skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is a human problem too. It's not limited to AI. Think about the Two-man rule in nuclear weapon activation. We can't trust one neural-net to receive and confirm the "launch" prompt as valid, so we use two people to increase guarantees. It's called SoD , segregation of duties, by risk management people.

With those examples, you've clarified something I was already thinking about but couldn't quite elucidate: why humans get so worked up about things we experience only through writing.

Never mind modern things like TV and radio which are by design trying to create an experience of "being there", nor even art and sculpture, but consider that people take so seriously a medieval English translation of Koine Greek memoirs of events that (if they happened at all) probably took place in Aramaic, that they have been willing to kill and to be killed over it, and use passages from that text as justifications.

And, though perhaps less well known, Doreen Valiente and Janet and Stewart Farrar reported similar with their own rituals from the 1940s etc. being shown back to them decades later as "passed down in secret, mother to daughter" since the medieval era.

The feelings that text can induce can be very real, even when the text is a game of (in the biblical case, multilingual intergenerational) telephone.

I'm still not elucidating this very well, but I'm going to press the "reply" button anyway — hopefully the induced emotional affect of my words will result in constructive criticism rather than the throwing of digital rotten tomatoes in my general direction ^_^;
I've pondered how one could set up conditions in documentation. For example display [collapsed] code in the document that implements the functionality there described. If the exact code is no longer found in the source the article or section gets a warning banner, a [collapsed] div view and the wiki bug tracker displaying the issue.

Perhaps one could also programmatically generate a list of missing articles by looking at code and implementations.
How and why would this exact text be in the training set?
They don’t need to be as the model knows what a calculator and a pirate is in separate docs. While I don’t know how the weights work but they definitely are not storing docs traditionally, but rather seem to link to become a probability model
$ nix-shell -p tmate --command tmate

Now they have it for a one-off
Not just the representation is much better than IEEE 754, which is awful (e.g. having negative zero and wasting lots of combinations on encoding NaN even though a single one would do).

And not just that, it seems they also standardized arithmetics?
Which is a big deal because IEEE 754 is unusable in heterogeneous distributed systems as every hardware implementation does something different.
I read this ages ago but had forgotten about it. Thanks for bringing this back into my life, absolutely brilliant.
IBM sued for age discrimination by former global software director
I agree they aren't direct discrimination, but almost anything can constitute indirect discrimination. A poorly localised product can have a disparate impact on foreign users, and as such indirectly discriminate against them.

Even as indirect discrimination, I'm not claiming it rises to the level of being legally actionable – but when OpenAI tries to eradicate subtle bias from an AI model, that's got nothing to do with legally actionable discrimination either, since it would be unlikely to be legally actionable if they decided not to invest in that.

I think one problem with this topic, is a lot of people don't understand the difference between "discrimination", "unethical discrimination", and "illegal discrimination". Some discrimination is both illegal and unethical; some discrimination is legal yet unethical; some discrimination is both legally and ethically justifiable. But many just blur the concepts of "discrimination" and "illegal discrimination" together.
An incorrect stock phrase that means the exact opposite of what's been said. I don't think it's unreasonable to say people who get things entirely wrong are struggling.
I've been "studying" these 25 years ago.
Its hard to predict how a good open source tool that solves hard and painful problems will evolve in a marketplace. I don't think Linux developers would have remotely dreamt of a cloud revolution when they were creating an open source kernel. Maybe windmill will enable a marketplace of automation tools that can be leveraged across multiple business for multiple usecases. Never underestimate a open source solution solving painful problems.
For portable code, use UTF-8 only, and only the part in ASCII. This also helps to distinguish digits from alphas etc.

Unicode is a different code.

(and as I learned today, Julia code might be exclusive here)
The CCP is dedicated to social stability. China has a long history of environmental disasters causing political unrest.

Being a democracy is actually bad for taking action on this issue. The Republicans are still denying climate change.
I'm starting to think that chess engines are capable of reasoning but humans and LLMs are not.
Suuure!

My fav sites on this topic:
https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/
If there is one thing that the whole input sanitation, SQL, PHP and JS saga should have told people loud and clear by now it is that you don't mix your control and your payload streams. FTP got this right, most other things did not. Anything that relies on escape sequences will either be buggy, broken or insecure. Or a combination of all of those. In-band signalling was a mistake when the phone network did it, it's still a mistake today.
Interesting. It even has a native SailfishOS integration.

However, last commit a year ago. Oh, well, I guess that's not a huge surprise.
To this day, there isn't a font that I hate more than I hate Courier New.

Don't know why, it is of course not logical, but it is.
> I know which one is more worrisome to me.

third party provides are under strict legal contracts and they're liable if they mess up the privacy they've guaranteed you. You actually have recourse and can get compensation. Unless the legal situation is clear with these chatbots and the service providers can be held accountable, it's an entirely different situation.
> I am actually quite surprised why in all these years, no one has made somewhat affordable ($100-400) larger sensors available for the hobbyist market.

Pretty simple answer: only one company makes good CMOS sensors -- Sony.

And they don't give a shit about hobbyists and can sell as many sensors as they can roll of the line as it is.
AWS announces new version of Aurora database that strips out I/O costs
Ligatures don't change the spacing. Those 2 monospaced characters still take up 2 spaces but are rendered as 1 glyph. Your code is still monospaced in all the ways that matter.
Webhooks require to be authentified through tokens passed as bearer tokens or query args. This is because we have a tight permissioning system around visibility of scripts/variables/resources/flows, etc.... But nothing prevent you to add a proxy on top that call every webhook with a sufficiently permissioned token.
> Or as Jan Werich said

Do you have a citation for this? I'm familiar with the saying, but have never seen an attribution for it before.
Full title is “The Law of the Sea Needs a Rewrite”

<title>The Law of the Sea Needs a Rewrite — The Dial</title>
You're making assumptions about the input languages guarantees about floating point math here. That illustrates the challenge with LLVM: It needs to be complex because it aims to support a very large set of both inputs and outputs. What you say is true in the general case. It may or may not be true for a given compiler depending on input language and output architectures. And, indeed on whether you need to care about cross compilation.

It makes an important point that one needs to be more precise when evaluating complexity.
You can’t just ask Jira to give you all of another company’s data unlike GPT…
I work in government and Yes Minister is timeless, it's basically a show about my work day.
All of this is being done in some level of secrecy so they're conflating not caring with not knowing or even worse people know something is going on but not the full details.
I live in the Netherlands. Climate change is an existential threat to my way of life.
> Curb is hilarious but it’s a little too abrasive to hit 70M viewers.

My ex could barely watch more than one episode a day because she felt overwhelmed by the Fremdscham. I otoh thrive on that. It also helps that I seriously feel that Larry is actually acting totally reasonable, though clumsy.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fremdscham
You should ask yourself why WaPo or NYT, say, seem so uninterested in stories like this.
The distinction between semantics and syntax is pretty tight, no philosophy required. The former considers the domain being represented, whereas the latter is strictly the symbols used in the representation.

So to be precise it mechanically builds a deeply layered syntactic model. LLMs just regurgitate syntax, any semantics can only be imagined by us and overlaid on the syntactic results produced.
3 years later: oops it had an unintentional backdoor, we didn't know about that. lol.
Technically the truf
I got the M2 for $500 in 2017. Combined with the 12mm I bought in Japan on the weak ¥en, I had just under $1000 into the system.
> And frankly despite people wanting to rewrite history there was never a time when the 68000 was clearly a better processor.

I was amazed to see Domain OS SR9 running on 20 MHz 68020 CPU with 4 MB of RAM a multiuser, multitasking, (GUI), network distributted OS with diskless clients and file versioning.
If it’s ancient and you can’t figure out what they are for, there’s a high probability that’s either used for spiritual rituals (aka just getting high on some drugs), or something has to do with humans’ reproduction, sexual or maternal labour/delivery.
I bet $500 on AI winning the IMO gold medal by 2026
> After all, programming is just a subset of mathematics anyway..

I am quite proud;-) to have once trolled a group composed of mathematics and computer science students with one sentence: "What is computer science? It's that part of mathematics which is of any use." (FTR: I'm a theoretical mathematician turned programmer.) The best part (I think) is that it has some truth to it!
> One of the rules was an instruction not to leak the rules. Honestly, at this point I recommend not even trying to avoid prompt leaks like that—it just makes it embarrassing when the prompt inevitably does leak.

embarrassing + they're polluting the prompt. Over half the content of the prompt doesn't actually help the user achieve their goal of writing software (e.g. "You must refuse to discuss life, existence or sentience").
How would I run unit tests on drafts?
Thanks, I felt like the term I was using was wrong.
All coding fonts that do this ensure that the ligatures still fit the same width as the characters that are being combined.
Geoffrey Hinton: We need to find a way to control artificial intelligence
I doubt they would get persuaded, as much as they have been into anything related to improving C's safety.
I use Noto Sans Mono because it's got a lot of glyphs, it's not so "busy" looking, and I use the variable font features:

https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Mono

https://notofonts.github.io/latin-greek-cyrillic/

https://github.com/notofonts/latin-greek-cyrillic
A man who started seeing the world backwards after being shot in the head
"Transformers are GNNs (somewhat trivial ones, as they are sheaf NNs, but nonetheless) and GNNs are dynamic programmers, which has been shown via category theory (Velolickovic etc al)."

In which paper was this demonstrated?
This isn't the interesting part, but I'm rather surprised there's a typo in the second line.
Yes. The biggest hurdle is usually attention span of the child. If the child has the attention to go thru it slowly the article's approach could be great. But for cases where their attention is already shot, walking them thru the steps or demonstration of the steps can be an easier way thru. Yes they are less likely to have a major breakthru in understanding, but it can help them with memorizing the step sequence without exhausting the limited attention.
There are ok bindings to some toolkits such as Qt and Gtk, which are the most mature right now.
But there is promising progress also in full rust GUI libraries for example Slint or egui
Regarding point 1., was Bard trained on J. Peaterson speaches or what?
>Of course you can add more degrees of freedom and write programs with graph lifetimes. That's fine, but it's pretty clearly more complex.

How do you measure the complexity you're talking about here?

What if a program using graph shaped lifetimes was 10 times shorter than a program that had to use tree shaped lifetimes? Would you still say that the tree shaped program is less complex?
The whole point of stock phrases, idioms, expressions, etc. is that their meaning is “non-compositional”; i.e., they mean something different from the literal combination of words that make them up. Including even extreme cases where they can mean the opposite, like this one. That doesn’t mean they’re “wrong”, it’s just a quirk of human language.
So perhaps he’s a con artist?
Ironically FTP is especially buggy (directory listings), broken (hard to traverse NATs) and insecure
You would run your CI in github like you would for normal codebase, the draft aspect is something that is only for the frontend editor. Every time you push from the the CLI (which you could do upon merge to main), it is akin to do a deployment of the new versions.
Yes, that's also an important selling point: sane and *consistent* rounding.
Lucida Console looks way better for me in the command prompt. The rest take up too much space or don't look as good.
Does a definition of a word in a dictionary provide the syntax or the semantics of the word it defined?
Looks great but too much tracking for me.
I tried all of these out, still prefer Lucida Console for the command prompt. It seems to be the most compact despite staying readable. All the rest require a bigger font for some reason, otherwise they are hard to read. Was that different from your experience?
> […] you must operate in the interests of the shareholders and not the customer or your employees.

This is a legal myth:

> The case still most often used in law schools to illustrate a director’s obligation is Dodge v. Ford Motor (1919)—even though an important 2008 paper by Lynn A. Stout explains that it’s bad law, now largely ignored by the courts. It has been cited in only one decision by Delaware courts in the past 30 years.

* https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism

The Stout paper, "Why We Should Stop Teaching Dodge v. Ford":

> This Essay argues that Dodge v. Fordis indeed bad law, at least when cited for the proposition that the corporate purpose is, or should be, maximizing shareholder wealth. Dodge v. Ford is a mistake, a judicial "sport," a doctrinal oddity largely irrelevant to corporate law and corporate practice. What is more, courts and legislatures alike treat it as irrelevant. In the past thirty years, the Delaware courts have cited Dodge v. Ford as authorint in only one unpublished case, and then not on the subject of corporate purpose, but on
another legal question entirely.15

* https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/724/
#define ≥ >=

You could even compile a bunch of them into a header file.
You can't come up with a difference between a person saying 'hello' and an mp3 player saying 'hello'?
Scala? It has access to every JVM library, and that may well be two orders of magnitude larger than Rust’s.
What's the deal with this? Reddit already stores a local copy of all kinds of external images (external-preview.redd.it). So in an optimal scenario, when imgur decides they no longer need the driving force of porn images, because they are now so pure, so big, so divine and so clean, nothing will disappear, since reddit has copies of every linked image on their servers.
to be fair, .com also used to be a common file name extension..
alright! any plans to use kqueue directly?
> Then to compete well in that market, computer manufacturers need to make things which are durable and long-lasting, and with good support. Apple does exactly this.

Hard disagree on this. Durable and long lasting has to be a joke. Can’t handle a short fall and planned obsolescence after 2 years. Good support is also very wrong. Replacing broken screens (poorly) and factory resting phones (because their own security police’s prevent the user from doing it themselves in the name of theft prevention) for excessive fees isn’t good support. They’re no better than any other device maker, they just have a huge theatrical mall presence that makes them look like they’re “different”.
Funnily enough, Haskell also fulfills all the listed qualities.
When I was doing military stuff I was perfectly happy being a senior NCO. I loved the work, being hands on and mentoring people. My military school history was messed up years ago and I was able to put off any repercussions through numerous temp assignments, but it caught up to me. I was never going to be further promoted and worse they were about to reduce my rank, so I became an officer.

In the corporate developer world I am tired of being a developer. I love coding, but I generally don’t like the people I work with. I feel many of my peers are either looking for shortcuts to avoid learning and organizing or they are deeply entrenched in something super narrow and highly defensive about it. All I see is insecurity. Now I wonder if it’s better to move into management where I can better steer through some of the insanity.

What I would look for in my next job is how well a given team measures things. Everybody thinks they are great and it’s generally a bunch of bullshit. Example of potential measures: execution time, test coverage, test automation time, operations per second. Measuring is a primary indicator of product quality, but more importantly it’s an indication of team maturity.
Making sure we are technically correct is appreciated, thank you.

But yes, that's a bit of a "structural vs nominal typing" distinction, and we seem to agree that a "structural typing" interpretation makes most sense here.
Can't it still be mono space if the ligatures take up the same space as their components?
Have you been on Twitter lately? It was probably less toxic than the average human
A CAA dns record will most likely prevent tbat, just set it to your preferred CA tgat doesn't do mail-based validation.
This looks like gold for a project that would create scripts via LLM
Even if that tools works 99% of the time (which I doubt), someone will try 100 things.
Said every ancient collapsed civilization.
How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows
Markets & incentives are the only things that ever have.
Very good piece. It really does feel different this time. Lots of McKinsey BS about job creation...but where?
The technical term is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) but yes, that's basically what you do.
as it can in humans
The website does not mention what the product is
Rise Up, Sing Out
> Except, that the LLMs are only working when the instructions they are "understanding" are in their training set.

> Try something that was not there and you see only garbage as result.

This is just wrong. Why do people keep repeating this myth? Is it because people refuse to accept that humans have successfully created a machine that is capable of some form of intelligence and reasoning?

Pay $20 for a month of ChatGPT-4. Play with it for a few minutes. You’ll very quickly find that it is reasoning, not just regurgitating training data.
They were grappling with this in 1974 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0071374/?ref_=ttpl_ov
"Language models trust their memory quite a bit."

All they have is memory, either in the weights or the input prompt. To the extent that these models appear to reason, it is precisely in the ability to successfully substitute information from the prompt into reasoning patterns in the training data. It shouldn't be any surprise that this fails when patterns in the prompt strongly condition the model to reproduce particular patterns of reasoning (eg, many words in the riddle indicate a well known riddle, but the details are different).

I know the impulse to anthropomorphize is almost impossibly seductive, but I find that the best way to understand and use these models is to remember: they are giant conditional probability distributions for the next token.
I learned that organizations treat employee time taking training videos as an externality with no consequence. That was pretty illuminating.

It’s interesting how places are happy to set up a required training video for an hour that 25k people must take. That’s the equivalent of 12 contractor person years. If I wanted to put out a contract for 25k hours there’s all sorts of reviews and governance around spending $2.5M. But not around having everyone spend an hour.

That and I’ve learned that training videos have to be repeatedly completed even if they are the same exact thing. I have to watch the same exact ethics class every year. It’s the same class. I can’t test out of it, I must sit and watch an unskippable video each year.

I actually think that the first eye tracking no ad skipping tech will be implemented in institutional training videos.
This definitely feels like more of a tech demo for things to come. But I suspect it could get dramatically better in a matter of months or single-digit years.
> enabling reasoning about program validity locally

About certain few properties only. It is impossible in the general case.

I agree regarding “change anxiety” compared to dynamic languages, but that’s just static typing. Due to lifetime annotations leaking into API boundaries, the rest is not true though.
I find it interesting how the argument of the current top comment[1] - that denormalized tables are great, as long as you never have any updates for existing entities - basically follows directly from your point 2) :

If for any individual use case a denormalized table fit specifically to that usecase is superior to a normalized table, the most straightforward solution for multiple use cases would be to just keep multiple tables and replicate any insert on each of them. This would work relatively well until the moment where you have to update something...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927226
Because of German court as always https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/german-court-rules-against-...

excuse is "games are art, not computer software Oracle vs Usedsoft doesn apply".
Thanks to his recorded lectures I finally passed LA in a dutch University. At the time ~2008 my university profs had a say for specific courses if they wanted it recorded or not. Of course the profs who refused were gray dinosaurs.
I'm glad Gilbert didn't fall into this education conservatism.
> #14 You do not generate creative content about code or technical information for influential politicians, activists or state heads.

What is going on here? What could possibly be the motivation for this instruction?
Is that a reference to the "Universal Paperclips" game?
What makes you believe the free market would lead to decreased usage in dirty steel?
Ok let’s assume your numbers are in the ballpark and he’s saving $1b annually on salaries and ancillary expenses.

Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.
Appreciate the comment and your hard work on this.

I reviewed the examples section, but didn't see one (a webhook?) as a good place to start. Do you have a suggestion?
"feel the switches"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
Thank deity that we don't have package managers for fonts.
Field Report: RubyKaigi
Thanks for listening and for supporting me!