trying to shift blame to a scapegoat, which is a pretty common defense tactic. If you shoot someone, you can't claim you're innocent because it was only your finger that pulled the trigger. Obviously things are a little blurrier with organizations, but certainly not totally disconnected.

>> I'd expect if someone stops by your office with a problem, you'd give them at least a few minutes of your time to help.

> And when your day ends up filled with spell checking documents when you have a Ph.D. in English, maybe you might rethink that open door policy.

That's an obvious mischaracterization of what they would have been asked to do, or what would have happened. People are usually pretty respectful of other people's time, especially in these kinds of situations.
By the way, https://github.com/sponsors/code-hike/
Yes, we should always leave death as an option. Conversation over.
Crime != violent crime.
> As I said, I started from the point of zero experience with Lisp. I had a degree in software engineering, but I don’t feel like it has helped me in any direct sense. At most, it exposed me to different kinds and concepts of programming, but I am confident that it’s anything but a prerequisite, as also shown by the story of Protesilaos.

A reminder that back in the late 1970s, secretaries at MIT who knew nothing about programming were using Lisp to customize Multics Emacs to their liking and workflow -- and Emacs was far less convenient then than it is now!

The weird trick they used was, telling the secretaries they were just customizing their editor, not programming it!
True, but to be fair it would be even lower if it wasn't for scientific research like this
There's such a thing as tact and respecting his widow and kids than to jump straight to scandalous speculations that besmirch his integrity, which are easy to make but in poor taste.
Get into a bad relationship and you'll disabuse yourself of that notion really quick
From what I’ve read, Apple can and has worked with third parties to unlock MDM-associated and activation locked devices, but only after a certain period of time and reasonable proof of legitimate ownership to try to avoid creating a pipeline to “legitimize” stolen hardware, which doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. There’s no point in having a locking feature if they’ll roll over and unlock it for just anybody.