skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bill Binney, technical director of NSA at that time, disagrees. He already had a system in place that heavily used filters to only collect what was needed and excluded citizens, which was called "ThinThread." Later, Gen Michael Hayden (NSA Director at the time) switched priorities and went after everything, called TrailBlazer. They got way too much data and couldn't sift through it, even though they had the info in their systems. Binney quit the day after 911 and later revealed the program and the Gov't went after him, along with Thomas Drake and others.

I'd watch the linked interview below. It gets really interesting when Binney talks about how much money and contracts were awarded to make TrailBlazer. All of the data storage, etc. Huge, massive contracts to keep it going. It also greatly increased their annual budget. ThinThread was internal, and fairly cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

A very good interview with Binney who discusses this and a lot more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
Book Review: The Domestic Revolution, by Ruth Goodman
So why did Amazon threaten to stop taking Visa cards? Do they not have a UK bank account?
Every time this topic comes up, many of the responses here are about how it is pointless to try and impose limits on social media (or anything for that matter) on children, as they will inevitably circumvent them or something like that. To me it comes off like mental gymnastics to excuse a failure to actually parent.
> young people watching make up videos is somehow worse

Well, this is a straw man. If you look at any statistic, they are hardly just watching make up videos...
Satanic panic happened in the US, UK and that's it. The ills of the modern internet are globally distributed.
Advertising can also be a 'profound risk' to youth, leading to the same issues that social media causes - insecurity, low self esteem, addiction to unhealthy products - and social media, business-wise is mostly just a platform that connects advertisers to their target audience.

I doubt the surgeon general would directly call this out in the USA, since we're one of the few countries that allows pharmaceutical corporations to market directly to the public (and social media seems to be a big part of their advertising budget).
What's your working experience with Elm?
I think a better analogy would be to compare React frameworks to the iPhone, everything works nicely and a lot of choices have been made for you.

React itself is just a really good JS library, not a full opinionated framework. I made the choice to use React because it was possible to add individual interactive components to an ASP.NET Razor MPA without rewriting the whole thing. Gradually React takes over more and more functionality, necessitating a need for a framework, and then we get the iPhone experience.
>surely if this is starting to show signs of success Alphabet just swoops in and buys up Uber

It's too late for that. The regulatory pendulum for mergers like this is swinging the other way. The public was indifferent to big tech gobbling up the competition when times were good. Now that money costs money again, people with normal (i.e., not overpaid tech) salaries are feeling the squeeze, which means politicians need a cause that makes their voters feel like they're fighting for them. The giants must be punished.
Uber is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web scraper.
What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)
Nobody care about people with old desktop. Update your shit!
This is true only if you keep your funds in an exchange instead of your own wallet.
I know what lots of things are that have yet to be invented. Space elevators and their variations, for example.
Not being on Tiktok is not social isolation nor is it mentally devastating. I think many here are projecting their own addictions when they make these hyperbolic assertions.
I love the advertising on some of the crock pot or instant pot packets you can find in the store. It'll say like "ten minute prep time!" (ignoring the 4-8 hour cook time) or the instant pot one will say "ready in 5 minutes" when that means the pressure cooker will cook at high pressure for 5 minutes, but it can take 5-10 minutes to heat up to that point.

Time is an illusion.
IIRC, if you don't choose one, no DE is installed at all.
"It’s a process of playing a riff, figuring out the comfortable tempo and time signature, setting it in Reaper, then playing along to it until there’s a change and doing it again."

Not sure it helps, but you can use a tempo map in Reaper to basically warp the grid to your audio. In Classical and Romantic music where Tempo Rubato is pretty common this is a life-saver.
It's... interesting... to note that the example of a text in ithkuil takes up about as much space as the normal English text, due to how large ithkuil has to be written compared to regular text.
Anthropic raises $450M to build next-gen AI assistants
Show HN: An AppleTV App for Sonos
Hi HN,

Apologies in advance for no mention of LLMs, novel Dark Matter theories, or any Rust code :-)

We're SONOS and AppleTV users that could never quite understand why nobody had written a tvOS app to control a SONOS system from an Apple TV. So, knowing zero Swift, we set out a few months ago to try and put something together. Turned out to be a somewhat steeper learning curve than we expected. SwiftUI is still relatively new, and support materials are dominantly focused on iOS. There are very few tvOS examples out there, and some stuff just doesn't exist at all (i.e. where is in-app subscription management for tvOS?).

Also, the official SONOS API involved a lot more than we were expecting at the outset. Not just things like OATH, but the need to build out some server infrastructure and web socket connectivity so we can push back device state changes from SONOS' servers to a given user's running app.

Our released app is not crippled in any way and is 100% free to try (a modest subscription is required after 14 days). There's a lot of functionality that could still be added (see, for example, https://sitnos.com/#roadmap ), but at this point what we really need is feedback. Does it work on your system? In a constrained world of just swipes and clicks, is there a better way for us to present an interface? Should we focus next on search? On managing/editing playlists? On more cross-service discovery? Should we abandon the whole effort as hopelessly misguided?

Any and all comments/thoughts/feedback really gratefully appreciated.
There are likely similar things already in some countries. I know Finland has IT-ehdot (IT-terms), they are made by a group of organizations (the Finland Chamber of Commerce, Technology Industries of Finland, Finnish Association of Purchasing and Logistics LOGY, Finnish Information Processing Association TIVIA and the Finnish Software and E-business Association) though they are not free. They tend to get updated every 4-5 years.

The attachments (essentially similar to the terms in Common Paper) are readable in English at https://it-ehdot.fi/tutustu-ehtoihin/ ("ENGLANNIKSI" tab), but the agreement template (similar to the cover letter) requires buying them.
> so in a sense this is an argument that we already have rogue AI

Yes. Science fiction is pretty much 100% about things that have already happened.

Colonization by aliens? Colonization by Europeans.

Robot slave uprisings? Human slave uprisings.

AIs taking over the world? Capitalism taking over the world.

Once you realize that sci-fi has to be about things that have already happened for writers to be able to write convincingly about it, it's hard to unsee. It's all just "what if the past but in the future???"
Same for cats:

wildcats, such as the species Felis lybica, began exploiting new resources offered by human environments, such as a proliferation of rodents in grain stores. These cats were tolerated by people, supporting their natural evolution to deviate further from their wild counterparts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication#Cats
Microsoft announces Windows Copilot, an AI ‘personal assistant’ for Windows 11
> how toxic research culture is

…at some labs. There’re many-many places with good PIs, decent funding, retreats, events, etc. I don’t get why people paint it as black and white.
The problem is that virtually all languages abuse exceptions and use them for very much expected control flow and business logic. But exceptions should be just that, exceptional. Eg when you make a db call, the db not responding is not exceptional. Nor is not finding the user you're looking for. Those are 100% within the range of expectable outcomes for a db call.

fun findUser(userId: String) : Either<Error, User>

is MUCH simpler and more powerful than

fun findUser(userId: String) //haha, I can actually throw exceptions that aren't in this signature, or return null (wat)
>wouldn't it be plausible for other models to step in, contain, and mitigate the damage?

Conversely you're making an argument to maintenance of that status quo. It makes zero sense that would happen.

As analogy lets imagine a nice balanced ecosystem with lots of plants and flowers and insects and animals that's been going on for a while. Then suddenly you drop Kudzu in it and it begins spreading like wildfire and quickly puts pressure on at risk plant and insect species. You release another insect that eats Kudzu only to try to reduce the amount of it, but in the time it takes the insect to breed up to numbers to combat the Kudzu, it's spread even further and wiped a few species out, and now is putting pressure on the larger animals that cannot eat the Kudzu.

In natural environments you don't really ever get your old ecosystem back, something are just gone and cannot be supported any longer, and there is a new balance between competeory species. AI is a potential competeory species to humans. Escalation between AI systems present a far larger risk to humans than direct AI versus Human actions in my line of thought.
If anything, with increasing automation we need more PhD students and more research being done.

The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.
It was claimed that any law that was passed whether or not it was technically possible was de facto good.
To take a crack at the old chestnut, masking didn’t do anything productive.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/02/covid-mas...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...

It did however appear to retard social skills development in children. It’s hard to find a definitive argument.
Beej's System V IPC Guide
Why not? It seems to work fine in rain - as evidenced by all the "bomb cyclones" in San Francisco this past rainy season. There are a lot of places they can go that don't have snow.
I have been on some of these Discords.

Do you remember the comments sections on torrent links, where people ask questions about things that were already explained in the torrent's readme? Discord is like that; people don't bother searching and ask the same things over and over.
That’s true. Perhaps using the LLM approach you could extract a deterministic selector, and notify the users if it changes in some meaningful way.
Reddit will never die like Digg did, but also it already has. When Digg died, it was still primarily a news site, and the community was smaller and more cohesive.

Reddit is now what Forumer used to be and a less reactionary NextDoor if you're in at least a medium-sized city. Today there was a loud boom in my city and the first place I heard about it was the local subreddit. Digg never had that. Nor did it have the special-interest boards (including pornography). Reddit also functions as the best independent product reviews site — my back owes plenty to /r/Mattress.

But as a news and politics site, it's basically dead. If you use any reasonably independent subreddits, people will be talking about how awful the "defaults" are. People prefer Discord for video games and they join filter-bubble communities for politics. The all-time top posts on /r/news are mostly more than two years old. The same is true of /r/worldnews and /r/politics — in the former case, some minor Hungarian drama from years ago outshines every single thread about the Russo-Ukrainian War.
I think the difference is we found that on our own. Maybe you showed a friend or two. Maybe you were the one to introduce your friends to ICQ.

But those things are nothing like the hyper connected hyper expectations of being constantly online and being part of “current thing”.

I get your goals, but I’m not sure as parents we can compete with an absolutely all encompassing relationship with a screen, where the best in the brightest in the world are working constantly to make sure your kids sees x, believes y, repeats z.

There is a strong chance that the only way to win is to not play.
Probably a lot like Simcity 2000 Network Edition.
Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars or running their own data centers.
There's something to be said for it, but you have to plan ahead; most people who are starting out trying to cook are very bad at planning ahead.

A cookbook that focused on "here's stuff you can pre-prep that can be used in multiple meals" would be nice.
Technically xor is a special case of erasure coding.
Science conference + speed dating + Shark Tank = Scialog
Reflections on what I’ve learned as a Scialog: Advancing BioImaging fellow over the past three years.
Fluency in Ithkuil is probably impossible practically speaking. John Quijada himself doesn't consider himself fluent.

I actually think LLMs trained on conlangs is a super cool idea, but you'd need a huge corpus to do that. Kind of a bootstrapping problem.
Very interesting points. Thanks for taking the time to share.
They kind of did. Mammoths and such existed for a very long time and it seemed like life on earth was big, not as big as in the time of the dinosaurs, but a lot of creatures were getting quite large akin to them.

Humans then left Africa and killed them all off. Our environmental niche seems to be perfect for hunting and killing big grazers.

It's our world now!
> Really shows how ill the "App Store" model is when a company like Nintendo who has an entire hardware empire off selling high quality non-exploitative games can't make money on it without resorting to gambling industry tactics like the other low quality apps/games on there.

Or they're just greedy. They make tons of money running their own walled gardens.
That video looks amazing with respect to all that local integration. I’m not sure if I’ll work that well. But well, will see.
Hope to see a Posix IPC version as Posix IPC is more widely used nowadays.
It came around.

> The latest round of layoffs at Facebook parent company Meta is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/21/23692515/tech-worke...
I mean that the set of systems that you can build which require neither custodial trust nor have single points of failure is increasing.

To name a few instances of this: This is old news, but I remember when zcash introduced halo and got rid of trusted setup--that's a legit increase in what's possible. NFT's as ownership of digital assets is maybe a silly application of the tech, but the sort of uniqueness constraint that they enforce is useful in centralized databases and I expect it'll find a similar niche in the distributed systems of the future. TCL's that use token price to encourage curation appear to be a non-starter, but coupled with a web of trust I think we can use the same concept to have consensus on a wide variety of useful things.

Their use as money? Sure, wildly inconvenient. But like... duh. Emulated systems are slower than ones running on bare metal because you have to embrace the constraints of both systems--it's the same with the use of cryptocurrencies within the existing financial system.

The point was never to make something that's just as good as traditional money--why bother? The point is to make traditional money obsolete in favor of something else. Something whose rules matter not because the guy who wrote them own has a gun, but because people consent to participate based on their merits.

> how should we determine which of these fake currencies actually have value and which don't?

By their side effects. If you value the endless consumption of electricity and zero sum games, you should value bitcoin. If you value politicians playing chicken over the debt ceiling, you should value USD. As it stands, the options are all pretty bad, but the ability to craft new ones is getting better and the cancer that our current one has is getting worse, so eventually there will be something worth switching to.
I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user.

The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.

The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.

Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".

The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.
It's already heavily against Nintendo's DNA to produce for platforms that aren't their own[1]. They are very much like Apple in that respect. Given that the mobile thing would have had to be tremendously beneficial to avoid the knife.

So you are very right, this is probably the end for Nintendo's mobile gaming efforts.

[1]: The book "Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America" by Jeff Ryan was incredibly fascinating if you're interested in the history and "inside story" of Nintendo in their early days. Can't recommend enough. Narrated by the great Ray Porter, and DRM free on Downpour: https://www.downpour.com/super-mario?sp=19981
asking simple, low effort questions -- "hey how do I log into [this new system]"
-- is as simple as leaning into a room or over a cube, but with remote you have to poke someone.

in person you just drag a laptop over but remote you have a call, share a screen, carve out time. not necessarily more disruptive, but sure feels like more effort, and now involves multiple apps sucking up bandwidth and potentially logging everything you say.
IIRC those rumors were post Flemming and started in the Bob Rock era.

And Justice For All was his last album at the helm and that was 1988 still to early to do that sort of thing digitally (ProTools came out in the early 90s) and no one is hand cutting tape for each beat. Even the Black Album is still early for that level of manipulation in 1991.

Which isn't to say he didn't use a click or many many takes and tracks to help ...
Any specifics about generational improvements and hardware are moot without a reference point for total cost (hence why I brought up cost for a single human level intelligence)

To put it another way: the specifics about hardware don’t matter at all. All that matters is the dollars required to complete tasks. If Russia can have the best cyberwar unit in the world for a few million by ignoring an AI treaty, they will do so. If the cost is a few trillion, they will not violate the AI treaty because they don’t have a few trillion to spend on cyberwar and could still have a world class cyberwar unit for orders of magnitude cheaper. Then, the AI treaty is unnecessary: the economics already determine the outcome. The treaty only makes sense if the cost of human labor and the cost of AI labor are very coincidentally nearly the same.

> Your limited to 2 eyes attached to your body and a tiny area of focus they provide. Again, why would an AI have such tiny input limits?

A human organization is not limited in this manner. You can scale up human personnel at cost as well. You might expect that humans scale suboptimally (organizations suck at utilizing labor) but you can build this into your model while projecting total cost of human labor required.
"I can tell you with confidence they have not really put effort into weather"

Ah, the Internet, where people who know absolutely nothing about a topic make bold assertions about it with 100% confidence.

https://blog.waymo.com/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-weather-re...
Yeah true, and yeah hopefully. The politics on this have gotten a little out of control but that seems pretty levelheaded.
> Social media upturns traditional government controlled information transmission. E.g. the US government built its case for the Iraq War partly on fake information run by the NYT (by the currently media-respected journalist Judith Miller).

I agree with much of this: the PR foundation for the war in Iraq was based on cherry-picked information and a large degree of media manipulation. However, the media outlets also were not blameless; there is considerable fault to go around. Many journalists were too trusting. Knight-Ridder may have been the only major journalism team to get it right. (Fair?)

> Control of information transmission by attempting to FUD alternative means is a way to consolidate opinions - a way to manufacture consent.

As a method, yes. The logic is sound. But to prove it happens, we must investigate. When it is a large explanatory factor? In what specific situations?

I agree it applied to the Bush administration’s handling of claims of WMD in Iraq.

But I’m not clear on how it applies to the social media guidance for children.

I think it would be ‘reasonable’ for social media companies to lobby public health officials to water down the government criticism of them. (But I’m not clear if this is along the lines you are thinking.)

To put a fine point on it: Are you claiming that U.S. public health authorities are seeking (or under pressure) to “manufacture consent” broadly, in this sense; namely, to counter social media only because it challenge and undermines government information?

Are you saying U.S. government attempts to “manufacture consent” only for selfish purposes (to control the dissemination of information), without caring about the veracity of such social media claims?

Another motivation is more plausible: public health officials intend to protect public health, (as constrained by the powers their agencies have)?

A lot of social media information suffers from being false and misleading. It is a proper role of government to have official channels to put out vetted information. Ideally, these channels would be true and well supported by evidence.

We can and should be skeptical of such official advice, but it should be treated seriously and be given some weight.

We also must be skeptical of claims of a broad motivation to “control information” overrides a public health agency’s primary professional responsibility.

Even if there is significant motivation, where is the ability? The federal bureaucracy is quite sprawling and hard to control. Such attempts to do often lead to resignations, legal battles, and/or leaks.

…

I might even agree with the ethics that suggest getting masks to key personnel is worth some degree of public deception. I’m not sure. A lot of disaster and emergency triage involves tough choices. When we’re acting ideally, public officials don’t have to lie or mislead.

In any case, the effect of deception is a loss of trust.