skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We still have a monopoly on good language practices for American english and/or AFAIK how to actually build something that solves business needs rather than requirements.

We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.

By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.

Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
There have been plenty of deterministic interpretations of the Bible, the Calvinists being the first that pops to mind!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism
>The layoffs have nothing to do with anything.

They probably should though, at least I think so.

With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.

I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
Started as a joke that this was daily. Now it's no much of a joke.
Derivative, yes, but also incremental huge steps sometimes,

Things like airplanes, lasers, nukes..
> There are places that were welding people's homes shut at that point.

Yes. Many places including new Zealand did unthinkable authortiarian things. Easily could be classified as torture.

> Do you suggest we move away from democracy or try to fix the failings of our systems?

How on earth did you arrive at "move away from democracy"?

Also, the coercive and sometimes violent authortiarianism perpetrated by govs with media/big tech collaboration (who saw massive profits from lockdowns) had little to do with democracy. In fact, extreme powers that go against different constituinal documents were enacted in the most damaging security theater ever.
>The only way this could be a problem is if you assume employees are fungible.

Which Google does by pushing every hire through the same hiring funnel.
For me the most concerning thing about the ChatGPT hype has been seeing how difficult people seem to find reasoning about the risks and abilities of these systems.

Questions around the emergent properties, sentience and creativity of AI systems should rarely be discussed as black and whites.

I don't think ChatGPT is sentient, but is it more sentient than a rock? I mean, maybe? At least I would be wrong to say a hard no to that. Similarly questions around the ability of LLMs to reason or produce original work probably isn't black or white either. LLMs do seem to show some signs of basic reasoning ability and have shown they are able to produce unique works, but clearly there are limits to both.

Perhaps this isn't unique to AI though. A "bad" artist is arguably one that is too heavily influenced by another and lacks artistic creativity. But does that mean what they do has no creativity? I think not, but that often is the black and white language people will use.

It seems to me ChatGPT is neither stealing or doing something all that creative.
Same here. I game in spurts where sometimes I will play a few hours a night and other times I will only fit in a couple hours a month. I have several AAA games I bought in the past that turned out to be obscenely huge downloads, and by the time I freed up enough space on my system to download them, then actually downloaded them, then started them up only to discover they didn't run on my Surface Pro anyway, the return window expired. Very annoying.
Is the CEO-to-worker ratio of 398.8 not a moral issue? Hard to take the morality argument seriously here.
Why is JavascriptCore so big? What's going on internally to end up with binaries that big?
As per usual, I'm mortified more by the clowns "on my side" than by those I'm opposed to. This comment is really a threat to those of us who take the pandemic seriously? We need to censor/downvote positions opposite our own? Cowards.
No other domestic worker could do that job for the same price. You see, we just went through layoffs for cost saving purposes, and have nearly no money in the bank (just $100B), so we can only hire these H-1B visa holders or our business will go under.
And if you google "unicorn" you will get this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

Sadly, having a wikipedia article does not mean something actually exists.
While you're at it, make it mandatory to publish the prompt with the published result for text-based generators.

I would love to see all the biases and intention that went thru the creator's mind for certain pictures and texts and what the system associated with that.
It doesn’t matter if the mechanic is identical or not.

Think about handing a friend a thumb drive full of music versus downloading the same files from Napster.

One of those activities can be sued out of existence.
Reporters, activists, whistleblowers, ... a lot of folks would benefit from improved security. But at some level everyone would. Importantly, Old Twitter blocked links in DM's to the New York post over their Hunter Biden story. You couldn't even share that story over DM.
Well, consider a different scenario.

I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.

He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.

There are a couple interesting things to consider here:

1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.

2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.

My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?

And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
The application process takes in general no less than a year.
That's so cool!

I feel like this is a solution that even someone who objects to CRISPR/gene-editing would approve of. Genetic editing of petri dish cells, helps discover previously unknown pathways, which lead to a search for pre-existing molecules that we'd already discovered a long time ago.
Two years ago we already had GPT-2, that was capable of some problem solving and logic following. It was archaic, sure, it produced a lot of gibberish, yes, but if you followed OpenAI releases closely, you wouldn't think that something like GPT3.5 was "pure science fiction", it would just look as the inevitable evolution of GPT-2 in a couple of years given the right conditions.
Yes. I did. ;)
Those Babylonian phones were wild. Too bad they'd only run 2 hours on a blood sacrifice though.
Well, it's not like getting a response means anything anyway. The contents of the response has no correlation with their future behavior.

Politicians just know that it's better to be nice to people who seem to like you or are engaged with the system, since they want to keep getting your vote. If not then the person isn't worth your time.
At one point not too long ago the US was producing up to 90% of our own oil supply, is that not the case anymore or am I misremembering that all together?

To clarify, I don't recall if that was actually kep in country or the net import/export comparison, we may have been making enough to cover something like 90% but exporting that overseas.

Anyway, 100% agree fertilizer has been a problem for a long time. As long as we treat food production as an broken loop where farms are dependant on outside resources rather than building sustainable farming systems we'll always be stuck trying to steal someone else's nutrients in the form of fertilizer.
This has more to do with Amazon and local businesses than it does with fidget spinners.
This audience isn’t the same as the population at large. Many would conclude from this headline the wrong thing and not see through the BS.
You are probably thinking about dirt cheap outsourcing to places like India. When part of the shift that's happening now is internal hiring of full time developers in places like Australia or the UK where the language skills and culture is pretty much the same but the wages far lower.
In my experience, there is nothing an employer hates more than the idea of letting employees become contractors.
Not sure how the article knows "new" employees, but something doesn't click for me. H1B visas kick in on October 1st of each year. August 17th can only be for H1B transfers. Might still be a new employee, but definitely not someone coming from overseas.
That's not the requirement. It's frustrating to see otherwise smart people on every single tech board ever since decades to not understand work visa and employment green card requirements and the difference between them.
I’m not in favor.

But the present situation is brought about by those very policies, where (eg) the Dutch government is seizing Dutch family farms as part of their Green Leap Forward — and you seem fine with that status quo. In fact, you’re out here saying we can’t change policy to protect family farms from such government intervention.

> Farming is not economically viable on a small scale without subsidies in Europe.

My point is that the collapse of small farms isn’t organic market forces, but government policy such as the Green Leap Forward expropriating them — and so it’s completely ridiculous to say we can’t change policy (eg, stop doing that) to help small farms.

Policy is the problem; why would changing it not be the solution?
Sorry chatgpt wrote it.
Again depends on what is meant by style. Another post in this thread suggested plot elements as part of style Aka “a wizardry school for preteens.”

Sharing a few surface levels elements like that is fine, but if a one page description could equally well be used to describe both works you’re well over the line.
While opinions differ about whether the article has any merit, I know that when California brought the AB5 bill several top quality folks doing "side gigs" for my then employer were subtly let go because the management believed that the nature of their association with us brought them within the ambit of "contractor". They were quickly replaced with people from cheaper locales.

I've also seen documents supporting a few H1B filings and know that most of the skills mentioned in their are fabricated.

So yes companies do this regularly to cut costs in the name of layoffs and talent shortage.
Tell that to the neural network.
In the ELO song 'Don't bring me down' why do they say 'Groos' in chorus?
As a software pirate, I hate this idea, or anything like it.

I can see this being useful to fill up a steam cache though, depending on how it works.
> 1. It seems the Bun.file API (https://bun.sh/docs/api/file-io) doesn't provide a way to distinguish between a zero-size file and a file that doesn't exist. Is this right? If it is, it would be nice to have one. It doesn't have to interfere with the lazy loading.

Yes that is correct and not good. Pedantically, files which don't exist can be created between the call to check if it exists and after. In practice though, it is pretty annoying

> 2. Do you cross-compile Bun? If you do, how has your experience been cross-compiling with Zig when you have a C++ dependency?

We cross-compile the Zig part but not the C++ dependencies. zig c++ was too opinionated for us the last time we gave it a try. I'm optimistic this will improve in the future though.
The question is "how fast". If bun executables are always 45x go's that's a problem. If they are always 98mb more than go's, then it's less of a problem as the size grows.
This is a very interesting post. I don't understand this part: <<AI is the policy-makers it will expose>> Can you help to explain a different way?

And hat tip to this comment:

Have you watched ANIME ever? Yeah... its here now.

The more I watch the original Ghost in the Shell, the more I think it has incredible foresight.
Breaking: Google accidentally leaks all customer personal data to the blockchain, governments enacting forced breeding to support the product.
In my experience things kind of balance out, and you end up with negligible compression gains after compression. On the other hand, it also affects the time it takes for the browser / js engine to parse and execute the code, which can be significant in this world of massive bundles.
I've found that LLMs have some intense binary trypophobia. Once you start replacing all their 1s with 0s, they quickly fall in line.
I dropped a couple hundred bucks on a GPU years ago. It's done a lot of work for me and has years to go. True if you don't plan on using it no point in buying it. Same goes for literally anything
I’ve been working with the tech for a long time now, and I’m convinced we’ve only scratched a very cursory amount of the value waiting. People are focused too much on its ability to write and emit bad code and say silly things and making it read poetry in the voice of a Dalek. Particularly generative multi modal AI hooked up into a feedback loop with classical AI and reasoning techniques, solvers, optimizers, etc, will be remarkable.

For instance: I uploaded an image of a saloon with cowboys playing cards and asked one of the multimodal models to describe the scene. It did with details about the game and the card table etc. Acting as a goal base agent I told it we need $20. It said it could either play cards or work at the saloon and recommended saloon work as it’s assured. I advised it to play cards and describe how to walk to the card table and to provide an image with the card table labeled and the route annotated with obstacles. It was able to do this. This could be fed into a navigation system. I then uploaded an image of a bunch of card hands and asked it to classify each hand as what it’s holding and the relative strengths. It was accurate. Using a optimizer it could feed the visual card state and play an optimal game. Etc. Each one of these tasks would have been absurdly hard five years ago.
Our moon is enormous relative to our size. It probably gobbled up any other natural satellites.
Scanning 1:1 DM's is overly obtrusive. Apple iMessage and Facebook WhatsApp don't scan DM's either.

> Users don't benefit from this change.

Twitter blocked links to the New York Post in DM's over their Hunter Biden story. Clearly all users would benefit if they don't MITM 1:1 DM's.
Illogical for the private sector. Publicly funded research is probably more effective anyway though.
They're also very fast-paced so I don't think it would work
Data fed into models should be protrcted
Or if paracetamol works [1], which, given that it has a remarkably low lethal dose, really makes you wonder whether it should be sold at all.

[1] https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2021/214/7/efficacy-and-safet...
related: https://macwright.com/sites/polite.technology/preview

"""
Responding to feature requests

Once a project achieves a certain level of success, it will have users, and those users will have additional demands of the project in the form of feature requests. Experienced and empathetic users will state their feature requests precisely and kindly, but others will use an unfriendly tone or imprecise language that doesn't lend itself to a solution.

The maintainer does not owe their time to anyone
The maintainer must treat everyone with respect
Ignoring the first principle will lead to burnout: there are unlimited features to be requested and limited time to implement them. The sense of obligation quickly becomes an emotional burden.

Ignoring the second principle will damage the project

and reduce its chances of ever attracting additional contributors, which is the only way to succeed in the long term.

1.) Maintainers are the keepers of the project principles

2.) The goal of the software.

3.) The scope that defines problems that the software will try to fix and those it will not.

4.) The style of the project: which programming practices are used, which language.

5. The culture by which the project is managed.

6. Maintainers approve of changes to the software by these principles, and also manage discourse and which other contributors are allowed.

"""
One idea / suggestion: The original Ghost in the Shell.
It's partly because all the shortcuts that modern CPU's make to be faster also tend to make them slightly less than deterministic, and less useful for real-time interaction, which embedded CPU's need to do.
Fools laugh at what they don't understand. To begin with, a formal debate requires exploring arguments against the proposition for the side that is assigned to oppose it.

Of all the extinct species you might attempt to resurrect, a mammoth is about the least economical option because when things go wrong (as they do) every problem will be massively expensive. If it gets born successfully but develops a health problem that requires surgery of some sort? $10,000 minimum. There will likely be a string of very expensive problems.

Maybe it would be wiser to start with something a little more manageable, like an extinct dog breed - we understand dogs better than we do elephants, for obvious reasons. There's a long list of extinct animals, most of which are a lot more manageable than woolly mammoths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_species
That’s exactly what sustainable means: “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level”.

And even in the specific meaning you are pushing, the actual impact of hydro is questionable. Until you take a die hard position that no ecosystem whatsoever should be disturbed the benefit vs loss analysis is more than compelling.
> this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.

Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.

The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
yes. author of just-js here. a minimal build of a v8 based runtime weighs in around 23-25 MB on modern linux using latest v8. this gets bigger all the time, due to new functionality being added to JS/V8 and no easy way to decide what parts of JS to include. when i started working on just-js ~3.5 years ago i'm pretty sure it was only 15MB or so - can verify when i have time.
Sorry, I had the "handing a friend a ~cassette tape~ thumb drive is a crime" pounded into my skull since the 80's. What's your point?
I have a lot of sympathy for these viewpoints, but I too find the discourse around LLMs to be lacking when it comes to differentiation from humans.

"[LLMs] are just theft", "LLMs don't _know_ anything", "LLMs don't have a concept of truth", "LLMs aren't sentient", these are all statements that feel reasonable, but fall down when you consider that we don't have good scientific definitions for what knowledge is, what sentience is, what a sense of truth is, and so on.

I do think that LLMs are very far from human level, but I also think we need to understand that humans aren't anything special, we're just one point on many axes, animals are at other points, and LLMs are somewhere else and trending towards something more like where humans are at.
Florida man sets record for living underwater – AP News
I mean...

Just imagine living 2000 years ago and not ever imagining just the massive slice of inventions from 1900 to 2023 lol
Yea except this can and already is doing harm. Just you wait ;)
This. I am a British citizen living in the USA so I waited nine and half years in custody to go to trial.
> Introducing Intel One Mono, an expressive monospaced font family that’s built with clarity, legibility, and the needs of developers in mind.

This font has the worst clarity and legibility I've ever experienced. If you try to read code using this font, you'll break your eyes. You have to make a conscious effort to read every word. It gets tiresome really quickly.
Layoffs aren't the same as firing and specifically aren't for performance.
> Can this be a case of Simpson’s paradox? A movement will not resort to violence if there are non-violent ways for it to meet their goals.

According to the research cited in the book, the more violence the movement does, the more its chances drop.

If there is a movement where the 'core' is non-violent, but there are some 'adjacent' groups that use it (even against the wishes of the core), the the odds of success drop.

The reasoning seems to be that most movements start small, and the main way to success is to get more and more people on your side (or at least not against you). The moment any kind of violence starts occurring you start turning people off.
Sorry, you’re wrong. Go read about how deep neural nets work.
that's pedantic. switch 2 years to 5 years and the point still stands.
Some of the worst hires come through word-of-mouth referrals, too. That's how you get unqualified nepotism hires. In fact, networking can be thought of as a form of nepotism or cronyism (depending on how touchy a given person is about "nepotism" being applied to the manner in which they got their position). I know I'm likely alone in viewing such hiring practices - feelings over process - as signal of an impending collapse. I think it's a sound heuristic, though, at least for previously-established companies. If you're not connected to eminently-qualified potential hires (and you're probably overestimating the quality of your network), "hire my friends" is a sure way to end up with an increasingly incompetent workforce.
> I’m a big believer that people need to be more productive when they’re in person

Yet compensation will not be proportional. Part of the reason WFH is good is because workers are getting some options. The evidence is simple, business owners would, and will, prefer robots and AI over people. They want that kind of control. I'm pro capitalism but this is undeniably one of its greatest flaws, which is dehumanizing people in the name of competition and market value.
Smartphone Use Goes Up in City Parks, but Down in Forests
There are many use cases. For example, a known government officials giving a tip to a journalist without giving them perpetual phone access.

There is a lot more friction involved in getting an anonymous prepaid number, and them proving your identity. On Twitter those issues are solved.
I welcome dissonant viewpoints, but I'm going to have to object to this one on the grounds of all works being derivative. This is just... mass derivation basically, but so is a creative-writing human.

I also object to its clickbaity format of "[Contentions thing A] is not [completely unproven hyperbolic thing B]; it is [completely unproven hyperbolic thing C]".