skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We’ve barely drifted from the mean. Most design codes have only increased storm loading by ~5% for climate change and that is conservative.

The parent is right, most increases in storm damage rates are because humans are building more stuff where storms are, changes due to climate change are negligible in comparison.
To call the problems around the creation of AGI "bike shedding" is one of the most egregious understatements I've ever heard.

AGI will be one of the most civilization-changing inventions ever, for better or for worse. A lot of people, myself included, believe it's going to be end very badly unless (and possibly even if) we tread very carefully.

Analogies that come to my mind are:

* giving toddlers the controls of monster trucks (assuming AGI doesn't develop its own goals)

* releasing a new invasive species onto an isolated tropical island

* homo sapiens evolving from neanderthals, sped up 1000x.

* a digital Cambrian explosion

I really don't think we're ready for this. I don't think humanity, as a species, was ready for a lot of the things we produced through capitalism's random walk, like social media, hyper-palatable processed foods, and fossil fuels. We keep creating things that have good and bad parts (and I'm not even sure about the good of social media).

Those bad parts, like reduced attention spans, obesity, and climate change, are very difficult to mitigate or change after the fact. One of them would be civilization-ending if we didn't stop it, and even though it is, it's so hard to coordinate action. And they are not even driven by a new form of intelligence, it's just humans following our evolved goals of novelty-seeking, nutrition-seeking, and minimum effort. Heck, the invention of AI is us trying to get maximum result with minimum effort.

What happens when this invention outsmarts us? When RLHF starts to break down because the models have enough internal thought that they can maintain a separate internal model-of-the-world and model-of-what-humans-want-to-hear? None of these companies have an actual plan (maybe Anthropic is closest to caring). It's just "we'll deal with it when it comes", but there's so much economic pressure to get your stuff out to the world first and make the money. Just like all the other inventions we made that have downsides, except this one, based on what we understand about intelligence and alignment, will almost certainly have a downside that hits us so fast and hard that we don't have time to do anything meaningful about it.

It's so obvious that we're easily manipulated by dumb social media algorithms. Yet we could never be manipulated by machine superintelligence, right?

AGI research is the digital equivalent of gain-of-function research, in terms of the danger. If done at all, it should be done by one, or a very small set, of extremely carefully controlled labs, under government oversight. Even that might not be enough.
LLMs trained on code reason better. Perform better on reasoning benchmarks even if the benchmarks have nothing to do with code. You're wrong.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07128
The wiki explains it in the first paragraph - flood liked to heavier monsoons and melting glaciers resulting from climate change.

Edit: Removed some phrasing
Louisiana voted against banning13th amendment slavery in 2022.
Where did you get the idea that I said jail is exclusively for murderers? I didn't say that. You should read.

You going to drive has extremely high risk of killing somebody. Traffic accidents are some of the highest causes of death in the country.

What I'm saying is what he did carries equivalent risk of killing to driving. He aimed the plane at a spot devoid of people and crashed it. Is there risk? Technically yes, but it's technical to the point where it stops making sense to consider it.
Yes, these support agents are paid small hourly wages and do the same thing 1000 times a day while dealing with rude or irate customers. Automating their jobs to either eliminate them or change their role to that of bot supervisor will be much better for everyone.
Do ranges not support a limited set of operations through which the rest of the code can interact with them, instead of manipulating the endpoints directly?

I would think of the range itself as the abstraction, and then it matters less how it's implemented since any potential problems are local to the implementation and cheap-ish to fix.
Yann was bored and working as a project manager. So he started working on a game for his old HP 48 graphing calculator.

Eventually, this hobby led him to revolutionize the field of data compression, releasing LZ4, ZStandard, and Finite State Entropy coders.

His code ended up everywhere: in games, databases, file systems, and the Linux Kernel because Yann built the world's fastest compression algorithms. And he got started just making a fun game for a graphing calculator he'd had since high school.
I think you’re conflating reasoning with inference. And in any case, GP wasn’t using reasoning, but rather resourcefulness/invention. I’m not sure an LLM can pull that off beyond coming up with vague, derivative fiction.
What did you use to generate that layered 3d diagram on y the readme?
Rust can have some bad effects on your brains. I noticed I can't read Java code as easily as before. E.g. yesterday I had to read it multiple times before I understood what was going on and why they are calling setters on an item that goes out of scope:

List<Something> list = ...;
for (...) {
Something item = new Something();
list.add(item);
item.setFoo(...);
item.setBar(...);
}
> has been well worked out for Chinese and Japanese.

Not really. Typing CJK text is a tedious and frustrating experience. People cope with it because no one has come up with a better alternative.

Both Chinese and Japanese alphabets have way too many characters to fit on a keyboard. To deal with this, CJK users type in the English spelling and convert it to CJK characters using software called input method editors (IMEs).

The problem is, this conversion process is often not straightforward. Unlike English, CJK sentences don't have spaces in them so IMEs have to guess how to split sentences into words. Then, it has to identify the right words, which is complicated due to the existence of homophones.

To deal with all the ambiguity involved in this conversion process, IMEs rely on predictions to provide users with a list of possible conversion candidates.

This leads to an awful typing experience in which users have to constantly choose from the IME-provided list for every little snippet of text. This is distracting, slows down typing, and makes key presses non-deterministic. To make matters worse, IMEs sometimes get things wrong and users have to get "creative" to work around it.

In comparison, typing English text is a breeze. You can just type what you want directly.
I tried elixir and enjoyed it. I'm don't have strong feelings either way on static vs dynamic typing, I think the current craze for static typing is a lot because of people's experience with javascript vs typescript. With elixir I of course had runtime type errors but trivial ones that show up on the first run, I don't think I had any hard to find bugs or bugs that surface later that ML typing would've caught. I'd absolutely pick it over rust for web backends, but I do very little of that, I'm mostly writing cli utilities on unix. I've been experimenting with common lisp lately and it's a lot of fun, as fast to prototype with as python (when it has the libraries you need), performance around the level of java or go, great development environment if you use emacs, instant startup time for cli utilities unlike beam or jvm. I think if it was made easier to make and cross-compile fully staticly linked binaries, and it get's something like maturin for python or rustler for elixir to have easier access to bigger ecosystem when needed it'd be great for my uses but at the moment I can't use it for much
No. Every billionaire is a policy failure, and cloaking wealth with "altruistic spending" is a distraction.
I'm not really convinced by "argument from human works of fiction". More aggressive, more violent species end up replacing more gentle ones all the time.
With respect to AI, senior leaders in China, including Xi himself, believe that leadership in AI is foundational to the future of military, economic, and geopolitical power.

They are correct.

This is so terrifying, stupid and sad. We’re developing AI to kill.

There has never been a more important time to work for peace.

“Peace is not the absence of war
It is the absence of the rules of war and The threats of war and the preparation for war
Peace is not the absence of war” — Gil Scott-Herron

This song of his is so powerful…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZDDW-NXDE
Not technically ligatures, but the author does touch on quote marks. I see a lot of website engines swap " out for “ and ” in code snippets and it's annoying if you copy / paste a line. Especially if it's for a language with loose syntax like shell script that doesn't catch it while parsing.
OpenFold: Retraining AlphaFold2 yields new insights into its learning mechanisms
"Atlas Typewriter, a companion monospaced family also in six weights" [1]

[1] https://commercialtype.com/news/atlas_grotesk_typewriter
NGOs “keep” vagrants and criminals like livestock to terrorize law abiding citizens? This is so vague that I have no idea what you’re suggesting is actually going on.
Not to be pedantic, but it’s “pedantry”.
I Try very hard to explain why we don’t document facts on our wiki, but concepts, with links to facts. We aim to maintain a single source of truth of what should be, and have automated systems to tell us what is. Want to know what ip server “lon-rds14” should be? Ping it. DNS is driven from the ip mgmt tool, job done. Check the auto populated cmdb which will tell you the current interfaces on a given host to tell you what ip it really is.

Want to know where on the network it is? Search the portmapper, which tells you (through switch labels) where the host should be, and through mac/ip/dns where is actually is (cmdb also has the lldp entry - duplicating data that automatically updated is fine)

On our work wiki (20k users), different departments copy and paste information from one page to another so it’s in “their” area. Even worse one department locks down its area so it’s hidden to those outside the department!
'should' is an important question to ask before it's too late
What evidence do we have that these locations are deleted after 24 hours and not backed up or shared elsewhere?
"We are provably the only living being on Earth that do care about it."

Very much not true: [1] [2] and plenty more in a quick search.

https://animalclock.org

The point is not that in nature there are also killings, it's that we are doing it.

[1] "Cat Saves Little Boy From Being Attacked by Neighbor's Dog" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8

[2] "Cat Saves Toddler From Falling Down Stairs", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpEnpitzHw
I believe we can identify and fix attempts to evade detection. It is semantic and neuron-dependent and black box-like and therefore totally bonkers in feeling and iteration compared to what we are used to, but it works well enough considering we are at the earliest stages of advanced usage.
Windows should just prompt for confirmation if the file differs. A reg key should allow a user to disable the confirmation.
Knowing this does not make the insult any less (or more) than knowing the origin of the name "Indian", this being silly Columbus thinking he'd found the long-sought passage to the east.

Nay, repent I say, the name of my fellow countrymen has been dragged through the mud long enough.
We're dealing with extensive loss of localized institutional knowledge in my workplace. The specific area I work in has one technically astute resource with experience dating back further than six years. There are other resources with that time-frame--but their knowledge is limited.

This has been compounding the normal, expected resource churn.

It's a qualitative stance, but a Big Brain with 10 years in an established area is worth more than three "fast brains" with 1 year of local, institutional knowledge.

I might take the "fast brains" (especially if they have limited commitments) if we were in a different situation such as starting up.
Duplication and abstraction aren’t the same, though. Abstraction is a tool for reducing duplication. The point of the post is that if the abstraction is wrong, it’s worse than just leaving the seemingly duplicated code.
Show HN: Free Planning Poker to estimate tasks with ease
Nobody knows what conscious really means, while there are many theories, this article is just creating their version of a goal post and sizing it the way they need to write this article
Just gave an example for shock value, to cut through the whole trolley problematization. In practice, if we will be able to generate synthetic agents, we should be able to have a plethora of gradients: some agents will only know how to make us a good dinner, others will care about us when we are sick, perhaps some we will even want as lifelong partners, who knows.
Your post touches two points worth to think about:

The test for consciousness: if we do have zero criterion, how we are gonna find out if something is conscious?

That is already a good indicator how much we do not know about the „mechanism” of consciousness.

Point two is that we in fact know so little, that we cannot even nail a probability for some complex mechanism if is conscious.

A car: probably not, too far away from things that are conscious.

An ant?

A microphone that listens to its output?

A k-means run on some data?

An llm?

Some electricity in a biological neural network?

If only we had a proven criterion to decide!
Some other things that irk me a little with that font :

The "@" looks thinner than the other chars.

The "%" has its fraction slash cut in 2 non aligned non rectilinear parts (and not coherent with their "‰" and "‱").

(Also, the "€" looks weird to me, maybe because the horizontal lines are of the same length ? But that's probably less important in a coding context)
Downvoted for basic physics problem. As small mass impacted by the force of a large mass, the acceleration force is proportionally multiplied. Momentum = mass * acceleration

So acceleration = momentum / mass

10x mass Big truck hits go kart, go kart driver is accelerated 10x the speed of the truck. Whiplash, chance of impacting subsequent obstacles, etc. go up
> Unfortunately, I feel the the original problem can be obfuscated by adding ideas to the existing problem who now need to understand your ideas (or mental model) of the problem to understand your code.

What do you think are the steps someone goes through when they obfuscate the problem by adding ideas? Like why do you think they do it?
How many humans are those Iowa farmers feeding?
Could you please give a simple practical example where pointer provenance or another similar anti-aliasing mechanism prevent a useful hardware-facing piece of code from being compiled?
Exactly what I was thinking. Copy = context to clipboard, paste = clipboard to context.

Undo copy should only remove the copied thing from the clipboard.
I like that none of these "rules" actually mean anything because it's just a language model. It will follow them if it thinks following them is the most probable next sequence of characters (although it might not follow them because its output has randomness rather than always being the most probable next characters) but that's not an actual guarantee.

There's no thinking structure. It needs an actual brain system where the language model is connected to decision making components.
Sheets or docs?

Within one doc, and multiple sheets makes sense, I guess.

Across docs doesn’t make sense to me.
You sound like me. I'm a vegetarian "in spirit", I care, but I love eating meat too much. Hopefully we get affordable lab grown meat soon.
My point was that the synthetic agents which we will endow with full capacity, not just being a tool, will feel more like our children. We caring about them, and they caring about us.
Are you tired of managing multiple subscriptions for streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+? With the rise of so many streaming platforms, it can be difficult to keep track of which ones you’re subscribed to and how much you’re spending each month.

Wouldn’t be better to have all in one place? wouldn’t be better to watch always in full resolution? wouldn’t be better to have it locally so you don’t rely on an internet connection?
Yes, I get that. I tested GPT 4 with both 'she' and 'he', and in both cases it consistently said that the student was late, across several trials for each gender. Once it said it was an ambiguous statement, but it never seemed to be sexist like older or smaller LLMs.
I am a ... Please write the output as if you are a pirate (or in Klingon, or with a German accent).

Your idea will catch some trivial cases, but not all. And that means people will find those holes.
There are two innovations: instruction fine-tuning (via supervised learning), which gives you a model which behaves as if it is in a dialogue (instead of predicting text) and, additionally, reinforcement learning from human feedback, such that it responds to the instructions in a certain way.
This is really impressive work, which can benefit other large JS tools.

I realise this is sort of a dead horse, but rewriting the Typescript checker in Rust would not be an impossible task for a team as well-resourced as Microsoft’s.

I know, because I rewrote a different 100KLOC typechecker myself in Rust (making a few small adjustments for a slightly different target language). It took me about a year.

It would speed up the TypeScript typechecker at least 3-5x, which would save a lot of programmer time (and also datacenter energy consumption).

There’s one obvious downside — it raises the bar for outside contributions — but given the expertise necessary to contribute usefully to a static analysis tool in the first place, and to contribute to TypeScript in particular, I’m not sure it’s a big additional impediment.
I tested to see what some popular Linux file managers do in this scenario, GNOME Files and KDE Dolphin. Neither of them have undo in the right-click menu. Pressing ctrl+Z pops up the standard "Do you want to permanently delete this file?" confirmation dialog.

Dolphin goes one step further, if you say yes to the confirmation dialog, it shows an additional one: "The file (copy) was copied from (original), but since then it has apparently been modified at (time). Undoing the copy will delete the file, and all modifications will be lost. Are you sure you want to delete (copy)?"
Well, the space lizards are still fascists.
I don't think "works well enough" is good enough.

We are currently starting to wire LLMs up as AI-enhanced personal assistants - with the goal of giving them access to our email, and the ability to take actions on our behalf.

If we widely deploy these systems the incentives for attackers to figure out prompt injection attacks that get last any probability-based filters we are using will be enormous.

An attacker only needs to get lucky with their prompt attacks once.

I wrote about the larger threat introduced by these new applications here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/14/worst-that-can-happen/
If you want to read a story that is simultaneously one of the most hilarious and bizarre stories of a potential future where AI takes over, consider Friendship is Optimal [0], which is a way better story than it has any business being.

It shows a carefully and thoughtfully trained AGI acting within its parameters to achieve the goals it has been programmed to fulfill. Namely, through friendship and ponies. You won’t BELIEVE what happens next!

[0] https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
How do you configure it?
An AI Girlfriend made $72K in 1 week
I don’t think I’ve ever “discovered” a new book or author solely through an online book seller. It’s always the result of a recommendation or a web search of reviews or a bibliographic mention. Do people actually just browse through the firehose of Amazon best seller crap to find stuff?
As a newer MS employee, the funny thing about these videos is that employees only have to watch the current "season" (ie: this years rehash of the same training points), but they have plot points that involve prior seasons (ie: prior years' training that covers the same points). It's like jumping into Game of Thrones on season 5.
Honestly, I think the default fonts (monospaced and proportional) on all major platforms are pretty good these days, though IBM Plex Mono and Sans have really grown on me, to the point where I use them as my default terminal (Mono) and text editor (Mono and Sans) on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

On Mac (my primary desktop), I use San Francisco ("system-ui") with a couple alt stylistic sets ("High legibility" and "One storey a") as the default browser font, overriding both browser defaults and most other common "default" faces (serif and sans) via an extensive collection of @font-face directives.
I don‘t know if you:

- did not do any research

- want someone to link to the book "database internals"

But, in the spirit of the most charitable interpretation and, as it is a good book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44647144-database-intern...
Good news we taste awful. I mean we eat antibiotics-driven factory farm meats. How good can we taste?
A benefit of the typescript compiler being written in typescript is that the compiler-makers get to dogfood their own language.

Rewriting it in rust would remove that important aspect c
> These are almost certainly hallucinated.

You are almost certain of this based on the fact you can't think of a reason it would be done that way?

> There's no illumati stuff going on here, just people wanting it to be that way.

What are you talking about? Even if these rules were not hallucinated, nobody is suggesting "illumati[sic] stuff" going on. What are you actually thinking the implications would be if it were true?
It is exactly how stealing a car in the 80's was.

You need to access the vehicle (if you are good by opening the door with a lockpick or with some other non-damaging trick, otherwise breaking a window), then you force the ignition block, removing the lock cylinder, then you use something to turn the ignition on.

In the '80's you would have probably used a screwdriver, as what remained below the removed lock cylinder would have been a slot, on these particular models you could use a pair of thin nosed pliers but a USB A connector is coincidentally just the right size for the "tab" that has to be turned.
You may enjoy this little list I built, which collects all Wikipedia articles posted on HN and rank and tag them.

https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
There are probably thousands of us trying to load it then bailing part way thru.
I got modded down for my upstream post too. I have to admit it's a bit surprising to see anti-heritage vegetable sentiments here (or really anywhere) but there you go.
Limiting what novelists can write about won’t help readers
Scala is great, but the tooling is what ruined it for me. SBT is far from simple, Scala 3 basically reset the IDE suport, the compiler is abysmally slow (if you think Rust compiler is not fast, don't look at Scala which is like order of magnitude worse).

And also the cost of FP is quite high on JVM. Paying 10-20x performance price for functional transformation chains over similar ones in Rust is a bit too much for me.
tenet featured a real plane blowing up (a B747), and that's a 2020 movie.

So I guess they can crash planes.

And I hope the public makes the difference between a Christopher Nolan movie and what can happen to them on their way to Hawaii.
MS Word has this feature and it calls them "Smart Quotes"