skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are NOT millions of people in “camps” in China, that’s a bizarre claim made by some so called researchers like Adrian Zenz. 1000s or 10,000s at most. And do you even know what the rationale for these so called “camps” are for?
Also mentioned in the post; doesn’t work well in practice
There's literally an algorithm that ranks up paid blue tick messages above others. How is that neutral?

The blue tick vitriol at the top of any thread has really turned me off reading any comments at all.
I first saw this painting in the intro to Melancholia, by Lars von Trier. I’ve had it as my desktop background for years. It reminds me a lot of the feeling of watching all your neighbors shovel after a snowstorm. Funny that the movie communicates an unsettling and existential story that is the opposite of cosy.
> I wonder how people survived freezing weather before HVAC systems.

Their houses were built differently, for one.
People from hundreds of years ago may find many things we do abhorrent too. Does that mean we are wrong and they are right?
I wonder also how much obesity plays a role in this. Food also acts as a stimulant. It's possible people are eating more to be more productive, to meet the demands of work. All companies seem to have cafeterias full of free sugary snacks and sugary drinks for employees.
From my experience with regular power outages in the Seattle metropolitan area, your fridge will last 24 hours after the power goes out, if you don't open the door.

Your water heater will provide water hot enough for a quick shower for a couple days.
> Look at the fact that they have taken Bakhmut. So maybe that is the limit of Russian ability or maybe if Ukraine can't stop them taking Bakhmut, there isn't a line where Ukraine can suddenly stop them.

Bakhmut was taken by Wagner, who perform much better than the regular Russian armed forces at least in this conflict.

And even then it still cost them 50k-100k causalities just for Bakhmut.

Wagner have left Ukraine entirely now. It remains to be seen if Russia can hold Bakhmut if it gets attacked.
> If the data shows members with annual checkups have better health outcomes on average than members without annual checkups, that is something that's relatively cheap and easy to do with potentially significant impact.

That or it's yet another example of selection bias. There have been so so many things like this where the epidemiological data shows a correlation with health, but there isn't actually a causal link. For example, annual checkups might correlate with better health because it's a more common behavior among people who can afford to do it, and wealthier people tend to be healthier.
I use Wasabi at $4.99 per month for 1TB and backup using borg and rclone. I serve only a few files, so I don't know the egress limitations.
You're not using a sat phone anywhere in those kinds of buildings ever. Those phones are hard enough to use standing in an open field looking at a clear sky while the sats are passing directly overhead.
If that is what the annual is, then it's probably no wonder why they aren't helpful.
Generate profit by reducing cost via better health of the population? I'm surprised you didn't make that connection?
How many are bots being crafted into sockpuppet accounts to silence damaging information.
Color can definitely aid in understanding when it’s used with consistency. When it’s inconsistent, it becomes an impediment to understanding. The terminal is a place where you have lots of different small tools that you are using in conjunction. Even if each author uses color with consistency in their tool, the full collection of tools will be inconsistent with one another.

A hypothetical example: imagine syntax highlighting where strings are green, function names are blue, and comments are gray when you’re inside a function definition… but strings are green, function names are red, and comments are gray when you’re inside a lambda/closure/anonymous function definition… but strings are gray, function names are red, and comments are a syntax error when you’re in a string interpolation expression. In the terminal, each of those different contexts is likely to be a different tool. The author of the lambda highlighter arguably made a non-standard choice but they close PRs about this issue with “wontfix” because it invites too much bikeshedding. The author of the “string interpolation” tool wanted their tool to differentiate between the template/parent string and a string that happens to be part of the expression being interpolated. The string interpolation tool’s author has a good reason for their choice and their tool is very consistent about it, it even has a black magick regex incantation that gets arbitrarily nested cases correct. Each author has a good point and they’re all internally consistent, but when you are plugging them all together into a general purpose highlighter it still ends up inconsistent for you.

Or a real-world example: at the machining workshop, we have a painting cabinet filled with spray cans and paint tins of different bases. We don’t paint our products - that cabinet exists because whenever a new set of tools is brought to the shop, we paint all the flathead screwdriver handles yellow, all the Phillips-head screwdriver handles red, the Allen keys get a red band if they’re Imperial, a blue band if they’re metric, the wrenches likewise get red for Imperial, blue for metric, and so on. The standardized colors make it much easier to grab the right tool quickly, but we can’t rely on tool manufacturers to all globally standardize on colors since some of them have other constraints that we don’t care about (if they manufacture insulated screwdrivers for electricians as well, they will often reserve both yellow and red because “yellow and red two-tone” is the color scheme for insulated screwdrivers, so their non-insulated screwdrivers will be green for flathead, blue for Phillips - or purple for flathead, green for Phillips - etc). The terminal is an even more extreme example since it’s rare to get a whole set of terminal utilities from the same author, so all your number 2 Phillips would be from a different manufacturer than your number 1 Phillips. Also the terminal is sort of like a workshop where all the tools, even the screwdrivers, can be machine-mounted so maybe you want no paint on the handles because otherwise it rubs off on the chuck and the build-up messes up your tolerances over time, or something.
I liked Solaris while watching it, but it's one of those movies that's kind of "stuck" with me. I find myself thinking about it at random moments, just kind of pondering its themes. I've always been interested in the fine line of "real" and "creation" (my favorite movie is Ghost in the Shell (1995)), and I think Solaris does a good job exploring the interesting themes about how our memories of a person an the actual person are different and the same.

It being free on YouTube is as good of an excuse as any to re-watch it.
Let me put it another way: the following are the same code:

if: x <= y, do: foo(), else: nothing()

if: y < x, do: nothing(), else: foo()
> Part of the motivation for this project was to encourage others to release open-source rooting tools so they don't have to shell out the $25 for the "pro" version that I did.

I took a quick look at it, someone could easily remove the license check, unlock the pro features and set up an easy to use site for it
it’s already split into 3 effectively.
At the turn of the century in the early 1900s we were nuking babies' thyroids cause the only corpses they could find had diseased thyroids and the healthy babies had them. So obviously something must be wrong.

There's always value in the counter example to see where our processes breakdown and fail.

What we learn tomorrow in how abnormal our bodies are from another?
Neither: great in that sentence was about being a positive supportive parent.
He left out the wonderful journey.
It’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. SLAC no longer is the acronym. This is partially because, in theory, the lab could be contracted out to an entity other that Stanford to run. There was an attempt to brand it SNAL for a bit in the 2000s, but it was thankfully dropped for just SLAC.
> the idea is that if* we're in an ancestor simulation, then "they" will make the rules as close to theirs as they computationally can. Why ancestor simulation? Why else would "they" spend all those resources?*

This always struck me as the most WTF simulationist assumption. To the degree we simulate our ancestors, today, it’s in games. Given an infinity to ponder and simulate, it strikes me as ludicrous to assume even a significant fraction of computer power would go to ancestor simulations.
I agree with what you said that satellite phones would not have been useful the day of January 6, 2021. You weren't saying that they shouldn't get satellite phones, right? Or that a security review prompted by January 6 has nothing to do with the decision to offer them satellite phones? Why would it be hyperbole?

I assume the security folks wanted to make them (the representatives) more secure in general, including having better communications, based on a review of January 6, and in some scenarios satellite phones would be useful. Like if they had to be evacuated, etc. Do you disagree?
I believe the GPT4 "paper" mentions that the RHLF part destroyed the models ability to gauge it's confidence.
I recall reading that government agencues forced the NIST to relax certain crypography standards so that they could still be reasonably broken with super computers.
GPT stuff is so dominant in basically every other part of the site these days, I would really prefer that people not pull it in to completely unrelated threads.
Thanks for highlighting these parts, I wouldn’t have read it otherwise.

Wise words. Humans appear to need resistance between themselves and the achievement of a goal/wish, else we don’t seem to give it any real value.

This example has stuck with me, from https://awesci.com/the-role-of-wind-in-a-trees-life/

> The major discovery from it was something they had never expected. The most interesting thing they learnt from it was the importance of wind in a plant’s life. Who’d have thought!
>
> In the biosphere 2 [without wind], they had trees growing faster than they would grow in the wild. Also, they found that these trees wouldn’t completely mature. Before they could, they used to collapse. Later it was found that this was caused by the lack of wind in the biosphere. And it turns out, wind plays a major role in a trees life. The presence of wind makes a tree stronger, it is thus able to mature and not fall down due to its own weight.

Maybe all kinds of life need some sort of resistance to thrive?
They didn’t use them illegally neither Russia nor Ukraine are signatories to the CCM.
> if we a priori consider dreaming something very unique, or put it on a pedestal, would this be "profound". Whereas it could be an essential attribute of intelligent function

That’s the point. With N ~ 2, we have substance to believing it’s essential versus a fluke.
A 300 min annual prepaid plan with Iridium, retail rate, is ~$1400/year. Assuming no government discounts, you're looking at probably less than $2M-$3M in phone costs for 535 members of Congress and first year service, with <$2M/year service upkeep.

I assume it would be relatively straightforward to onboard another part of government assuming existing awards, based on my experience with US government contracting.

https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/586ca912-a43c-d9a3-fbd...
What’s the reasoning then? As far as I can tell he thought he was doing the right thing at the time, even if you might think he was naive or misguided. Surely the support for his actions indicates to you there are people out there who would have done what he did if they were in his position no?

I guess, to me being a traitor has connotations of deliberate intent to do harm due to some kind of external loyalty. While he certainly betrayed the IC, besides him ending up in Russia (which realistically is like one of a handful of countries that would take a guy like that), I’m not aware of any signs he was acting on behalf of anybody except himself
Pay always comes down to supply and demand of labor, not value added.

If you have a button that earns $1m a press, its a pretty valuable role to press it, but you can also hire literally anyone to do it. So pay for pressing the button can be quite low despite large value creation. Now, if only one person is eligible to press the button, he can easily negotiate up to $1m a press for himself. Same work, lower supply of labor.

For a long time, in person work and demand for people in SF Bay area led to major wage inflation in US tech jobs. I was there through the 2010s and saw firsthand what seemed to be 15-20% wage inflation YoY for many years.

With remote work that future is looking more tenuous. There are lower cultural barriers to having teams collocated in different timezones now that most people are remote in general.

So wages are likely to normalize somewhat over time… likely flatish in nominal terms for US workers, but down in real terms until other locales catch up. There’s still going to be a preference to hire US workers in a remote world, but the effect is going to weaken a lot.

Such high pay in real terms for people with minimal YoE is going to be considered an aberration in retrospect
If you live in an area that can drop to -20, you should be prepared for HVAC failure.

Just like when I lived in Iowa, the car always had blankets in the trunk. When I lived in Arizona, there was always a gallon of drinking water in the trunk (it works in the radiator, too!).

Just common sense.
That's one part where I actually think it works the way it should: for instance chinese makers probably don't keep any single trace of Google stuff in their builds, and they sell pretty big volumes.
Because remote education doesn't really work. Humans are just not wired for it.

One of my friend's daughter was 6 years old in the middle of the mess. He simply could NOT get her to "mode switch"--if she was home and daddy was home it's "vacation time" and anything else was a miserable fight.

He and couple of other families finally got together to pay a teacher and have a "pod" of 4 other children in their local housing development. That way the daughter went to "school" for some number of hours a day and her father didn't have to fight the "mode switch" any more.

All four of those students are now WAY ahead of all their classmates.
Oh god, it's even worse at naming things than people are.
My first PC computer came with Hercules card! Awesome resolution, but barely can play most of the games. So I hacked one game https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/ to run on it.

Here is what it involved, although it was barely playable. I've found where the game references the 0xA0000 addresss - e.g. the VGA 320x200, then I wrote a stupid TSR program, and had to hack in few places the game to refer to a buffer I had in my TSR (it was at fixed address, so it was easier). Then on every interrupt (I can't remember exactly what), it'll read the pixels and transforms then (well in a shitty way, that somehow made pixels work - how that last bit worked without even caring about the palette I don't know - maybe I was lucky). It was fun experiment, and it worked, but maybe 8-10fps or something like this...
I expect that healthcare to be given with the standards of the day universally.

If we have resource constraints (not enough doctors, hospitals, medications) then one of our top priorities should be to solve the shortages.
Snowden released an uncinscionably large amount of state secrets far beyind what would have been required to raise flags about surveillance on American citizens. Then he sought asylum in the USAs greatest political enemies?
He is a traitor.
Smaller VPS providers are a good value for this. I'm currently using ServaRICA for a 2TB box, $7/mo. I use it for some hosting, but mostly for incremental ZFS backups. Storage speed isn't amazing, but it suits my use case.

I'm using cloudflare R2 for a couple hundred GB, where I needed something faster.
In the event of a widespread communications outage, I’m not too concerned about whether some senator can call his mistress. Just another waste of taxpayer dollars. They want satellite phones, cut spending elsewhere. This has little to do with Jan 6. It’s just another perk for our ruling class.
>Why else would "they" spend all those resources?

Why the assumption that it takes a significant amount of their resources to run our simulation?
Can someone explain to me why Jane Street - a trading firm - is so all in on OCaml?

There's lots of other choices that would be easier to recruit for, with wider community and industry support.

Where does the Jane Street commitment to Ocaml come from?
That he can be neutral or support the candidates he likes, but not both?
I've also found this message - https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/trivia/ - but back then I could not read/understand english that well so wasn't sure what it was about, and that it was an actual trolling from the programmers - lol ;) - from the page above:

"Trivia
Hidden Message
This message can be found in the program executable:

"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
> My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay ...

Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!
Wait, you hated Solaris? It was the first Tarkovsky movie that I watched and I really connected with its themes of the "real" vs "memories". It's hard for me to imagine anyone hating Solaris...

I still have not seen Mirror, though a few of my film friends have told me to check it out for years.
The more I hear about Tesla and Musk the more I feel that he's like Willy Wonka and the factories are like the chocolate factory.
I loved CLRS! It was my first algorithms book in undergrad.

A beginner can and should pick it up if they love math and programming.
Can someone kindly explain, what does he mean by the use of embeddings? More specifically how are those embeddings calculated?
Still their moats are helpful in distributing their AI.
To counter that argument, if "they" live in world where computation is cheap (eg they have something like Zeno machines[1]) they may not be spending what they view as lots of resources.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_machine
I think you misread what I said - I was responding to this quote:

> If we don't reach at least Kardashev scale 1 in the next hundred years or so, we're going to go extinct due to several now-predictable factors.

Many people are certain of human extinction for one reason or another, it doesn't sound like you're one of them. I'm saying that we don't know what the future will bring, and that uncertainty manifests as apocolyptic thinking. I also specifically mentioned that we are facing multiple problems that can cause huge devastation and I'm not making the argument that "Oh hey everything is ok!" Just that to frame things as apocalyptic is contributing to the schism and preventing us from doing anything because everyone refuses to listen to anything else since they believe their lives are at stake.

I guess I shouldn't say "it won't be extinction", but that's way way way lower probability than people think. It's just that a massive amount of people have thought the world would end many times through out history, so I'm skeptical of "well this time we're RIGHT".
Ok. I guarantee I’m not that clever. I’ll avoid that particular phrase in the future. I was just being informal, but yes, I can see that it is misleading.

I think we should have lots of encrypted communication out there, to make it a normalized day-to-day thing, and to make bulk surveillance more difficult.

You are right that “eye of Sauron” evokes a different idea, which is more like investigating a specific known target. If done correctly that could be OK in some cases.
Change the Way You Persuade (2002)
Not OP, but I think the underlying meaning is that the focus on profit is primary. As in when it aligns with better patient outcomes it’s going to happen and that’s great.

But probably there are a ton of scenarios where profit is anti-aligned with patient outcomes and the decisions are made still to maximize profit.

I can believe that. Not because people are wicked, but collective behaviors behind the system favoring profits more than patient outcomes. The system is extremely complex and even small biases somewhere deep can possibly have a big swing in the outcomes.
I love the open web and want solutions like this to win but 3D experiences built on the web seem to fall flat. Any AAA games on the web? How far is state of art native desktop 3D vs 3D through the web? Add on XR (IMU, camera, geo-tracking, AI processing) and it falls even further. It would be interesting to see some side-by-side comparisons.
It is not an argument against super intelligence. It is an argument against the idea that super intelligence leads to kill-all-humans by default.

Why would they not still hold the same views? If anything the last decade has shown the AI x-risk skeptics to be right.
The trick with a gas generator is to have an electrician install an interlock on your electric panel along with a hookup to your generator. Then it's a snap to switch over to the generator, and start it.

The only trouble is that gives no indication when the power comes back on. So there you are, generator blasting away, while power is restored. Leave a couple circuits always connected to the line power, and hook those to a radio or a light so you know when the line is back up.

P.S. if you get a generator with an electric starter, odds are good the battery will be dead. The trick is to add a couple power posts to it, so you can jump start it with your car.
Areas around the house must be cleared as well. These are mitigations to reduce costs not cures.
Why not sell the home? I am sure the mural would make it more valuable?
Strong agree. It's like expecting video game characters (however sentient they may eventually / theoretically become) to understand the hardware instructions that power the assembly language that is running the process within which their reality exists.
I'm not saying they should, but why can't they leave? even Sacramento a little over an hour's drive away is already much more affordable, let alone other cities and towns in the Central Valley and it only gets cheaper the further you go East. https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/
I think we have to agree to disagree; I found The Tree of Life (the only Malick movie I've managed to finish) to be a boring, incomprehensible mess of a movie, while Solaris and Stalker have been, in my opinion, somewhat interesting things.