skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How are you solving for PDFs that are too large to fit in the token context?

I know of a few approaches for that:

- Ignore the problem and let it hallucinate answers to anything that's not in the first 5-10 pages

- Attempt to recursively summarize the PDF at the start - so summarize e.g. pages 1-3, then 4-6 etc, then if the resulting summaries are still too long for the context window run a summary of those summaries. Use the summary in the context to help answer the user's questions.

- Implement a mechanism for finding the most likely subset of the PDF content to include in the prompt based on the user's question. You could use the LLM to extract likely search terms, then run a dumb search for those terms and include the surrounding text in the prompt - or you could calculate embeddings on the different sections of the document and do a semantic search against it to find the most appropriate sections, as I did in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/semantic-search-answer...

Which approach did you use? Am I missing any options here?
That's nice until it breaks down, besides doesn't help much if you have 2400 lines long functions ( cbMainWindow ) that mixes Win32 API drudgery with indentation logic and SQLite fiddling.

Sure it's an cute and to-the-point codebase, but even if I have experience with using these API's I'd never volunteer to work on this codebase because it's obviously also one that's a creation of the authors memorized experience.
So we should just hope? Sounds like a good plan.
The German theatre world developed the opposite convention, “Bühne links” (literally "stage left”) means left from the perspective of the audience.

I don’t know so much about the theatre world, I’m a professional dancer, but at least the dance scene is increasingly international, switching fluently between English or German depending on the people present; some people learned the English/international convention, some - especially older - directors know mainly the German convention, some people are not aware that there are different conventions in English and German and the result is complete chaos.
Yes. I need a smartphone. What is it with so many antiprogress people on HN? Do you really need cooked food? Like reaaaaly need it? Yes ffs... Windows with ads is a much smaller inconvenience than completely changing my work style to fit with linux lack of support of a million useful things.
> but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps

My favorite book genre is roughly “Academic writes popular book after 20 years of researching a topic”. That will be very hard to replace with ChatGPT.

Someone like Gladwell though … yeah I can see LLMs being scary for that genre. Not quite yet, but soon.
Your boss enjoys the money you make for him with so little fuss.
Why is the increase in every single food item tied to the war in Ukraine?

Is that legitimate, or is that just timely excuse making?
oh I hate this word; as it is also often used in a fake way. "Gezellig hé"
The non-native social media people have grown up fully on in-person relationships where trust is very important. They apply the same trust to people on social media that they do to their friends and family. The social media natives treat social media as different things.
In my home town in Germany (and probably other cities as well, only I've realised I've never really paid attention to that subject while visiting other cities), the little tactile arrow marking the crosswalk direction plus a tactile buzzer for blind people is mounted together with those buttons, so even when a certain direction and its parallel crosswalk always get green by default (and therefore there's no need ever to push a button), a button housing still gets installed for the buzzer and arrow.

The only difference is that those kind of non-buttons are painted a different colour, plus with the older style of buttons that you physically have to push in order to operate a switch, on those non-buttons the push-plate is fixed in place and cannot actually be pushed. (Some people occasionally still try to.) With the newer style of button that operates via some sort of electronic touch sensor and therefore has no moveable parts to begin with, the only distinction might be the colour? (Not sure, because the intersection I regularly pass by on the way to work still uses the old-style buttons…)
> but those people won’t be “writers.”

Not by your definition maybe, but that misses the point made in the article:

> why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless?

The op has inserted a specific word here in braces because this isn't a question of what defines a writer, it's a question of who gets paid to write. By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the market. And the market, in my experience, is not particularly concerned with quality.
But the original Amiga with just a faster CPU is pretty damn close.
Enhancing Cybersecurity with Cyber Deception
The FAQ answers my question:

> In the analyzing step, ChatPDF creates a semantic index over all paragraphs of the PDF. When answering a question, ChatPDF finds the most relevant parapgrahs from the PDF and uses the ChatGPT API from OpenAI to generate an answer.

Are you using OpenAI's embeddings to implement that?
It only has to reach the level of AGI. That is the goal of AI.
Nonetheless, AI researchers predict exponential will include reaching some level of ASI.
so [reads the pdf] + [send to chatGPT] -> [gets chatGPT response] -> [sends response to ChatPDF] = ChatPDF?
Before version 6, PowerShell would default to writing output files as UTF-16LE. Good to know before reading those in to something expecting UTF-8.
The convention for orbital spacecraft is that the local coordinate system has +z facing whatever it is orbiting and +x facing travel direction. Then you can refer to directions relative to the spacecraft such as "+x", "-y", etc.

The space shuttle normally orbited with it's payload bay, opposite of the landing gear facing Earth. The payload bay was +z direction. From the layperson's point of view, the shuttle orbited upside down, but from an aerospace engineer's point of view it orbited right side up and landed upside down.
I think there's more than that. As someone who has written millions of words in my life, I agree with you - the mechanical transformation of my ideas is not the hard part. However, there will be people who haven't developed their own style or their own fluency in the mechanical transformation, and now they have the ability to do so almost as well as I can.

An expert reader will be able to tell the difference. But assume that these people have read and understand the subject but have not put the millions of words together yet.

At some point, it will become like a calculator. I can multiply 20% off a dinner bill faster than getting the calculator out, but people won't spend the time learning the mental math and they will do just as good a job.
Meal appears to be a cognate of Old Norse "mál" ("mål", "måltid" - meal, meal time - in modern Norwegian) rather than mjol. Compare also Mehl (flour) vs Mahl (meal) in German.
Oh that’s cool! I forgot about this!
To whit, having learned to drive on the left, the “easy” turn that does not cross traffic is always a “left” turn to me, regardless of living in a country that drives on the right. Makes giving directions to others quite interesting.
So, fun story. I've got an "AI" server which has three P40s and a M40 in it. I'm doing my own version of "off while idle".

I discovered that if the server gets hard shutdown by killing the power it will automatically start back up when the power turns on.

As a result I just set up home assistant with a power toggle and when I want the server off or on I can start it up by restoring the power.

Way more brute force than this guy's solution, but hey, it works.
I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.

I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.

We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.

Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.
Rail and waterborne – best for low-carbon motorised transport
> There's not enough newsworthy things to cover in that time

There is seriously no end to the number of newsworthy things to cover. The problem is that there are limited resources for coverage. It's expensive to staff a desk full of people who can find interesting topics and tell good stories about them for every subject area under the sun. It takes a lot of people with very variegated kinds of subject matter expertise.

It's much cheaper to have 4 or 5 people whose main skills are theater criticism level analysis of political events (i.e. how does this play with various demographics) and a skill of manipulating emotions to spend all their time speculating over nonsense instead. Just put them in a suit and have somber music on and we can pretend this is a serious matter instead of idle gossip.
> Chatgpt is way better at being persuasive than it is at being correct.

I get the sentiment, but I doubt this is statistically true. Of course it makes mistakes, and certain kinds more than others, but ChatGPT’s recall is very good.

> It is probably already netter than you at convincing them of stuff.

I don’t think I agree, but I’m not clear what you mean. What do you mean? Care to unpack it?

Here’s what I mean when I say I disagree:

* ChatGPT, on the whole, doesn’t press an agenda. While it does have baked-in opposition to violence, hurting people, sabotage, bombs, etc, it does not (best I can tell) have a values system to weigh competing interests in a workplace.

* Agency. This one may be obvious, but I think it needs to be stated. If you want ChatGPT to weigh in on a decision, you have to ask. You have to frame the question. An employee/contractor can come in with their own agenda and present a recommendation.

* Much of the time (I’m not sure how often, this is an empirical question), when interacting with something like ChatGPT, people convince themselves. They frame the questions. They read answers. They stop at some point, perhaps when convinced, perhaps when the response seems incorrect, and/or perhaps when they run out of time or interest. Along the way, they can push back, asking follow-up questions or disagreeing. Of course, ChatGPT is presenting information and that information may be persuasive. But what “get’s in” to the human brain varies a lot based on what that person is receptive to.

* Of course, a significant portion of Americans demonstrate limited critical thinking skills, for large portions of their waking life. One might debate this point, i.e. saying that sometimes just “going along with something” is a rational strategy to conserve energy, avoid conflict, fit in with a group, and so on. Whatever is going on, though, it goes appear that for many people, belief formation is not primarily driven by a quest for truth in the classical liberal sense. Such people often seek “advice” from ChatGPT not with the intent to question it, but rather to reduce the time and effort that thinking and researching requires.
Gemoedelijk is probably the Dutch word which is linguistically related to the one you mention. Interestingly, it has no megative connotation, but it won't be a word used much in randstad (the densely populated ~West of The Netherlands). So it is by definition not as popular as gezellig.
4th submission in 3 weeks
I just try to prepend "my". It's usually natural to do this anyway ("my left knee" e.g.) but can always be done ("I fell to my left" instead of "I fell to the left").
The more fun work in my life are raising my kids and creating art.
I'm not so sure about it. Neural networks and their models are built on theories made 50 years ago. The breakthrough happened in 2011 and we were able to build a lot on it, but we are close to our limits unless a company made another discovery and didn't publish it.

I'm sure we have room for improvements but the acceleration stopped at GPT3.5, and imho the last version proved that the next increment will be specific but not as impressive as GPT3 was.

I could be wrong, but imho our engineering caught up to our theory, or is close to, and while we'll be less stale than the aerospace sector, as our experiments are less materially expensive, I can see the field diversify but stop growing as fast.
Even better, I stand corrected.

ευχαριστώ πολύ
You could just make a shell alias or wrapper script that would simplify the whole thing
In Search of Durable Computing
The war in Ukraine drives up prices of fuel which has a knock on effect to just about everything else.
Gladwell's strength is that he's an incredible storyteller. It will be a while before an LLM gets to that level.
'derived' isn't the correct term here possibly. More like they both derive from the same common term 'gezel' (which is also a word on it's own meaning 'buddy' or 'fellow traveller' or 'fellow worker'). In gezel-lig the 'lig' is for making it an adjective. In gezel-schap the 'schap' ('schaft' in German) indicates something like 'more people' or 'company'.
Yes, content farms will be able to produce low-value content even more cheaply. Any “writer” who leans too hard on ChatGPT will find themselves producing material that feels indistinguishable from all the other low-value crap that floods the internet.
Seems many have no concept of exponential growth as this is the correct answer.

The goal of everyone building AI is to reach AGI, if that is achievable, there is no last 10% or 1%.
Nah, LinkedIn takes the cake in that regard. If you wanna feel full on narcissism and a bunch of meaningless fake posts with people trying appear as something they're not... LinkedIn is the place to be.
> argue for performance options which lead to productivity hits

Always.
Can you elaborate on the flaws of Kubernetes YAML templating? Can you include a description of a better system?
The gains on taxes are uncapped, but the losses are capped per year. I think if you have a bigger loss, you can carry it forward even as an individual and apply it against future gains (or take another $3000 deduction). Apparently the limit is $3000 for married couples, I thought it was $3000 for individuals.
If you read further down in the article, China is suffering from a drought that’s been the worse in decades

Edit monsoon not drought. Thanks s1artibartfast

“In the second half of last year, swaths of farmland in the world’s largest rice producer China were plagued by heavy summer monsoon rains and floods. The accumulated rainfall in the country’s Guangxi and Guangdong province, China’s major hubs of rice production, was the second highest in at least 20 years, according to agriculture analytics company Gro Intelligence. Similarly, Pakistan — which represents 7.6% of global rice trade — saw annual production plunge 31% year-on-year due to severe flooding last year, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), labeling the impact as ‘even worse than initially expected.’”

Reading further, I’m not sure why Ukraine is mentioned either since their major food export is wheat and not rice
I feel like there's a lot of room in the market for a chip that sips power but has a billion PCIE lanes and RAM.

Does such a system exist?
I kick myself everyday for throwing away two Amiga 500's in their original (but moldy) boxes and styrofoam. I just didn't have room for it and I didn't use them anymore, not even sure if they still worked.
LAION Petitions Governments to Keep AGI Research Open, Active and Responsible
This was in response to another comment up the thread saying that the license is basically free since you can use it without activation with very few limitations (can't change the desktop background and such).
It reminds me of a lot of hackernews comments on technical topics from non-software fields.
This reminds me of back when Apple sold WiFi access points (they were high-quality, but a pain to administer since they required running a Windows-only or a MacOS-only executable). I tried running arpwatch for a while on a network which had one of these, and gave up, since the MAC address for any Apple machine on the network was constantly bouncing between the real machine and the access point. Apparently, whenever an Apple desktop went to sleep, that WiFi access point proxied ARP and mDNS requests for it, much like what's described on this post (but it did that by default, with no configuration required to enable it).
If you don’t have an editor or aren’t rewriting your prose, you may indeed be communicating faster and clearer than most people—but not at the level the author talks about. Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption.
Meh, I struggled to get my pi to work as a time machine server. It would work for a few weeks and then just stop working and I would have to start the backup from scratch previous backups becoming unusable.

In the end I just plugged an external hard disk into the mac.

I have had similar issues in the past even with such simple things as SSH to a Mac. It would be easy to blame the pi or Linux, but as far as I can tell, Apple just does not play nicely with anything not Apple. It's just that little bit different. I have no such problems interfacing Linux and the pi with anything else.
Anything that is unencrypted by default has something wrong with it.

No machine I deploy has the telnet command present because I don't want to give my users free footguns.
Low powered pcs are the way to go for self hosting.

Lots of great options that sip power at idle (most of the time)

Desktop grade cpus can be found that max at 35W.

The power per watt of sa
Vivaldi mobile is quite nice. It has the speed of Chrome but with adblocking and customization.
I was hoping for something less sanitized, that gives more insight into what the processor is doing, like this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

This, though, falls into the enormous genre of algorithms that take some cool phenomenon (often pi) and then quantize it to some tempo, and some scale, and some set of samples, thereby killing everything that was interesting about the original phenomenon.
Meta has started its latest round of layoffs, focusing on technical employees
When you word it that way, it doesn't sound as impressive.. I've seen many 20k ton objects move large distances.. they are trains :)
Software is driven entirely by utility value, not production value.

I don't care whether the app was written on stone tablets in hand-rolled assembly, or by an AI, so long as the plane lands safely.
Yeah... but alternatively you can easily find a group of like minded people. I suppose you could argue this just fractures society more though. People migrate off into groups of others they agree with and don't even bother trying to coexist anymore.
> First there’s nothing secret about all this.

Right. It's going to come as a shock to exactly no one that (e.g.) Wikipedia was used as a source.

Then there's the fear-mongering about using public databases (e.g., voter registration lists) in "unforeseen ways". While that may be true, they don't seem to be concerned about non-AI actors using these databases in "unforeseen ways".

Pretty much pure clickbait.
from an entirely new account too.

jannies should start deleting these ads. ever since gpt-4 dropped, this website has become unbearable.
I could see #1...

I am not sure how that is different from today? Do you want all Reps to be "At Large" so instead of voting for 1 person, in CA would would vote for 54 people?

I am not sure that is tenable but an interesting concept.

I have always supported the Wyoming Rule, and supported taking congressional redistricting out of the hands of legislatures moving towards fixed allocation based on something non-political like zip codes.

On the Electoral College... 10000000% disagree. The President should absolutely not be elected by direct majority, that is taking the same mistake of the senate and making it for the president

First and foremost the office of president should be reduced in power, Congress and abdicated far too much power to the executive, that is what has made the Presidential election soo important, is should not be.

Secondly, I would be in favor of a change to the electoral process where by the votes are allocated proportional just like the house, instead of First Pass the Post like we do today, but I would Strongly Oppose just moving to a pure democracy system. That would effectively make many states have no vote in the election of the president and almost fully remove republicanism from the US system, if not completely put us on that path
I have been using ChatGPT pretty consistently for various summarization type of tasks for a bit.

But this weekend I tried using it to learn a technical concept I've struggled with. Previously, I could have spoken about the topic intelligently, but could not have put it to any practical use.

In a few quick prompts and < 1 hr of synthesis, I was able to get to practical knowledge to understand it enough to try and build something from scratch. And building something in another 2-3 hours.

I think this would have taken me 1-2 months of dedicate hitting my head on the wall time to learn previously.

In that moment, I had a realization similar to the author.

Basic flow of the prompt went something like:

1. Tell me about this thing that's part of the concept that I don't understand?

2. Explain this new term you threw at me? Do it in the context on an industry I understand well.

3. Explain yet another concept you mentioned in the same industry concept?

4. This sounds a lot like this other concept I know. How do these differ in practical use?

5. Write me some sample code in a language I understand very well, that does X use case the you mentioned?

6. What are these other concepts you used?

7. How can I do this new concept to do something I've implemented before.

Essentially, my knowledge of other concepts, industries and being able to draw parallels allowed me to learn much much faster.
I've always had very good night vision, it would not be worth giving that up just to not need contacts.
Its time, if you've not seen it like this, this is what it is
Barely anyone takes the Sunrise Seto. I managed to easily book it while I was there. I really want to take it again when I am back, 100% quintessential Japanese bliss. I hope they never get rid of it.
You are right. The stories are fantastic and he really makes the underlying research shine. I can see LLM + Human working great for that kind of writing.

LLM writes the first draft, human makes it sing.
You can direct it (or at least via api with a prompt) to be more concise or write for a specific audience
Is this why cheese (I believe via Roman Latin) is also 'cacio'?

I'm only familiar due to 'cacio a pepe'.
I use my pi as a backup server. The disks spin down when not in use.
I don't think that's an accurate mental model of how a tool like this works.

It's not training a new model on the PDF, or accumulating additional training into its existing model.

Instead, it basically copies and pastes relevant chunks of the PDF into the prompt (invisibly) and then pastes in your question.

It does use calculated embeddings in order to help it spot which are the most relevant sections to use, and it will store those (since they cost money in API calls to retrieve) - but it could be implemented to delete those stored embeddings and the PDF itself when the user stops interacting, or requests that the document is deleted.
Every AI blogpost recently reads like a bad parable of the old engineer and the hammer.
The best UI is the UI your users are used to, and 1% of Windows users are used to the Win 2000 gray UI.

Win XP came out 22 years ago.