skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> bottom line is commercial real estate (CRE) is screwed and the sole driver of all of this

I've seen several people point to this narrative on HN and it just doesn't make any sense. There's three possibilities as I see it:

1) There's some secret cabal of people who run the world and they've decided that commercial real estate needs to thrive, for some reason. So these overlords go to their puppets running major companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Dell and tell them they must make their workers return to the office in the name of propping up commercial real estate. Apparently some people on HN think this is likely?

2) The managers at Dell/Amazon/etc. feel the need to prop up commercial real estate as an act of charity. Rather than focusing on their own businesses, they are worried about their friends in commercial real estate. This seems even less likely than 1.

3) Managers at major companies believe that there are benefits to working together in person.

Why are people so reluctant to accept option 3? You don't even need to accept the premise that working from the office is better. You just need to accept that premise that management believes it's better to be a proponent of this option.
> It's more about lower management becoming less needed. If a dude managing a team of 5 and not contributing anything can't have f2f meetings all day he suddenly feels obsolete and fears for his future at the company.

I don't know about that. In my admittedly limited experience as an EM of 4 ICs, I'm drowning in work, mostly because they all do great work and are now double and sometimes triple booked on projects because we haven't been allowed to hire anyone. It's more than a full time job to keep a small team supported and I don't remotely feel like I'm obsolete because the company could chose to WFH.

I've personally noticed, since we've been back in office, it's been easier for those ICs to have conversations with other people in the company that they need to work with, as well as have informal brainstorming sessions with each other. This is great for me, because simply being a conduit of information between other people isn't the most efficient use of my time, so I don't really feel threatened by that. All of them have told me they've actually appreciated the hybrid schedule and the time in office for some of the week, and some of them told me that when I was a peer IC (before being their manager).

Our work is definitely more experimental/R&D/unproven though. Frequent communication, collaboration, and brainstorming is critical for success. If you're doing the kind of work where you can sit down today and create a year's worth of feature tickets then maybe it skews in favor of the office being more of a distraction.

> Of course he will sacrifice his 5 reports to feel more important so he communicates up the chain that it's absolutely vital that they return to the office. 5 guys will commute for a combined 50 hours per week so that 1 guy who doesn't do anything can keep his job.

I don't get the impression anyone at the executive level of a BigCo is collecting feedback from low level managers about whether they should RTO or not. And even in the Bay Area, 2 hours a day of commuting is on the extreme end. Everyone on my team has a total of a 1 hour commute or less, and in my case that includes a day care drop off and pick up. Personally speaking, my commute wouldn't change even if we were 100% WFH because my home and the office are equidistant from day care.

We do have a peer IC who has a long commute though and it's not great for him. I do wish there was more flexibility on a case-by-case basis to tweak the number of days he's in the office.
I spent a decade working in an office park with no restaurants and only over priced cafeterias with low quality food. Everyone brought their lunch and usually ate in their office while on conference calls. My employer was responsible for the selection and hiring of the cafeteria management company.
Of course not. Apple provides a feature with clear benefits (https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...: “A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity as measured during the 12 months following Apple’s introduction of the remote locking feature in September 2013 as part of iOS 7“, https://www.macworld.com/article/221201/apples-lawenforcemen...: “We are hopeful that the cell phone industry will imbed persistent technology that is free to consumers that will make a phone inoperable once stolen, even if the device is off, the SIM card is removed or the phone is modified by a thief to avoid detection”), and users aren’t required to use it.

The car equivalent would be a feature where you can choose to make your fingerprint necessary to start the car, and revert that decision whenever you want to.
GPT-4 Multi-Language Name Matching Tool for KYC
An exception being Microsoft, who is forced by the US government to keep bugs in their platforms :-)
Everything you said was wrong, yet you said it with such confidence. Why don't you just admit you're wrong and don't know what you're talking about.
I wouldn't say I always loved their content but it was nice to have a difference take on things occasionally.

Feels like a very unfortunate loss.
75% of Irish data watchdog’s data privacy decisions overruled
> If you work with people like this and say, “just do your own thing, it works for me” then you are trying to control other people because it pleases you better.

No you explicitly aren't. Not bending to someone else's preference is not "controlling" them.
You might be interested in VSCodium -- a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of VSCode.

https://vscodium.com
Certainly not improbable.
I think the audio sample here sounds completely American, as it claims to be: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mommy

But either pronunciation of "mummy" (embalmed corpse) is how I would address my mother as a child: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mummy
And what's the difference? Does that make it okay?
i thought they've been doing that since forever?
Are you and I alive by choice? I don’t know what this means.

I will go further and boldly predict that some of these future people will like living.
Perhaps that is because you haven't used my top ten prompts for software devs who are worried about losing their jobs!

But also yes, it is not the greatest thing ever. It is mostly mediocre for me as well. And lots of the most exciting things, like DMing a dungeons and dragons campaign, is actually mostly terrible because it recreates the same scenarios over and over and it never remembers any of the information that a DM should know like anything on your character sheet, when to ask you to roll the dice, or even which version of the rules its supposed to be using even if you ask it directly to use that particular version of the rules. But in fact, it is wild that it has read all of the rules. I was using it to run a star wars saga edition game for myself (I'm not that lonely I promise). And at some point it occured to me this is all copywrited information, is it allowed to read this and then regurgitate it to me? How much of this is fair use? If I wrote a campaign for the system could I regurgitate rules like this in teh campaign book? Who owns all this material that is created not from imagination but from highly complex combinatorics?
Twitter Censors for Turkey’s Government in the Election Build Up
exploding head emoji

C&P "Google just updated its free competitor, Bard."

C&P "ChatGPT has now a big problem"

C&P "Here are 7 incredible things Bard can do (that ChatGPT cannot)"

C&P "ChatGPT is in trouble"

exploding head emoji
I never understood that either but that's also common for Swiss or Austrian streamers who adapt a near to perfect German even thought most people would understand them, or at least would understand a light version of their dialect.
Yes, this needs to be treated much more seriously, perhaps criminally.
I you have such an unfortunate chain of events, then a bit of radiation leaking out will not be as significant.
Which kinds of GPT startups will thrive?
Sweat bullets? You may be confusing Tim Cook with Tim Gunn.
Some hens begin crowing like roosters. It's really annoying for backyard chickens, but I have had it happen a few times. That suggests to me that while chicken behavior varies based on sex, that is a spectrum, not absolute categories.
Should pencils and paper be restricted too, since they can also be used to make illegal content?
Nice, did you build it?
Because stereotypically British aren’t seen as very threatening people, they sound quite docile really. There’s also a lot of exposure to British accents in popular media compared to the others.
Whats the difference between taking photos/videos on a phone from 2018 and cutting edge?
Not the person you replied to but the Steam Deck is definitely a capable dev machine. I wouldn't work on the screen itself but it can handle most day-to-day dev workloads unless you're trying to run 10+ containers running heavy JVM apps on it.
> friction of getting your phone in and out of your pocket

it's a quick (and mostly accepted) way to tune out, for example, while standing in a line or something. Yes, many people overdo it, but imagine popping on your VR helmet for a second in a social setting.
I dunno man, I think you are getting tripped up on the evolution of the English language. Yes, your kids are either male or female (mine are all male). Those fundamental physical characteristics can't be changed by language.

But what language means does change. The term "gender" used to mean basically the same thing as "sex", but now it's evolved to mean "the other stuff, aside from biological sex". How they act (for dogs), or that and also how they want to be perceived (for humans, but maybe also dogs; I've known quite many dogs over the years, and that includes a couple of bad-ass bitches that wanted you and the other dogs in the room to know who was boss).

Language evolution is often uncomfortable.

I don't like that "crypto" means the grifter funny money shit now, instead of cryptography like science intended... but it does. My objection doesn't change that; it's a consensus thing. It might be the same for you.

Do they have to bring it up? I mean, kinda debatable, maybe. I did ask about sex, not gender. Strictly speaking, no they didn't have to bring it up. But in that same vein they could have just answered, "Male or female." That would have seemed somehow insufficient. Adding context is pretty core to what these fuzzy-logic language-model generated-text vendors are offering.

But anyway, it's not really debatable that dogs "express gender identity". Because that now means "how they act and how they express themselves". It indeed "doesn't exist" as some kind of empirical boolean value (unlike sex (ignoring for simplicity the highly unusual biological intersex cases I just learned about, haha)).

Because, in the now-prevailing meaning of the term, it is literally an interpretation of their behavior.

It doesn't negate or contradict biological sex, it just now means something separate.
“It’s pronounced Bouquet”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances
They are going to quickly discover that this is the case. I left Lockheed right after they started forcing everyone back into offices that didn't even have enough desks. Those whom were actually creating value there all had plans to leave to. Plenty of them left as soon as they got the news lol. Sure it's a way to do layoffs without saying 'layoff', but the impact is going to be felt much harder down the line.
Another one that "watches" a movie would and "rates" it for you - so you can decide if you want to watch it for real or not. Bunch of competing personalized models as services - PMaaS - all fighting to impersonate you better.

Then one of them gets hacked.
An obvious issue is AI thrown at a bank loan department reproducing redlining.

Current AI tech allows for laundering this kind of shit that you couldn’t get away with nearly as easily otherwise (obviously still completely possible in existing regulatory alignments, despite what conservative media likes to say. But there’s at least a paper trail!)

This is a real issue possible with existing tech that could potentially be applied tomorrow. It’s not SF, it’s a legitimate concern. But it’s hard and nebulous and the status quo kinda sucks as well. So it’s tough to get into
Rooftop Solar Panels Could Power a Third of U.S. Manufacturing, Study Finds
Canada is also Huuuge!

My limited experience is that differences inside these two countries (e.g. New Foundland accent to Winnipeg accent, or Texas to Boston) are way bigger than averaged difference between countries (i.e. Manitoba to Minnesota). Most "Canadian" English is broadly similar to most "American" English, especially the standardized TV / Movie kind.
You are right, and this is a tech problem even before LLMs. Facebook has allowed very consequential calls for ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia and hasn't done anything about it. That is the issue with a global tech products.

But there's nothing about LLMs that changes that from a country level prosecution/accountability perspective. You still have to be aware of where you're putting that text into the world. Right now, it's just between you and ChatGPT. People shouldn't fool themselves into thinking they can just plug this shit into their news network and be free of liability
AI on the Command Line
That won't help either. The problem in those areas is local and national corruption. If you bring farming equipment into an impoverished third-world community and teach them how to use it, the local warlord/drug gang just comes in after you've left and steals or destroys the farming equipment.

It's an unfortunate fact of reality that foreign aid, though very well-intentioned, benefits the rulers and generals of corrupt governments more than it benefits their citizens. See "The Dictator's Handbook" by Mesquita and Smith.
I believe this native-accent is a common gag; Laurie also in one episode of House MD did the American-faking-a-British accent when he telephoned an overpond doctor in GB to learn more about the medical history of a patient.

I also recall an episode of The Mentalist, where agent Rigsby (played by Welsh Owain Yeoman) says he can imitate a british accent and proceeds to do so, only to receive a “nah, not good enough” by the protagonist.

The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
And why do they never choose to copy Brian Blessed or Matt Berry?
"Science" didn't really exist for another couple centuries. This was just wealthy dudes having a fun hobby. The same way people of means today have "charitable organizations" to play around with, wealthy people back then liked to dabble in "natural philosophy"
I could say that no one has seriously proposed "eliminating ALL violent crime perpetrated by immigrants," and you're using this absurd strawman as some sort of shield to avoid discussing race, and that people generally accept other groups who commit violent crime at similar rates to their own, and it's just one group in the US in particular who falls way outside the bell curve (per link theme)... but it's clear you aren't here for earnest or honest discussion, so I'm out.
Advanced Monty Hall? The Sleeping Beauty Problem
"Some UK accents will hold you back, no matter how smart you are" (2019)

With a Birmingham accent being worst.

https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/uk-accen...
ChatGPT4 has replaced ~99% of my Google/StackOverflow searches...
No it doesn't. Any food production systems requires significant upkeep and security. As long as it's not solved bottom up the problem will continue to exist. Just look at the dilapidated schools in Africa. The gangs/corrupt governments will simply steal the food production facilities.

The only solution is to uplift the entire country, anything highly targeted will not work.
And is GPT replacing google search for folks?
VS code badly needs a "do not disturb" mode that disables all this junk and more (like turn off all the pop up notifications and autocomplete suggestions as you type too).

It always throws me out of flow state to have it constantly barfing and spewing info on screen as I type--like, I've been programming python for 20 years and I know exactly how the print function works, I don't need a huge spew of doc string text when I type it now. Autocomplete and such can be very handy but it's a real pain to turn it off as there are about 3 or 4 random little settings to fully disable it. Give me a do not disturb or no distraction mode that disables and enables it easily.
What rules that apply to animals? There is plenty of homosexual behavior in animals. According to Wikipedia, there even seem to be animals (sheep) that are homosexual individuals.

There are apparently intersex animals. There are certainly many male animals castrated at a young age that have markedly different behavior as adults.

We humans have aspects of gender identity (pink vs blue, for example) that most non-human animals lack the technology or inclination to develop even if they wanted to. Sure, male ducks often have lots of green feathers. But do they wear green because they identify as male? Of course not, because they don’t choose their color scheme! (And remember that pink hasn’t been a girl color for all that long.)

Humans have the fascinating property that you can ask them about their sexuality, gender identity, etc, and they might actually answer the question! I wonder how much of the apparent exceptionality of humans this accounts for.

> the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans.

If you observe a room full of small human children and conclude that the “the males and females have different behaviors and preferences” and that this is anywhere near sufficient to explain the behavior of said small children, then you’ve either found a highly unusual group, or you’ve found a group where someone else is fairly aggressively imposing gender identities on them, or you simply aren’t paying attention.
It's astonishing how TSMC is the only company in the world that can do this. They are just so far ahead of everyone else in manufacturing. It'd sure be nice to have more capacity.

The Economist had a good article a few months ago about the volume of chip manufacture by country and process size. The takeaway is Taiwan leads < 10nm, the US and Taiwan lead 10-22nm, and that > 22nm is an interesting mix including South Korea and China.

Chart: https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/834/90/media-assets/imag...

Article: https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/02/02/americas-hoped-for...
And at bigger companies, you're almost certainly dealing with people in multiple locations and even timezones anyway. For many of us, we could go into an office and it would just be a desk we made phone calls from.
I think its unfair to characterise these managers as too lazy to plan, more that previously they could often resolve things by quickly grabbing a few people and talking things over, and now that involves a game of calendar Tetris to get the necessary people on a call at the same time. At least in the case I'm thinking of this was more a corporate failure to adjust to remote work, instead of introducing a culture of asynchronous communication what used to happen in the office just got transplanted into MS Teams, resulting in everyone being almost permanently on video calls.
I have experience this problem in my own healthcare. When I tell the doctors, I want to focus on diet and metabolics and not medication they do not want to help me. So even the doctors are trained to exist in the for-profit system.

And I know I’m in the early stages of ankylosing spondylitis yet since I don’t have any bone deformation yet they just don’t care about my pain.
All i can say to that is well done! But a company that sells software today requires far more mentorship for the junior than figuring it out yourself as a lone developer in a non software company. Take telecoms for example where you cannot even Google the right acronym let alone understand how to use the company's internal programming framework to build an application that won't be deployed for another year. Most juniors drown with such large loads of info in my experience.
you might want to read the article again
> is the AI fit for purpose

It's a shame that "alignment" has gained this secondary definition. I agree it makes things trickier too discuss when you're not sure you're even talking about the same thing.
> Phonetic spelling implies that there's at least one pronunciation that correlates 1:1 to spelling

No! Phonetic spelling implies that each pronunciation correlates 1:1 with one spelling.
Have you ever considered that their position might actually be moderate and balanced, and it's your position that is so far off to one side that you find anything in the center to be the opposite of your beliefs?
Poor leadership leads to poor results. Everybody knows the emperor (Zuck) has no clothes and it's been known for quite some time. He got lucky, he made a lot of cash. Good for him! Now it's become painfully obvious he has no clue what to do. Why? Because he got lucky.

The odds of hitting the unicorn jackpot are minuscule. The odds of hitting it twice? Relying only on luck? Practically zero. That's why Zuck is flailing.
Yes and it's confusing because there's a SKD SDK (sentient killer drone software development kit) to integrate with the larger platform that includes the telemetry, prioritized missions, battle space sensor network, and the LLL (life-long learning) module.
"First of all, it takes a human being to guide these models, to host (or pay for the hosting) and instantiate them"

And this will always be true? You repeat this claim several times in slightly varied phrasing without ever giving any reason to assume it will always hold, as far as I can see. But nobody is worried that current models will kill everyone. The worry is about future, more capable models.
lets not forget death by audio!
Building a more inclusive gaming community with Gitlab
I had a really bad dell monitor experience this year too. I had a still image on the monitor for 30 minutes and it caused extreme permanent burn in. Returned it and got the cheapest no name monitor with the same specs and it’s been great and half the price
To understand what's going on requires a deep understanding of Pakistan and its "military-veto democracy". This is the best explanation I've seen, from a veteran Indian journalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0boy9JdZfWE

tl;dw: The powers-that-be in Pakistan -- the army and whichever political dynasty the army favors that day -- routinely overrule the popular vote because they don't believe that democracy will always spit out the best candidate. This is partly due to arrogance but also because the institutions that are supposed to keep a check on harmful populism in Pakistan are broken or corrupt. These powers-that-be have decided that IK is bad for Pakistan (twist: they're probably right about this; IK is a religious fundamentalist and a giveaway socialist in a country that is broke) and have invoked "special measures" to keep his name off the ballot or the ballot away from the people. Understandably, this has angered the people who have taken to the streets.
Not only are Cockney & Scouse less prevalent in entertainment, their standing is almost always represented as lower.