skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point at which the Chinese room fails for me when trying to describe GPT is when I make up a world with certain rules for it and have GPT do a task in that world using those rules.

The idea that there's a lookup table somewhere seems to fail in these situations - or rather that if there's a lookup table it is astronomically large compared to the size of the model.

In writing this I was thinking about the classic wolf, goat and cabbage problem which has been well studied. What about Wizards, Warriors and Priests with a set of powers?

Imagine a universe where there are three types of people: wizards, warriors, and priests. Wizards can open a portal that allows two people to go through at a time, but they cannot go through the portal themselves. Priests can summon people from other locations to their location or teleport to the location of another person. Warriors cannot teleport or summon, but may be teleported or summoned by others.
---
Given four wizards, a priest, and a warrior - what are the necessary steps to move them all to a new location?

The when GPT answers that, it doesn't seem reasonable that it has been trained on that type of data or problem (in the abstract) or that according to the Chinese room problem there's a lookup table such that when you get that text you can look up the answer for it and generate an answer (that seems to have been reasoned out - it is also interesting to then tweak the problem domain and have it create a new response ("wizards can only open one portal").

The Chinese room is ok enough to say "nope, that doesn't need consciousness" for the chatbots of old that are very much a parse / lookup / response style approach. Even the digital assistants of Siri, Alexa, and Google are acceptable with that model.

But with GPT-4 that it can't be explained with the Chinese room... as I said, that's interesting. It doesn't mean that GPT-4 is conscious (I would tend to argue against it but I don't have a good definition of consciousness to argue from) its just that one can't say that GPT-4 isn't conscious using the Chinese room to describe its abilities.

The Frankenstein fear, I believe, is two part. First, there's the "it's coming for our jobs" part of automation and robots. There's also an existential fear that it is harder and harder to say what makes us human and separates us from machine. That gets very much into questions that come into conflict with many individuals identity and the value of knowledge. If those questions haven't been considered before or if you are coming from a rigid worldview where the possible new answers are coming into conflict with them - the LLM can be quite frightening.
This would be a more compelling summation if you could accompany it with a case for how Bakhmut was more important strategically than Kherson, whose strategic importance seems pretty obvious even to a layperson, which Russia was fiercely committed to holding, and which Ukraine took through a campaign of industrial warfare.
No, the person that invented the smiley face drawing is the most faked :)
So now we agree that asking about private messages is not a “stupid” question?

And then if they do e2e encryption where the EU can’t get to it, that runs afoul of another proposed EU regulation.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-violation-priv...
The water used to irrigate crops has dissolved minerals in it. As the water is taken up by plants (or evaporated), it leaves those minerals behind. This then raises the salinity of the soil. Eventually, the soil becomes too salty/mineral encrusted to support crops. This happened in the Middle East. What is now Iraq used to be the main grain growing region of the Middle East several thousand years ago. Over time, the salt in the soil rose to the level that wheat could not grow, but barley could. Eventually, the soil became too salty for barley. Today, some of the Iraqi desert shines in sunlight because of the salt crystals. It has never recovered and will never recover. California is progressing faster.

Selenium is one of the minerals that ends up in the runoff of Californian agriculture. In some coastal areas, the selenium content is so high that bird eggs laid by wildlife never harden. Or the birth defects are so high that the hatchlings don't live.
I fail to understand the negative votes (above), Dell did and does exactly what is attributed to Walmart and others in this thread. It is known among manufacturers but held in secrecy like so much in that business. Source: multiple years in used computer industry in California
This actually makes me feel optimistic. An org like Wikimedia being able to resist the attempt to subvert their mission to "social justice" instead of doing what it was created to do, sounds great. So many other orgs have fallen to the same and turned into a mockery of their former selves...
This is a fun little bite-sized post, but I wish it tackled more of the nitty-gritty.

Does anyone know of any write-ups on the architecture of early-90s Windows that are more in depth, now that this has whet my appetite? (Or other OSes of the era, come to think of it?)
The twitter algorithm will no longer give biased search results once this pull request is accepted.
Missing an address of the methodological conceits. Well, whitewashing them altogether via statements like "Robust statistical associations". Heavy correlation can seem to suggest a causal relationship which is actually masking a complex driver which defies our (current) intuitive or even critical understanding. If you can't explain the physiological state or process which connects particular "genetic variants" with particular "brain-related traits", there might not be a connection.
Be a defense contractor, making military widgets.

Fed.gov asks you to ramp up production from 100 military widgets a month to 500.

You are running your assembly line 6 hours a day to make 100 a month, with maintenance after hours.

You put on 2 more shifts, and run 3 different 8-hour shifts. An MBA would say you are better utilizing your capital investment in your assembly line, and are better utilizing your fixed overhead (e.g., rent on the manufacturing plant.) The guy who fixes the drill press is worried about the lack of maintenance and that burning smell from the drill press' drive belt. So you buy another drill press on credit, with no guarantee that this whole Ukraine thing will not be over tomorrow. You can not just buy another drill press. Your contract says you get partial reimbursement if it's "Made in America." You could get a deal if you could wait for delivery, but you need it tonight, so you send a gopher to Elliot's Hardware with your debit card and instructions to do his best, but to come back with a big bad drill press no matter what.

Your HR people spent the money to recruit a bunch of FNGs (F#$@% New Guys) and are now trying to get every competent employee to change shifts and to train FNGs. This means extra pay to the competent people who can train someone. Adding more people to a late project makes it later, for a while.

Your production slows and you are burning cash. QA has scrapping most of what you produce. As you increase your orders from your suppliers, they are going a something similar ramp-up, and know you have no choice, so they are raising their prices.

You know people are dying, and are spending cash to make this work. You think of that Ukrainian girl in your kid's class at school. She has the meanest face you've ever seen on a kid that age. You literally just bet your company's future on the orders continuing for a minimum of 2 more months, with tears in your eyes. People are dying. In the past, Fed.gov sometimes came through and paid for your effort, and sometimes they screwed you. It's way too common for Fed.gov to cancel orders and expect that since they cancelled the order before it was delivered that they should not pay anything.

Then the lamestream noise media at 60 minutes runs a story accusing you of price gouging.

I've been there, I've done that, and I'm pretty sure I've been blamed for selling some $600 hammers. If you need it now and lives are on the line, I can spend money to get it sooner, but that is going to be expensive. The alternative is January, 1942 when American kids were training with brooms because they did not have enough rifles.

We need to be mass producing missile frigates, oil-tanker-conversions as escort carriers, 1,000s of F35s, 1,000s of F22s, renovating every single plane in the Bone Yard that can be turned into a drone, and sending $1 Billion a month to SpaceX to get the StarShip operational for the High Frontier. It's not going to happen.

/rant
I've tried to search a bit and all I can find are statistics on new business formation in the USA which shows a 2x rate than 10 years ago - twice more businesses started per year. This doesn't mean there isn't more consolidation at the top, but do you have any link to statistics showing less competition?
I tried ChatGPT 3.5 against Google Translate, translating English to Greek, my native language, and they perform almost the same. The text was difficult text of science fiction, fantasy stuff and the results were tolerable. Roughly 50% of the text had to be manually rewritten.

Maybe for more casual sentences and not so difficult text, they perform better, i haven't tried. Anyways, they are both better than nothing.
> the 2020 admin threw more money at the problem than was necessary, and did it in the second form

Yes, the Covid stimulus was an experiment in "helicopter money", with a predictable response in price, especially in light of concurrent supply-chain issues.

> it's probably still much better than having thrown too little at the problem would've been

No, some interventions leave things worse off than it would have been without. When it comes to the public's money, and truly stupendous amounts of it at 25% of GDP, the bar has to be a lot higher than "eh, probably better". I suppose it's a job for economists and historians in the future to study this, but one wonders if there is some relationship between the amount of Covid stimulus response and the recent inflation, and how persistent it would be in the years to come.
> I asked my boss for a raise today and he rejected it. It's a bit overdue and I'm paid slightly below market.

I'm sorry to hear that.

> I could probably find a new better paid job in a few weeks, but I don't really want to quit, the team is nice, I kinda like this work environment, it's a full remote gig with decent hours.

It sounds like there are real plusses to your current position, yet you are nonplussed. Would you truly be considering interviewing elsewhere if you felt fully satisfied with your current position?

> I've been thinking about interviewing for jobs that I don't plan on getting, just to get a better offer and force my boss hand, does that sound like a decent idea?

Generally, one may not force a superior's hand, at least not without real possibility of resentment and political instability. If you're going to the trouble of interviewing, wouldn't it be worthwhile to consider your options?

> What do you usually do in this kind of situation?

If I were in this situation, I would certainly feel under-appreciated at the very least. I would seriously consider my options, and I would not make any decision in haste. Nor would I take too long to decide. Carpe diem.

What would I have to lose by interviewing? Wouldn't having more options to choose from be advantageous, regardless of which option I were to choose? Optionality is valuable.

Frankly, if I were in your position and I were to have an outside offer in hand, I would not volunteer that information to my boss to elicit a counter offer. I would just leave. After all, he already made it known how much -- or how little -- he thinks I'm worth by rejecting my proposed raise in the first place. Even if he were to match the offer, would he really think that I'm worth it? How might it affect me in the long term if I were to stay, with or without the raise?

Best of luck, and I hope things go as well as they can for you.
A city files a charter with the state to be recognized as a city. A business files a charter with the same state (not a city) to be recognized as a business. It's like instantiating the same base class, but extending each one with specific properties that identify them as different objects.

Whether it is A->B or B->A doesn't really matter. It's all a method of operating as a defined entity to the state with minor differences. It would not be hard to define something like Apple with it's corporate campus as a city. That would blur the lines pretty significantly. They could create an actual Apple Police. I'm guessing that would do some heads in.
I asked a follow-up question:

Where did Person get the spoon from?

ChatGPT's answer:

I apologize for the oversight. Here is the corrected version, including the step to get the spoon:

Person: {The tea is ready. I need a spoon to stir it.} Get a spoon from the kitchen drawer.
Computer: You have taken a spoon from the kitchen drawer.

Person: {Now I can stir my tea.} Stir the tea with the spoon.
Computer: You have stirred the tea with the spoon.

Person: {Time to enjoy my tea!}
The global view to put it into context:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
The "spike" was when the metrics changed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/h6_technical_qa.h...
Yep... you spend hours messing around with docker containers and debugging all the weird build errors.

I am less familiar with storing data in a db (for ml hosting concerns), but I'd imagine it would add overhead (as opposed to accessing files on disk).

You also have to deal with hosting a db and configuring the schema.
> speaks to the truth of the archetype

The archetype claims that success breeds success, and this is categorically false, apart from a few exceptions (e.g. monopolies, collusion, etc.). The fact that even literally the richest person on the planet couldn't make a cellphone project (that he himself spearheaded) successful is a clear counter-example to the archetype. Your point that he didn't go broke afterwards is imo unrelated. I will agree that success definitely lowers risk profiles, but does not necessarily impact future success.
> But maybe they don't have to do much if anything, since Taiwan will be far, far harder to resupply than Ukraine.

It's also harder to invade, what with the lack of land routes, and there is a reason for the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership and the US plan to equip sone of its existing ballistic missile subs with new high-speed, long-range, conventional precision weaponry starting within 5 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say and I wouldn't go that far. But it's pretty straightforward to say, yes, older people like change less than younger people, even if they aren't fanatics.
> we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information).

Not exactly true - the "Proxy Protocol" [1] was invented for that purpose. Wikipedia as an entity should be large enough to ask Apple if they can implement support for it - the question is if they want to.

[1] https://www.haproxy.com/documentation/hapee/latest/load-bala...
I’ve never had that happen but it will act a bit weird if the webpage thinks you’re logged in but you’re not. Check cookies and passwords or use the command line.

Or install openwrt.
> If you see lots of positive or misdrecting comments, it's not necessarily a coincidence (imo).

And right there the topic drowns in whataboutisms before it disappears from the frontpage.
Texas A&M Team Studying Effects of Crypto Mining on the Texas Power Grid
So are they banning VPN and SSL too? Those are not fringe techniques.
https://archive.is/CylSl
I'll be the first to agree that a lot of books in topics like business strategy are too long. But IMO the ideal length is probably more like 100 pages than a magazine article much less a 1,000 word blog post or a listicle. Context, examples, background, etc. all add to a basic idea in a way that makes it easier to remember and understand.
Early MacOS did this with handles (basically pointers to pointers.) You'd lock them to read/write and when they were unlocked, the OS was free to move the underlying memory and change the pointer in the handle.
I just wanted to test out the TTS locally on a powerful Ubuntu 22.04 machine, but the process for setting it up seems pretty broken and poorly documented. After 20 minutes of trying I finally gave up since I couldn't get the VITS dependency to build (despite having a fully updated machine with all required compilers). It seems like they never really bother to see if the stuff works on a fresh machine starting from scratch. Somehow for my own projects I'm always able to start from a fresh git clone and then directly install everything using this block of code:

```
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install wheel
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

But whenever I try using these complicated ML models, it's usually an exercise in futility and endless mucking around with conda and other nonsense. It ends up not being worth it and I just move on. But it does feel like it doesn't need to be like this.
None at the moment, hopefully. At this moment a single nuke would kill more people than died so far in the war.
I was stressed about my relationship with my wife so I got a second one. This advice did not decrease my stress.
SSRIs are preferred because better tolerability and safety compensate for worse efficacy.[1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK67142/
> "Average human level" is pretty boring though.

It seems you have the wrong idea of what is being conveyed, or what average human intelligence is. It isn't about being able to do math. It is being able to invent, mimic quickly, abstract, memorize, specialize, and generalize. There's a reason humans have occupied every continent of the earth and even areas outside. It's far more than being able to do arithmetic or playing chess. This just all seems unimpressive to us because it is normal, to us. But this certainly isn't normal if we look outside ourselves. Yes, there's intelligence in many lifeforms, even ants, but there is some ineffable or difficult to express uniqueness to human intelligence (specifically in its generality) that is being referenced here.

To put it one way, a group of machines that could think at the level of an average teenager (or even lower) but able to do so 100x faster would probably outmatch a group of human scientists in being able to solve complex and novel math problems. This isn't "average human level" but below. "Average human level" is just a shortcut term for this ineffable description of the _capacity_ to generalize and adapt so well. Because we don't even have a fucking definition of intelligence.
Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors [pdf]
The important part is in the parens at the end of course:

> There can be a temptation to learn lots of fancy words and to use them in fancy sentences without being able to say precisely what you mean. You should feel free to do that, but you should always feel a pang of guilt when you do.

GPT - as far as we know - feels no guilt pangs whatsoever.
Didn't WhatsApp switch to Signal's protocol, or is that just the encryption layer?
Reconciling schemas -> this will be hard. We're starting with just two data models (Documents and Conversations) that are relatively universal, but there's no way to avoid a lossy transformation from Notion because things like tables and embeds aren't neatly captured as a Document without making our data models just as complex. I suspect LLMs can help finding a good balance between generalization/depth since they're very good at automating work that typically requires a lot of customization.

Data syncs -> If the source doesn't offer webhooks, we just poll daily, do a diff on our side, and send the updated data to our customer. I'm not aware of any way to avoid polling when webhooks aren't available, but we plan to do the polling ourselves so we can provide a webhook like experience for customers.
Is there an easy way to off-board the persistent disk to cheaper machines when you don't need the gpus?

Like imagine, setting up and installing everything with the gpu attached, but when you're not using the gpu or all the cpu cores, you can disconnect them.

If you have docs on how to do this, please let me know.
Chuckling to myself thinking about someone obsessively optimizing the speed at which they read books with titles like "In It To Win It!", "The Pro Inside You!", "You can do ANYTHING!" "10 Chapters to SUPERCHARGE Your Career."

Real nonfiction books are better not to skim. Pick better books.
This is so cool.

We have a lot of ants in our place at the moment and they're fascinating to watch. They do seem to solve problems and even show empathy towards each other. Sadly one was badly injured the other day and two other ants tried to come to the rescue, it was beautiful and sad to watch.
It’s fairly understandable that they collect user data and I don’t care about that really.
Using free services always comes with some personal info extractions.
ZIRP wasn’t without inflation, it was just limited to financial assets - look at housing supply worldwide, equities, bonds, art, etc etc. This became a problem in the latest round of money printing when that inflation finally spread into CPI and affected food and other necessities (though housing is a necessity and people have been screaming about that for two decades as it continued to rocket higher…)
There's nothing particularly special about Esperanto in that regard compared to natural languages that it is modelled after.
Look for another job, but do not present it to your employer.

I think you should always be interviewing. See what you're worth, see what the climate is like, hone your interviewing skills for the next time you *need* to interview, and maybe get a better offer at a more interesting place.

But never ever present any kind of alternate offer to your manager, or let them know you've interviewed. This is equivalent to asking them to beat a counteroffer, and this will almost always end in disaster.

Best case scenario: You get the raise, but the next time there are general raises you will be passed over. After all, you already got your raise.

Middle case scenario: You don't get your raise. If the threat was idle then you stay where you were at the pay you had, but there will be general resentment. You will get to work on less interesting things and your opinion will be less heard. You will be sidelined in your role because you were even considering looking outside the company. Eventually you'll want to leave anyway.

Worst case scenario: Your company will match or even beat the offer. They will spend the next couple months pairing you with other engineers who will quietly learn what you're doing, and then once the other position has been rejected and filled you will get laid off. Or fired for cause. It isn't hard to engineer enough to argue that, and even if you're fired without cause unemployment doesn't go very far.
In other words, companies raise prices because they can. Businesses being profit-maximizers are hardly anything new. What is novel about "greed"flation is that it introduces the notion that companies are taking advantage of people's expectations that prices will rise, causing inflation. The question is, is this a short-term phenomena (as with most inefficiencies caused by information asymmetries), or will these abnormal increases last? it's hard to say, as it is dealing with behavioral economics.
Government spending on production is usually mis-allocation, because if it was productive a private company would be already doing it. If it's a subsidy to a private company doing it, it isn't productive, either.
It did drop 30 points from 9:30 to 10am. But it also did that just last Friday, and many times before that.