skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This argument makes no sense, no matter how often it's repeated. The Japanese housing bubble crash represents investment losses on land, even empty lots, and is not a result of high upkeep costs. The losses in that graph represent many several multiples of the cost of the structure. Furthermore, depreciation of structures happens everywhere worldwide, and while it may happen faster in Japan, it's mostly balanced there by low construction costs.
I've used MJ quite a lot. It's easy to create something. It's quite difficult to create a specific thing.
I think the difference is that the digital wool fools us into thinking, at least at some level, that we're being productive. It's much easier to pull yourself away from the TV to "do" something because watching TV genuinely feels passive. Consumption of content on the internet/smartphones blends the passive entertainment with a feeling of productivity so well that you feel like it's actually worth it to just check this or that app, or to just scroll for a little bit longer to see if you happen across something that actually has value. It's harder to break away from.
My seventh grade teacher pronounced these inversely and the whole class got them “wrong” on a spelling test.
RLHF seems to suggest that human feedback to tune the model after plain textual data pretraining is quite potent per sample. There might be some optimal ratio of data+model size:rlhf size that works quite favorably for us in getting hallucinations to a minimum. Furthermore there might be some “there” there, in the hallucinations, that has yet to be identified as valuable in itself. Either way it seems like our ability to wrangle these models is getting better
Well, each to his own I guess. I don't see the need for myself. Data is backed up, critical data is encrypted and I've never had a malware infection. I'm pretty careful.

You can run something like Qubes if you want better isolation.
what did China do in battery? I thought China is still behind Japan and South Korea.
Knowledge is awareness of information. "Awareness" is a quagmire because a lot of people believe that 'true' awareness requires possessing a sort of soul which machines can't possess.

I think the important part is information, the matter of 'awareness' can simply be ignored as a philosophical/religious disagreement which will never be resolved. What's important is: Does the system contain information? Can it reliably convey that information? In which ways can it manipulate that information?
Mao did not try the exact same thing lets stop with the BS first of all. Last I checked China is doing fine. I was obviously exaggerating when I said all but I honestly think that all diseases carrying mosquito types should be completely eradicated. This is not a laughing matter imo and not a time to act like a psychopath.
Mosquito borne disease situation is dire in a lot of Asian and African countries. May be if you lose loved one your idea will change.
Well, for one, humans are obviously at least more than a fancy Markov chain because we have genetically hard-wired instincts, so we are, in some sense, "hard-coded" if you forgive my programming metaphor. Hard-coded to breed, multiply, care for our young, seek shelter, among many other things.
Leading workshops in USA and Europe has been pretty eyeopening.

Americans: “I’m so and so from $employer where I do software engineering in the foobles department”

Europeans: “I’m so and so from $city where I live with 3 kids and enjoy basket weaving. For work I build foobles”

You have to explicitly ask Europeans about their employers whereas Americans seem to get completely consumed by their company so much they lose all other identity.
This was an interview question a friend of mine used. He explained that it was a very common Chinese childrens' game. It was also done on a British game show from the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfa3MHLLSWI
> Every modern filesystem just handles that automatically.

Do they? I always assumed they just try to avoid fragments but ignore them once created, and rely on bigger faster disks to hide any problems this may cause.
Does Pimsluer have an app?

Anki is a good app, but only if you create your own cards. The act of creating cards is more important than the study.

The more I learn about learning languages the less I think an app is good. There are useful things they can do, but the problem is it is a lot of work to create great content and it is hard to get someone to pay
That's not how the Russians are thinking. Russian math is very straightforward: grind down 10,000 convicts to kidnap 10,000 Ukrainian kids. It's a good deal in their books.
Could anti-quarks behavior be explained by them having negative mass instead?
>> You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's [list of options]
Or the people who are labeled "buffoons" (or whatever pejorative) aren't actually buffoons but are labeled that way by people with their own political biases.
I don’t believe there is silver bullet to learning a language for anyone - especially your average human. Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, whatever are great for some foundational exposure and I appreciate that service but they aren’t going to get anyone fluent.

I am a native English speaker and learned to fluently speak Spanish starting at 25. I don’t think I have any natural talent for languages but I was committed. Multiple intensive full-time immersion courses, immersion in Spanish speaking countries with an effort to assimilate and a lot of watching TV and reading for me to master. My weirdo catalan-ish accent still has serious issues (applicable to anlmost any accent in the Spanish speaking world) and I still make mistakes I know are mistakes the second I make them - 15+ years later.

IMO Exposure (which in my janky definition includes at least some of what I described above and required usage to manage some regular task or communication) is the only way to really learn a language. And the thing that separates the real polyglots and everyone else is some combination of intrinsic aptitude and accelerated learning as they pick up more languages that drastically reduces the amount of exposure required.
> I don't know

Yes, but don't worry. I do.

> I would consider it lazy to write off the political structure coordinating over a billion people

You're not considering anything. You're only desperately trying to hold on to a losing proposition you've arrived at through a lack of principle, a profound laziness, and a basic nihilism.

> I'll let America get a couple more hundred under its belt before I conclude this Democratic experiment is working.

Such sloppy thinking. You really do need to broaden your horizons.
> What is the finish line?

$0 / free is the finish line. Open source LLMs being released for free are undercutting the AI LLM services.

> Why are contenders like ChatGPT or Claude "winning the race to the bottom"

They're automating some humans in several industries and cheapening other professions. Why pay translators, copywriters, etc when a AI LLM can do it 95% cheaper or a locally installed LLM can do it for free.

The pricing of these AI LLM services are close to free and they can't cut prices any further. Once locally installed LLMs eventually equal the performance of that of GPT-4, Claude, etc the only logical step for those services is to slowly increase their prices and add more features as running these AI LLM services is very expensive.

Open source LLMs are essentially at the finish line of the race to the bottom but are admittedly not good yet, but will eventually be. Cloud LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude right now are good enough, close to free and are 95% cheaper than hiring a human journalists, copywriter, translator, etc.
Yep, I feel (a little) bad for anyone doing node development on Windows (though I probably should feel bad that they're having to dev in JS).

But this isn't an "NTFS problem" as you'll have this occur on any filesystem that supports file system filters, like antivirus.
The problem is the false dichotomy in thinking that a fancy Markov chain can't contain intelligence / knowledge.
Love the Golf, but honestly, the hatchback versa's space efficiency impressed me more than the golf. It's significantly smaller than the golf, but its tall, has a smaller engine bay and very thin doors.

It was easier to pack my firstborn's stuff in it than the Golf. We got rid of it for the Sorrento when we got rear ended when my daughter was four days old. Then I decided I'd get the heaviest vehicle I could then afford - the Sorrento.
What I like of this the most is a way of discovering new sites I didn’t know about, hoping I can find something equivalent to when I found Reddit back in the mid 2000s
Yeah I think everyone, as an adult, underestimates the immense time requirement to learn a language.

I dabbled taking a course after work for a few years, basically for fun.
It was a.. group 4 language, lol. Looking at the foreign service stats, apparently I needed 1320 hours to have "Advanced low" average aptitude that Group 1 languages take 480 hours to achieve.

It was 2 or 4 hours/week, with a few sessions a year so I would be in class maybe a total of 40 weeks/year. I did this for about 4-5 years before changing jobs & moving made it highly inconvenient. All of that added up to maybe 600 hours of classroom time.

At my peak, I felt at best like a precocious 9 year old.
When traveling I could sort of make my requests known in a store, restaurant or hotel.. if they person I was speaking to had the time & patience. Of course, any complex requests immediately fell apart because I had a low hit rate of understanding the clarifying questions coming back to me.

Learning a language, outside of direct engagement with native speakers, on a regular daily basis.. is just extremely hard to the point of being foolhardy.

For the record, I'm doubly an idiot because 20+ years ago I tried to learn another language which, of course, was also Group 4.
This touches on what I think is a main separator between the GPT models and humans: If a human is unsure of the instructions, they will ask clarifying questions. GPT-4 cannot do that currently.
Using these sorts of shared credentials could be construed as unauthorized access, which would definitely be legal gray area.
there exists a setting which will work for all your test points.

The caveat of the author is (I think) that if you have a task, you collect a set of points (questions) on which you will test this task. Then you tune your setting (prompt) to start working for your test point (questions).

After that procedure, you do not know if that prompt solves the original task. You might have overfitted to your test points.

And by repeatedly doing this overfitting for various tasks, you are not gathering evidence that a good setting truly exists for all tasks
Ah yes, Go and JavaScript, the only two programming languages.
Good point. While it seems obvious to me that LLMs can never be anything more than fancy Markov chains, in my experience it seems the majority of human "logic" does not operate much differently. Very rare to encounter someone who is able to think or speak critically. Most regurgitate canned responses based on keywords.
> many of us are (implicitly) penalised for spending time talking to the public.

The infamous Sagan effect: https://astronomicca.com/2017/11/03/the-sagan-effect/
It's actually a Goldman-Sachs account in Apple packaging. The federal funds rate is in the 4.75-5% range, which means Goldman, in theory, can take the money you deposit and re-lend it at 4.8% or so, pay you your interest, and still make a profit.
That's crazy talk. Nothing actualy exist until the anglosphere takes note of its existence.
Markov chains, like any algorithm, are hard-coded. And just as evolution hard-codes our genes, supervised learning (and in the future reinforcement learning) hard-codes LLMs and other AI models.
Ahh. This brings back memories. I used to do this when I was using Adobe (Macromedia originally) FLASH back in the day. If no FLASH, show them the shitty version. HAHA. Good times.
Because it is not generally possible to determine that the result is undecidable, when maybe searching a little longer would find it.
Even more fun fact. "Thermidor" as well as the other months on the Republican Calendar don't have any root word. They were made up whole cloth and intended to sound like Greek or Latin.
My thinking was simply that they had millions of loyal, happy iPod users that would be replacing their iPods at some point in time, and iPhone would be a natural upgrade path for them. And they had retail outlets where they could push the iPhone. But I was skeptical about them being able to deal with the mobile operators, and I underestimated how slow competitors would be to catch up.
It depends on the individual system, and as you expect there are systems where accessing ROM is equivalent to RAM speed wise.

You mainly first began to see a speed disparity with full 32 bit systems which had a 32 bit data path to memory. It'd be common to still only have a 16 bit datapath to ROM, necessitating the hardware to split 32 bit transfers in two when accessing ROM.

This disparity ended up diverging further as the CPU only had to hit the north bridge (or more recently the memory controller in uncore on the CPU die) but practically having to go all the way out to some of the slowest, legacy interfaces like LPC to hit ROM.
I mean - why not both? Their products have been on a hot streak recently - idk what other big tech company compares in terms of the quality of the core products they sell. And they've also been making a ton of money. That hasn't exactly gotten in the way of accomplishments like apple silicon and the apple watch
Spiral goes deeper once you get in. I got into a rabbit hole reading through some of the best practices and it ran into the same stakeholder management that is common.

It’s a fun historical count and I might write up some of the learnings later on.
And if you don't have 2.5 hours, Throughline did a good 47 minute episode as well: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1127015286/silicon-island
That is the best counterargument.

But it's not clear to me that there will end up being better and worse places, instead of each place having its own brand of shitty local elites. And I don't want to bow down to elites allegedly on my side of the political spectrum, I don't want any of them having power over me.
33% income tax on the top band, not in total. Even though I fall into the 39% band I'm still not paying as much as 33% all up.
> Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated.

I believe that's mostly a US thing. Here in France we love state monopoly on tap water, energy, and trains and snail mail service… Privatising those and opening them to competition generally caused more problems than it solved.

> Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement.

The only agreement most people understand, at the most basic level, is that money they deposit can be retrieved at any time. The idea that a bank run could even be a thing nowadays feels outlandish (I don't know the particular, but I understand that we have put various mechanims in place to make bank runs very unlikely, if at all possible).

> Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits

I don't receive any income from my regular bank account. I even pay a small fee for the privilege of having that account. The things that pay interest back are special accounts, some of which I don't have immediate access to. For those the bank is very clear that it will use that money to invest in stuff, justifying why there's a return on interest at all.

Now if we went all the way to forbidding investment accounts, sure, every bit of inflation means your money is evaporating over time. I'm actually okay with that. It's a form of tax, with a flat rate, that rich people with a ton of money will pay more than the small folks. But yeah, it sure would be a hard sell to those rich people.
Yeah, I use it to direct new newsletter signups to a special url which redirects a user to my latest post. https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2022/static-site-redirec...
Does somebody have good resources on what a digital dollar would even mean? The dollar already digital, most dollars are held at banks, which are in turn held as entries at the Fed. How does a digital dollar change any of this? Why is a blockchain better than a plain old relational database somewhere in a Fed datacenter?
You're assuming the world is a single country.

It isn't.
> I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.

From what I can tell, the root issue is that most people are item-oriented instead of system-oriented.

People are animals and animals need to survive. Survival is path dependant, so people think today is more important than tomorrow. In actuality, today and tomorrow are the same thing.

The American experiment seems to be failing its two pillars of capitalism and democracy for the same reason: they require input from most people. Rather, they require _thoughtful_ input from most people - and most people ain't that good at thinkin.

As far as I can tell, the game is already lost. Competition in all key products is at best reduced to 4 players. Money's influence on politics is hiding in plain sight. At least taco bell delivers.
Nice idea, why did you choose to build it in typescript/node out of interest?
Most public libraries will have a public workstation where web based editor might be used if that helps. After that, a base chromebook is like 300 bucks new
They most likely didn't have blue eyes, but might not have had brown ones.
memrise, duolingo, clozemaster, etc.. are all useful to get you reading words. If you're going to a place with foreign languages and not english written everywhere, it can be very useful to start understanding basic constructs and word formations. How certain letters are pronounced can also be a big help.

Nothing beats immersion though. Duolingo at it's best (in the languages offered) can help prepare you a little for immersion but you're going to find out very quickly so little of it is helpful in conversation.
As far as i can see that food bank is totally overrun according to local news https://www.local3news.com/local-news/chattanooga-area-food-... . I will relay the other links but since she doesn't have children I am not sure in how far the /for-families/ links will be useful. She has been applying for SNAP.
Last time I checked there are apps you can use to negotiate a quote for specific trims with a multiple dealers so you can get the car you want without stepping foot on the lot. If you live in a major city, getting a base model Camry isn't even kind of impossible. Getting a new model 3 for 27k is.

Furthermore, while the model 3 has the same wheelbase length as a Camry, there are smaller cars that have the same passenger capacity. As an example, the model 3 has an internal passenger volume of 97 cubic feet, which is slightly less than the Civic's 99 cu ft. So if that is the metric which matters to you, well 23k is now the price to beat.

"Doing X is slightly harder than I want, so I will use that as a basis for justifying something more expensive while still feeling like I did something prudent" is a pretty transparent move and an indicator that you aren't price sensitive.

As for the gas vs electricity price costs offset, I only drive 5k a year, so cut that number in half. Lord forbid I live in an apt and park on the street, then I'm truly effed.

The model 3 is an expensive fast car. That is okay, better than okay, that is awesome and there is no question you get a lot of bang for your buck. I'd love to own one! That said, it isn't a Honda Civic, Toyota Camry, or $OTHER_PRICE_ECO_CAR, and trying to draw such a comparison is all kinds of odd.
Ultimately, this is a tool like Google. If using a search engine doesn't work for you for some task, then it's not the tool for the job.

You even get to trial it for free.

You shouldn't use LLMs if you can't make them work. I can make them work for me for many things. That makes them useful for me.
Mercedes just reported ~14% margins and rising, Tesla reported 19% and falling.

Bit of a gap, but not 3x anything. And Tesla plays a little fast and loose with how they capitalize things. Oh, and they make huge margins off a product they sell that doesn't exist (fsd).
> The other reason is that the Deskpro 386 was almost certainly the first PC where ROM shadowing made a real difference. The Deskpro 386 had 32-bit RAM, significantly faster than 16-bit ROMs. That was not the case with 16-bit PC/AT compatibles with slower CPUs, slower RAM, and a 16-bit data path to both RAM and ROM. On the Deskpro 386, the system RAM was likely several times faster than ROM, and that’s what made ROM shadowing desirable.

Also it doesn't make sense to push for a faster ROM if it's wouldn't be utilized or benefit anything.
> One of the big things in raising kids these days is "external rewards" vs "intrinsic motivation"

I think this is a bit more complicated and what works for some doesn't work for others. But I think to be a successful language learning app (as in successfully teaching language) then they can't just rely on this "immersion" approach. There needs to be study tools too.

> Duolingo is all about external rewards

I definitely agree with this. It seems like a big alignment problem. But I think they could make more money if they better aligned their app with user goals. It could reduce attrition rate, get more paid signups, and more active users. They have "first mover" advantage, but the hype phase is over, there are more competitors in the space, and they need to adapt or fail. Momentum is a pain. It is the reason for a lot of companies' success but also the reason for many (including the same) companies' quick and "unexpected" decline. Hacking is a good early strategy. It can get you to the moon, but it won't keep you there.
No, it's real. This is just only half the story.

Google provides to anyone registered to bid on a given auction a unique ID and a lot of demographic data about the person browsing, but nothing that would directly identify them.

The advertisers, ad networks, publishers etc. participate in a kind of complicated handshaking that matches these "anonymous" IDs to entries in databases they've purchased from vendors who do sell your data, legally, due to all the various terms of service you click through in your life. These databases enable a link from the Google ID to everything that's ever been collected about you, from disparate sources, and aggregated on your email address or whatever.

This may well be against Google's terms of service for participating in RTB, but Google doesn't police it and looks the other way because they're making money. Just like Amazon is halfhearted about cracking down on fraud now that they can launder the reputational hit to third party sellers.

So there's a huge ass data marketplace that Google doesn't directly sell PII to, but enables to exist and be effective at using your PII and everything anyone knows about you.

Try to count up how many companies participate in this marketplace and then ask why it would all need to exist if the majority of ad impressions shown were anonymous and only broadly targeted. What are all those data engineers and data scientists in ad tech doing?

Think about why it would be worthwhile to buy and sell all this data in a world where Google of all orgs wasn't enabling it to be useful.
A totally delightful article and so applicable to the corporate mindset as well.

Loved the quote from Zig Ziglar

“Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.”
Isn’t this exactly what’s described in the article?