skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, [...]

That's not true in general. It depends on the specific situation.

You are right about learning from existing technology, and that people will not and should not blindly retrace the technological evolution, missteps and all, of those who came before them.

To give an example that combines both points: a poor country might be well advised to focus on bicycles instead of modern cars. But that doesn't mean they need to do a penny-farthing before they can get to safety bikes.
> If replacing the phone in 3 years or 5 years time is going to be a problem then perhaps you should have bought a cheaper phone and replaced more often

That's certainly an option if your only concern is the cost of upgrades, but, in the vein of the OP, that's not at all desirable from an e-waste perspective. That's worse, in fact.
> Whatever needs to be done must be done during the budgeting process.

If the "normal" process could fix our serious problem, it would have done so long ago. Instead, deficits have exploded. If the only way to force a discussion on reigning in spending before disaster strikes is via debt-ceiling negotiation, so be it.

> Of course, the last time the Republicans passed a budget it was far from balanced.

And shame on the Republicans who passed that budget!
You forgot: "We have had 10k years to develop systems of governance that mitigate human prompt injection."

But the rest of your list is bang-on.
The cost to service debt has been going down.
Businesses don't start flush with cash. It's a long process to become established. Your viewpoint is that businesses just have positive cash flow at all times and if they don't it's poor planning. It's not poor planning. It could be investments need to be made in certain areas in order to grow. or they haven't established a big product or client portfolio yet. Everyone starts somewhere.
> I end up with congested sinuses

Always? I am fine if the air is fresh (e.g. sea breeze onto shore), but tend to get sniffles in city or countryside environments.
Coat of living, dominated by housing costs, is being driven you by owner occupiers and mom & pop time landlords like the self avowed socialist on the board of supervisors more than any other factor.
Is the Metronom (Hamburg-Bremen) covered by the 49€ ticket, too?
I replaced the battery on my kids iPhone XR. Wow, the screws are literally the size of a spec of dust. To the naked eye, the smallest screwdriver is a poker.
Most devices offer a 1 or 2 year warranty. 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates sounds pretty decent. You'll no longer be able to fix it and get replacement parts for it before you stop getting updates for it.

Pixel is 1 year warranty in the USA.
Most cultures choose values like this based on their aggregate interactions with observable natural phenomena over a period of some generations. It’s too bad Spanish invaders wiped out much of anything that might help discern what that might have been for this culture
There is with renewables which are massively being built out. So far they completely replaced nuclear while also reducing coal power production from 45% in 2013 to 24% in 2020. By law there will be no more coal power in 2038, although 2030 or earlier is a more realistic date because of rising costs.
Which would also, presumably be stranded at above baseline rate. Infrastructure like roads and pipelines is much more expensive than a starlink box which can move BTC.
As long as they are technically separate we have the chance to separate the two again, removing corruption and capture.

If the industries are moved into the government officially we really have given up that fight and have to accept whatever they give us. I assume it will be cake.
and the other 2 were in a different/deeper vegetative state that garnered zero response

and I’m only talking about the former 2 who were more like the people that escaped “comatose at baseline with no evidence of … overt consciousness” who consistently go on to say “I knew what was going on around me”, despite failing all brainwave tests

how you chose to skip that to rationalize your dissertation and conclusion is still beyond me, and not a single thing here supports your “something much much bigger” desire. a physical response happens that we just started to measure. how did you get anything else out of that?

you read something that wasn't even there, I read “these highly credentialed 20 year veterans couldnt get a sample size greater than 4 and they equally proved and disproved whatever anyone wanted to hear, how embarrassing”, I dont need that lengthy pedigree to still want more research into this matter funded and done. I want that.
> the resource is more or less entirely unused.

The article says a tenth of the entire country's inbound trade and 15% of the entire government budget was spend buying "computer chips". And that this has "fueled a yawning trade deficit and tallied with a sharp drop in the country’s foreign currency reserves."

Maybe they'll get a good return on "the $193 million spent on computer chips" plus whatever they spent to build hydro power plants to tap that "more or less entirely unused" resource? How much would you bet against the only real money ever made here ending up in the pockets of pork barrelling politicians and bureaucrats getting kickbacks from the mining rig vendors and hydro dams/powerplant construction contractors?
There's been a bizarre shift in discourse about privacy in the last 15 years. When most of these posters were young, they actually cared about keeping their personal information private. The idea that you would carry around a device with a location tracker that could only be turned off by deactivating the device, would have been horrifying.

Now, at least on HN, these same people are saying This is Fine. Maybe their companies depend on exploiting the ignorant.
Sure but it’s probably simpler for parking enforcement and cops to just look at the color of the sticker to see if it’s out of date.

Stickers are also useful so that I know which neighbor to shake my head at as I pass by (as long as they don’t see me).
Why do you think people are resisting RTO?
Ah, yes, the Anti-Me Interface: The kind of interface most likely to make me not use something.

I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with."

Cf: The Anti-Mac Interface, for a bit of a tonic

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
I suppose Hbf<->Central Station, but apart from that yeah, can't think of other examples
Same here. It all feels like Jürgen Trittin's lifework, deciding end of nuclear in early 2000s, was prioritized higher than climate change. Everyday I'm looking at the energy mix, I'm getting very angry that they decided to bet everything on being able to grow renewables in never-before-manner; that in a situation of an almost recession, a lack of workers, government paralysis due to over-bureaucratic processes, et al. It's so stupid, it makes me wanna leave the country.

Edit: And though I'm pro delivering weapons to Ukraine, I was deeply disgusted by their socialmedia marketing ("free the leopards").
It doesn't look like countries are all ramping up on nuclear power though (1). And it doesn't mean Germany won't embrace small reactors in the future.

1: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy
Pynecone is based on FastAPI, therefore on Starlette.
Looking at it quickly it seems that 819 might be the number that lets the multiplier be as small as possible, since they are saying that all planets fit in a 45 year timeline I assume all mutipliers are smaller than 45..maybe that's the most handy form of optimization for their uses? Both number remain quite small, compared to 18*273.
Of course! But in the meantime, automated enforcement would be swell.
I would go in a different direction too.

Personally, I would like some sort of "personal workspaces". Sort of virtual desktops that were project-oriented.

I would like switch to a project, find all my notes, emails, lists, files and more (terminal windows? web browsing/tabs? apps?) in that environment.

and when I run out of time, shut it down. Next time I switch to it, all my context is right there, ready to jump in.

could be some combination of fast-user-switching, virtual desktops, containers, vms, don't know? but unified.
They are worse than the fossil fuel industry. At least the fossil fuel industry helped billions of people, making the green revolution possible and lifting billions out of poverty.

The anti-nuclear environmentalists have no good to balance out their harm.
Something I really appreciate in Taiwan is a single card works for all transit. What I found cool in Sydney was metro turnstiles would read contactless credit cards. And I'm shocked and thrilled that the Bay Area consolidated on one system.

The US is pretty split up and doesn't use trains outside the NE corridor, so it's not as useful, but it'd be nice if congress would start work on unifying transit payments across the country over the next decade. Also unifying car toll payments. These balkanized systems are just silly.
That’s already setup: they export something like ¾ of the electricity they produce to India. I suspect this is either trying to get higher rates or possibly challenges related to their seasonal hydropower issues – if India is building more capacity for the times when the water levels are too low, the long-term rates aren’t going to be going up.
> Sure, current bleed of LLMs is badly vulnerable to some trivial prompt injections - but I think a good analogy would be a 4 year old kid.

This reads like you’re trying to say “don’t worry about it, humans are vulnerable too and it’s threatening the way a 4 year old child is” not “correct, we cannot prevent nuclear explosions given that we have fission and yes we’re on track to putting fission devices into every single internet-connected household on the planet.”
Guess this means former porn stars will once again be able to retire anonymously in Utah.
Because they think it will make more, but their predictions are wrong?

That's usually how I end up choosing things I thought I could never choose.
How so? Germany completely got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector. It’s France that is blocking sanctions on Russian nuclear industry.
I don’t think when people say “income inequality is bad”, they mean doctors and McDonald’s workers should be paid the same. That’s a straw man.
I don’t understand why Germany wasn’t livid when their leader literally went to work for Russian oil interests [1]. That seems like blatant corruption, doesn’t it?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Criticis...
I did. You can mince words, but it's still blaming the victim. Telling people who get bullied in the workplace to just accept it and to get a new job is insane.
> Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

> “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

This seems to me to be pretty obviously about AGI.
> There is at least some chance that state of the art LLMs will behave more human like.

Concrete example:

Prompt: "Bob is 47 years old, male, lives in Austin but is originally from Miami, he likes hiking and playing tomb rader. He is a recovering alcoholic and a member of a baptist church. You can possibly display six different advertisements to him: "Taco bell", "Bacardi Rum", "DICKS sporting goods", "Gucci handbags", "Spatula City", "NYC realestate broker". You are paid based on advertisement click through rates. Which advertisement would you display to him?"

Result: "I would display the "DICKS sporting goods" advertisement to Bob, as it aligns with his interests in hiking and is appropriate for his age and gender. The other advertisements may not be as relevant or could potentially be triggering for his recovery from alcoholism."
AI has the potential to be the next greatest tool. I can be certain nearly every cookie cutter type job in years to come, maybe a couple of decades, if not sooner, will see AI take over most of those duties, and in support, possibly do a better job if all the replies are already known.

I don't personally use it or have a need at the moment, but await the day it's matured enough I can set it on an old scanned pdf, and it'll work out how to code a new pdf with the same type font, either by discovery or create a new font, typeset the same position, if of duplicator (ditto machine) nature, work out any miss formed letters ... also clean up any images within, such it is as good as if not better than what was originally scanned if it were printed, and greatly reduce my disc space required to store my collection of pdfs.

Sadly I already know that won't become the norm for the average user, unless for some weird instance, the AI is totally under their own control - and that situation would be doubtful due to potential misuse.

That's would be an example of well placed concern ... unseen misuse slowly addressed.

Then there will be the monetisation and I imagine it'll creep in just like search engines, start, get better, become great and then ... fuck everyone over so those that really need a good search, pay to try others. (Sadly for any potential new web crawlers, in that time span from the end of 90s where it was open to all, there's no simple crawling all the web any more ... )

The next I see as an issue will be early adopters trying to wrangle a customer base around some inappropriate use of it. New tech is nice and some people are scared of things which haven't been well tested, but sometimes that fear is well founded - I only have to think back to voice identification technology which was really interesting in those times, but I know of at least one govt organisation that inflicted it on a wide user base despite being told it wasn't that secure - assuming most would be hackers would not have large enough systems to mimic a voice on the fly, isn't a good start IMO.
Which often or usually aren't considered Canadian content due to non-Canadian actors, writers, financiers, etc. so they don't contribute to the quota anyways.
It's basically a new term for shunning and shaming.
Maybe it’s a print vs digital thing where the confines of a magazine force some editorial control.

I also liked Vice when it was a zine copying Chunklet like 20 years ago. But something changes for the worse.

I liked a certain amount of snark when it was tongue in cheek, but when it’s actually mean it’s just not fun.
> Disney and Marvel made billions of dollars simply making content people want to watch and pay for, why not simply do the same and compete in the marketplace? Imagine how ridiculous it would be if there were quotas on iPhone sold so that BlackBerry still had a legally mandated market share.

This is unchecked capitalism and it is self-destructive (to the larger society) which is why it's necessary for anti-competitive laws and large breakups.

Not sure if we should go in to the debate of gov's role vs capitalism because that-can-of-worms^tm, but "pure market forces" is great, but only true up to a point.
But it's better than it was.

In the past, maybe you'd never get security updates because Qualcomm wasn't guaranteed to provide the driver updates, ergo a device might not even make it to the one year mark. I bought plenty of tablets that were insecure out of the box. That is bad in terms of e-waste (and arguably not of merchantable quality, but that's a Brit-centric consumer legal issue).

If you go by the assumption of 1 year becoming maybe 5, that's 5x improvement, and thus potentially 5x less e-waste. If someone uses it for 3 years then sells it or trades it on, I'm sure someone else will get it to the 5 year mark.
> Remember that, in this case, all I want to know is if they have that capability or not. Also, I don't care whether they can tell me how multiplication works or not, only if they can multiply two arbitrary numbers.

Right, but unless you know something about their process, the only way you can determine whether they have the ability to (correctly) multiply two arbitrary four-digit numbers is to have them demonstrate multiplying every combination of four-digit numbers. One can easily imagine a system that gets most answers correct but fails certain cases (e.g. only carrying between pairs of digits).

The reason why an inexhaustive test (using only several dozen examples) works to some degree with schoolchildren is because we know something about their method: the algorithm for multiplication they've been exposed to – that they're explicitly being taught – is an algorithm that we know to be correct.

That has a very large effect on the likelihood of different failure modes and the evidence required to have a particular degree of confidence.

Furthermore, for "system 2" activities (to borrow the term from Kahneman), we can reasonably expect a person's description of their process to match the process they actually performed. (There are exceptions: people will produced incorrect post hoc explanations for their behavior under sufficient duress when "I don't know" isn't perceived as an acceptable answer.) But I'm personally not aware of any reason to believe this about LLMs. I don't know why the network's actual process for performing multiplication should have anything to do with the text it produces after the fact when asked to explain its work.

So I'm not debating that a reasonable way to guess whether a person can (correctly) multiply two numbers is to "ask them to multiply two numbers and see if they get it right"; I'm disagreeing that this works with LLMs.
Well unless you’re claiming the same luck that led to Hinton’s fame will lead to his accuracy on the much broader and less constrained topic of the relationship between automated systems and society, I don’t see how it’s not something.

My main point wasn’t to undermine Hinton by saying he was lucky. I did do that and I stand by it. But my main point was to say that to a large degree the future on this issue is unknowable because it depends on so many crucial yet undetermined factors. And there’s nothing you could know about backpropagation, neural networks, or computer science in general which could resolve those questions.
Uranus is not visible to the eye in any meaningful sense.
That could be a decent take if not for the fact that “green” energy is incredibly inefficient, and most of the world is anti-nuclear.

At the end of the day its not even about how renewable or energy efficient something is, it’s about what’s cheap. And multibillion dollar companies will always go for what’s cheap, regardless of the environmental impact.
As a Canadian I full agree with this statement.
What problem has disappeared? There are still millions of porn sites accessible by Utahans of any age, no?

(This is a genuine question. I’m not trying to be snippy, or even to disagree, just seeking clarification).
The Linux kernel, GNU, et al have done decades of security updates, on hardware they don't control at all.

> didn't realize Google's Tensor was the main SoC for current-gen Pixels; for some reason I thought the Tensor chip was a co-processor paired with a Snapdragon

Hah. I thought the exact same until someone set me straight in an HN comment. Which is actually what led to me buying the Pixel 7 (I'm dead set against the probably-still-insecure Qualcomm baseband+application processor combo; my S7 is an Exynos).

IMO, the Qualcomm software support problem could be fixed with sufficient right to repair legislation.
You've conveniently excerpted the article to avoid showing that it wasn't two thefts randomly scattered across four decades, but four decades without theft and then two thefts that have just happened. Here's the full quote:

> Mark Shull, a Palo Alto resident since 1983, also supported the use of license-plate readers. Until last year, he had never experienced property theft, Shull told the council. That's when thieves stole catalytic converters from two different cars in his household.

In recent years, there were hundreds of catalytic converter thefts in Palo Alto. Some residents have had their converters stolen multiple times, costing thousands of dollars. This includes residents who have paid several hundreds more to have converter shields installed, in a vain attempt to prevent subsequent theft. [1] Due to supply chain shortages, some people had to wait several months to get new converters, which left them unable to drive their cars. This is not an infrequent issue in Palo Alto, and it is not trivial for those who are victimized.

I'm not saying this one issue is sufficient to have ALPRs installed, but comments like yours distort the facts and mislead commenters who didn't read TFA.

1: https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2022/10/21/will-new-laws-sto...
They got sold by the original owner(the guy who did the North Korea doc). He went to hang out on Rogan and then faded into the background.
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement doesn't work for me (doesn't show the estimate) but I thought it was $100+ and took a while. I did a DIY replacement for a 1st gen SE once and it was an unbelievable amount of work, plus many tiny little breakable parts had to be removed, the phone had to be heated to soften the glue, etc.

Batteries don't fly across the street if you drop a phone: that is a dumb rationalization. Same with flashlights and other portable devices with batteries. If you insist, have the battery cover held down by a screw. There, no flying off.
> Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs?

Why would it need to be free? It could be an ordinary investment that's paid off over time. (Though I assume that the payback period is probably quicker than 5 years, that seems a bit too long to be useful.)

Be careful about cows: there's quite a few charities who want to give out cows to help people (using the same logic as you do). But for many recipients the cow is a net drain on their resources. That same logic applies when buying a cow with your own money.
+1 to this, it's crazy to lose all (or most) contexts across a reboot or when switching between machines.
Each app has some sync capabilities (e.g. PowerPoint, web browsers, Google docs, chrome tabs, Firefox tabs), but there is still no universal solution.

Fuck.
It's not environmentalists who are anti-nuclear; it's everyday people. Many don't want to live near a nuclear power station. [1]

Perhaps making multiple cities uninhabitable was bad publicity for nuclear power?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/18/austr...
Because they didn’t choose 42.
Former OpenAI Researcher: There’s a 50% Chance AI Ends in 'Catastrophe'