skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not banned outright because of the historic backlog of smokers. Tasmania is introducing a birth date cutoff, so younger generations are banned. Other states may follow.

Also, they're not just taxed; they can't be advertised, they can't be displayed in shops, only one counter in a shop can sell them, they have gruesome images on the packets, and there's a LOT of support to quit smoking.

The tobacco companies were using vaping as a way around all of these regulations, and an opportunity to once again market to younger generations, which is why i'm glad the govt is now doing something about vaping.

I also doubt the black market is as large as you think. I'm sure it exists, but I just don't think it's as rich as you describe. We're "girt by ocean" on all sides, and if anybody has a successful smuggling route into Australia they likely want to maximise profit by smuggling higher value illegal substances.
I would not equate the two. Salon and Huffpo were just clickbait farms, almost from Day 1. They had some interesting pieces from time to time, but nothing I ever thought of as particularly unique.

Vice produced (and still does some times) some incredible pieces because they were able to get access to people who were otherwise inaccessible… or it required a level or risk that is simply unacceptable.

I just came back to this thread because there’s an interview that just got posted a few hours ago with Maria Lvova-Belova IN Russia and it’s wild.
You can monitor some things about your blood without poking a hole in your skin.

Eg oxygenation rate and blood pressure.

(I agree with most of what you said.)
Compared to what?
Consider that computers, cell phone replace paper, books, car transit, movies, etc.
Solar panel replace coal, oil, etc.

Not perfect but 100X better than before, only getting better each year.
In 20, 30 year will be in such an abundant and green environment mostly because of all that tech.

Take a look at Tony Seba on the solar revolution.
This shows that they are very slow, even think tanks in US should have noticed and publish this before.

In the next article [2] I put the focus in the interoperability as the core tenet of blockchain or whatever technology you want to invent to set a better standard for global currency standards.

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-stable-coins-beyond-face...
To be fair, one of the ways that narrow AI is harming us is by making choices almost no human would make, or only the worst sociopaths would make.

The narrow AI advert bot will detect addicts about to fall off the wagon and give them advertisements selected to break their resolve, if doing so makes tends to make them click more ads. ... and it will reliably do this sort of crap except where we anticipated it and blocked that outcome.

There is at least some chance that state of the art LLMs will behave more human like.

But there just is no replacement for competent supervision ... and that applies to actions performed by humans, by more narrow AI, and more general AI alike.
Heroku is down and they didn't know it for 90 minutes
Loads of tweets reporting dashboard and deployment outages: https://twitter.com/search?q=Heroku&src=typeahead_click&f=li...

No acknowledgement from @herokustatus on twitter or https://status.heroku.com.
Speaking as someone who voted for them: I have never been more let down by anyone as much as the Green Party in my life.
They act like neocons nowadays basically.
Location: Brazil
Remote: Yes (only)
Willing to relocate: we can discuss about it
Technologies: Full-stack, JavaScript, Smalltalk, Rust, Golang, Swift

Résumé/CV:

http://sebastiansastre.co/cv

https://github.com/sebastianconcept

Email: sebastianconcept [at] gmail com

Backend-leaning full-stack software engineer working remotely in diverse teams for the last 10 years.

I’ve helped companies to scale their applications from millions of users to an architecture that can scale x10 that. Twice. With different tech stacks.
TARS, the main robot featured in Interstellar is what i want
Qualcomm don't make the Pixel SoC, mate. Google makes the Tensor, that's how they're now able to offer 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates.
Germany has one of the most carbon heavy electric grids in western Europe, https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

Compare them to nuclear heavy, clean France.

Your perception has been deceived by marketing. Stop following the news. Follow the data instead.
Their energy policy has been one big clusterfuck after another ever since they made a rash decision to exit nuclear power.
https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2800%2980...
> Type Inference is Bad

> So when you make a mistake, you’re still giving constraints to the inference engine. Erroneous type inferences propagate in every direction. Error messages appear hundreds of lines of code away from their origin.

Rust gets this right: it has type inference, but only within the function body. Most of your code is free of annotation cruft, but interfaces are strongly specified and errors can only propagate a certain distance.
Science doesn't have some super clear, strict, reductive definition like the "scientific method" you may have been taught in school. The idea that all science must make or test predictions is just based on an old misinterpretation of the philosophy of Karl Popper, mainly by physicists. The only real general requirement I think you can make is that all science involves some level of interrogation and study of the physical world. Anthropology qualifies in abudance.

Whether it's good science is beside the point.
I also suspect that there are more legislators than you'd think becoming very well acquainted with VPNs right now.
But there's a massive industry of film shot in Canada. Start watching the credits and the supporting actors are very often Canadian, with projects shot in Vancouver or Toronto and 'local' hires to fill out the cast.
So, keeping score, that's 1 website that has chosen to block the entire state versus 0 that have decided to comply with Utah's strict social media regulations. I wonder if other companies might do the same?
I think we used to be at the forefront but since 2-3 years China gained a lot of ground in terms of high tech Green energy products. They might as well have surpassed us in few fields.
Author here. This is a basic spectrogram visualizer that's mobile friendly. It allows to select regions on the spectrogram and play them separately. There is no grand plan behind this web app: it's just a handy basic tool to capture sounds on your phone and see what they look like.
They are really advanced for renewable relatively speaking, but also just got rid of the last nuclear so they ran out of options since green tech doesn't cover 100% yet in Germany.

IMHO and in many external observers opinion they did it the wrong way, the sane way would be as renewable adoption grows to first phase out carbon, then gas, then nuclear. Gas was forced to phase out (Russia->Ukraine war), and for some reason they are closing nuclear before renewable is common enough, so the only remaining option is carbon.
(This message has been read 1 times so far in this BBS).

Path: !CX2SA!N6RME!KE6JJJ!KQ6UP!AA6HF!N2NOV!W4BFB!N0NJY!WA3WLH!W9GM!WA2UET!
!K5DAT!W0ARP!KF5JRV!

We’re still using their cousins on amateur radio lol
They're definitely worse than me at spotting spam.
Once the word is out that something simple will break a system, yes they do it. It isn't Moriarty to think "if I take off my plates they can't see my plates".

I got my car broken into and several laptops stolen from the back of the car, in daylight at a restaurant parking lot. The restaurant had footage. The car didn't have plates. The cop took my info down so I could tell insurance I reported the problem - the cops had no intention of doing anything.

And I guarantee I can drive a five mile stretch of highway right now and I'll see paper plates or no plates on a shitty car.
What's the process for steaming a patch of soil? It seems like running a mobile autoclave would be really good at killing everything in the soil, which is probably both good (gets rid of the weeds) and bad (kills everything).

Are there mobile soil steaming systems? Certainly that'd be way less toxic than dumping a bunch of chemicals all over.
Microsoft actually tried to do something like this in the mid-1990s with OLE 2.0 and Cairo which was the operating system that was supposed to embody all this.

Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). Instead of opening applications, you would invoke "verbs" on different parts of the document.
But people upgrade their iphones instead of replacing the glued in battery. Make the battery user replaceable with no tools or at most a small screwdriver, dammit.
A lot of the developments of AI in different companies Hinton was not directly responsible for. Hinton never had anything to say about those companies, I don't think he's vying for limelight.

The fact that he never said anything before and the fact that he's saying something now means two things in my mind:

1. He is noticing something different about the current iteration of AI technology. We crossed some threshold.

2. Hinton is being honest.
If you drop the prices, the market for energy is never saturated (especially outside of the very short term).

But the prices might drop below what crypto-mining pays.
I know that California's doesn't match plates to car make/model, at least the toll and red light cameras. Someone faked my friend's license plate on their car and he's been getting all their tickets. Their cars aren't even the same color.
>I was insulted and mocked by everyone I said it to

Quit, trying to tell anyone. You really would end up making a fool in most cases of yourself if you tried. The world is not kind to people who go against the narrative, even if you are provably correct.

Look up the Marshall Protocol, it's old news in some circles.
There were OS support when fastram arrived (obviously). Since their chipset supported 4 megs of chipram (14 megs on later machines), they didn’t have to worry about slowram etc. So it wasn’t really an issue for them.
Latest phone cameras have gone too far processing the images and there's no off switch (check the photo forums). Also new formats like HEIC and HEVC confuse things. Also, personally I don't like face unlock.
I think you are exaggerating the problem.

I am doing LLM "AI assistant" and even if I trusted the output, there are still cases of just errors and misunderstandings. What I am doing is after getting the LLM "decision" what to do, ask user for confirmation (show simple GUI dialog - do you want to delete X). And after that still make the standard permission check if that user is allowed to do that.

I don't think is that any company with proper engineering is doing something like "let LLM write me a SQL query based on user input and execute it raw on the db".
I'm not familiar enough with german politics to understand, but how far up/down the chain of causality for this are the greens?
Yes, bit of a mixture. Sorry, I should've mentioned that (from memory) it was because they didn't have banknote readers or credit card payment and the US is still using dollar bills. So unless you had a bucket of very low denomination coins, you had to pay a physical person to then convert to coins and reach around to deposit them.

I once used a toll bridge in the Eastern US that had no indication of payment options (outside of a pass like the one you mentioned), no lane to escape once it was clear you had no alternatives, and then no method of paying the toll online after the fact. The only option I had was to wait to be issued a charge via the rental agency ($30+) and pay that once back in Australia.
Anti nuclear environmentalists will go down in history as useful idiots who ultimately served the fossil fuel industry.
The risk is that the systems we know are vulnerable are now being wired into more important applications. This is like saying, "okay, this JS library is vulnerable to XSS, but has anything actually been stolen? If not, I guess I'm fine to use it in production then."
I am not against Congress passing a debt ceiling hike, I am against Congress passing a "clean" hike that is not paired with the needed cuts in spending. The normal budgeting process clearly hasn't been working, if debt ceiling negotiations are the only way to force a fix then so be it.
https://downdetector.com/status/heroku/
> As an example I cannot send my kids to english school (because I went to french school) but my neighbor that is as french as me can.

What is this rule?
We already spent the money. Raising the debt ceiling is just a way for us to formally say "not declaring bankruptcy see ya in a bit"
> it’s nearly impossible to get a phone number anonymously in EU.

Wrong, also you can use a one-time verification service like 5sim, smspva, etc. or rent a virtual number
(re-parenting my comment)

Quite frankly, seven years is pathetic, and no company should be praised for that tiny support period.

I have a seven year old phone, and the one and only thing that will cause me to get a new one is the OS vendor ending updates, effectively forcing me to dispose of a perfectly working phone. The hardware lasts far, far longer than the software, which is totally asinine and backwards. The glorious free market is failing to solve this problem. No serious phone OS vendor provides long term security updates for their devices.

As a user, I demand at the very least basic, no-frills security-only support for as long as the hardware functions. This doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable.
Thank you for the correction; for some reason I thought the Tensor was a co-processor, paired with a Snapdragon chipset. In that case, there's really no excuse for Google not to offer longer support (well, aside from their own desire to spend less and push people to buy new phones), unless they've farmed out parts of the design and firmware to a third party who won't give them better terms.
Unless it's changed drastically over the last couple years, the lightning network attempts to effectively buffer transactions outside the ledger. Transactions are "deposited" into the network and passed around similar to marked bills. The bitcoin block chain is only involved when a transaction is initially moved to the lightning network and when one of more transactions chained into that are written back to the ledger when moved back out of the network.

This design has nothing to do with bitcoin other than the input and output formats. You depends solely on the lightning network itself and have given up all benefits from using a public ledger-based system. There is literally no way a layer two solution can offer faster transactions than bitcoin block times without requiring off-ledger transactions that aren't protected by the consensus protocol.
Here is an example of an emergent ability of ChatGPT that you can try yourself right now.

Give it this prompt: "Write a short play where "Karen" (who behaves as the Karen meme) is on a romantic date with Hunter S. Thompson. They are eating at a Chinese restaurant."

It is able to script their interaction and dialog in a way that makes sense in the context of the setting and their personalities, including an absurd meme character. That is an emergent ability that it was not trained to do and is certainly not in its training set.

Try it. Add different characters. Ask it to rewrite the play using pirate metaphors. You can go deep into its "mind" and see the emergent abilities at play. Just apply some creativity and skip the boring arithmetic problems, as that's a well accepted weakness of this type of model.
Blind contour sketching. Doing a lot of this trains you to rely on tactility and learned motion instead of watching your hand or watching the cursor. As soon as I did that in the sketchbook for about two weeks daily and came back to the graphics tablet I was cruising through the drawing process.
Complex, no. But many other things than complexity add to the cost of making something and a lot of those do not scale to higher volumes in any way like complexity does. Indeed cost-saving innovations often increase complexity in order to reduce those other components of cost (the hoops engineers wind up jumping through to save fractions of a penny in high-volume products is crazy. For a mild example, having a full network inside a car increases the complexity drastically, but decreases the cost of making up the wiring in the car a little)
No. I just feel that phones are in the asymptotic phase now and don’t see any reason to upgrade other than unfixable battery life issues, worn out charging ports and other such things.
Not really. It could be a new business that is only a few years old and is still trying to grow and become the type of business can afford these. Or an established business that lost a major client. Your viewpoint is really limited.
> Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this).

It reminds me a bit of the Apple Lisa.

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

> With Lisa, Apple presented users with what is generally, but imprecisely, known as a document-oriented paradigm. This is contrasted with program-centric design. The user focuses more on the task to be accomplished than on the tool used to accomplish it. Apple presents tasks, with Lisa, in the form of stationery. Rather than opening LisaWrite, for instance, to begin to do word processing, users initially "tear off stationery", visually, that represents the task of word processing. Either that, or they open an existing LisaWrite document that resembles that stationery. By contrast, the Macintosh and most other GUI systems focus primarily on the program that is used to accomplish a task — directing users to that first.
What language should they accomodate? Internationally the "standard" is just local language + English. Should they choose Spanish? If they wanted to choose the language with the most speakers they would rightfully choose a dialect of Chinese.
Dude they just (apparently) gave up on nuclear ..
Maybe it was written by ChatGPT.
Geoffrey Hinton talks impact and potential of AI (March 2023)
Nobody wants a phone where the battery flies across the street if you drop it. Most normal people are satisfied with the fact that Apple will replace any iPhone battery with a new one for $49 while you wait.
Sure, Google can have some credit for improving the abjectly terrible Android lifetime into a merely bad lifetime. But keep in mind their starting point was Linux which runs on 15+ year old machines without blinking, including API and security updates.

I wholeheartedly reject the narrative that cell phones should be considered throw away devices. It's not about money, and making even more e-waste by buying cheaper devices even more often is certainly not what I want.

As I said, my Samsung S7 (released 2016) is perfectly fine. Solid physical condition. Battery life is fine (I continue to play games on it). Honestly I would have kept using it data-only but as far as I can tell both AT&T and T-mo have blacklisted the model by IMEI.
Whatever energy goes back into the bounce necessarily isn't going into the tree.

The woodpecker is constantly applying it's force toward the tree so the bounce dampens over time.
> You're joining dots from LLM's producing text output that humans read to them being linked to autonomously taking actions by themselves. That's a huge leap.

No, it's not. It used to be a huge leap until OpenAI started advertising plugin support and Plantr started advertising using it to interpret drone footage.

"We won't wire it to anything important" was a good argument, but that ship is rapidly sailing now.
We could've let the existing plants run for a while, but getting a supply chain restarted and plants recertified when the entire country is phrasing them out is not trivial, especially not on short notice. (And also, the fuel rods usually come from Russia).

We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.
In Australia you can reasonably expect them to be anywhere because they deploy lots and the locations change daily. As a result we don’t have anywhere close to the speeding problems the US does.

You are unlikely to be caught for once off speeding, but if you habitually speed, you are almost certain to start racking up fines which are enforced.
What I would do, if I wanted to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia, is use money to ensure the voices of real German people who oppose nuclear power were amplified.
Unfortunately, Heroku has mostly given up. They simply don't care anymore. It's such a shame, since I (used to) love them.

We run on Heroku and I've been an evangelist for a decade. The current management is a complete disappointment, and this will continue to happen until Salesforce replaces the executive team.
That doesn't work. For that to work, the person needs to understand how that algorithm creates its output, and understand its flaws and vulnerabilities, AND be diligent about interrogating the results with those things in mind. Nobody technically sophisticated enough to do that will also have the domain knowledge to evaluate the most consequential decisions.

For example, sentencing "recommendations" are supposed to be exactly that-- recommendations for judges. But, judges seem to rubber stamp the recommendations. I'm sure for some it's a scapegoat in case someone accuses them of not really thinking about it, the more credulous probably assume the algorithm saw something they didn't, and for others, the influence might be more subtle. This is something we should have studied before we started letting this algorithm put people in jail. These are judges. Their most important function is impartiality.
Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
Geist's take is much less extreme than the one you are presenting. He suggests that the bill will be further watered down through policy consultation around 2025-26. You may want to:

1) Read your sources

2) Avoid opening arguments with phrases like "the Trudeau Liberals" as the Liberal party currently holds a minority in parliament [suggestion: "the government"]

Otherwise you come off as someone with your own axe to grind.
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE

Work: Social Media & Marketing

Employment: Contract, part-time

About: I am a technically astute, native English speaker (I also speak roughly 4 other languages besides English). I have been working in the social media space for 6+ years. My experience includes working in 2 startups that both resulted in acquisitions.

Why hire me:

- experienced, autonomous & adaptable

- combined analytics & creativity

- can offer rudimentary technical services too

- affordable (I live in a country with favourable exchange rates)

- willing to take part-payment in shares

References & other details available upon request.

Contact me via email: hn23 [at] nerdmail [dot] co
but I feel like we'd get so much more return on investment if we spent a fraction of our investments on simple public education.

For a great example of this, look at Japan.

Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away

I've seen dedicated bins just for recycling bags, but as you mentioned, the problem is in educating people to sort plastics correctly.

Of course, reuse comes before recycle, and lots of things that are supposedly "single use" can really be reused instead of buying something else, but many people don't even bother to think.