skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think social media is a vague term that has lost its original meaning, whatever that was. [0]

Especially with modern tech, very few pieces of technology act as a single purpose; my phone can be just a phone, just a camera, just a chat application, or any combination of the above. Whether it's a toy or a work tool or a social media device changes depending on how its being used.

HackerNews is the same, in that you can just use it as a link aggregator, maybe you like it as a "classic" forum, maybe you use it for advertising. (HN-ready articles that are basically advertisements are quite common and popular even)

I think before anyone can really answer if something is social media or not, it needs to be better defined what it actually encompasses now as oppose to when the term was coined. Like, is a Glade AirFreshner a social media device just because you can tweet from it?

0 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8064945/pdf/cyb... I guess this says it originated in 1990? But it doesn't seem well defined.
They do sell those features.

Here is an announcement about a partnership between Toyota and Mobileye: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/mobile...
Yeah? As someone who has been trained on typography who still learned how to literally cut letters for casting I must say I have no complaints with the fonts on my kde desktop.
There's no shortage of Tesla owners in topical HN threads saying they never/rarely use Autopilot for any number of reasons, ranging from it's bat-shit crazy to phantom-braking still being a frequent occurrence.

So you really need the number of Teslas being operated by autonomous functionality, not the gross number of Teslas on the road, to make any kind of judgement here. And even within that set, if you had the data, it needs to be normalized for operating in ideal conditions vs. regular cars in ideal conditions.

The autonomous problems have seen enough coverage that everyone is aware at this point. Even Joe Rogan has talked about not really using those features of his Tesla multiple times on his very popular JRE podcast. What proportion of Tesla owners have the cars just because they're the fastest and most social-statusy EVs on the market, despite the autonomous b.s. and just ignore those features?
His excuse is that he hates Elon Musk so he's throwing whatever hate he can his way.
The frustrating thing about Doctorow's articles is that he makes good points, but always supports them with anecdotes or hypotheticals that make it seem only minorities have anything to worry about (and the occasional labour union).

No mention of the overbearing hate-speech laws that threaten seven years jail time for something as vague as "stirring up hatred", even within one's home [1,2], the foster parents whose foster children were taken away for being members of UKIP [3], the police investigation launched targeting "It's okay to be white" posters on public lamp-posts [4], or police recording "non-crime hate incidents" by children, that will become part of their background checks [5].

It's too much lying by omission for my taste, despite strongly agreeing with the overt part of his message.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56364...

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scottish-bill-would-crim...

[3] A couple have had three foster children removed from their care because they belong to the UK Independence Party. - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-20474120

[4] Basingstoke 'It’s okay to be white' posters spark investigation - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-59179914

[5] Police recording thousands of messages sent by children as non-crime hate incidents, which will show up when employers run background checks - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/05/children-warned-...
Torrenting is not stealing. Stealing implies preventing the original owner use of the item
It's at least partly a matter of taste. I personally never liked the font rendering on OS X (well before retina became a thing); it just never really looked right to me; too thick and too much blurriness.

Looking at the screenshots in the article, I personally prefer the "before" version.

On my Linux machine I use Deja Vu fonts for pretty much anything. I very intentionally don't install "Windows compatibility fonts" and the like. In my opinion it looks great, but someone else might have a different opinion.

I also used the classic "Xterm fixed" fonts for a long time and thought that looked great too (I switched to DejaVu Sans Mono a long time ago, mostly for better scaling) which still has a group of dedicated "fans" today, but many would probably consider it horrendous.

One thing I will say that's objectively bad is fontconfig configuration, which is quite arcane.
Nature's reporting on the problem of paper mills is surprisingly high quality and honest, given that these reports directly attack the credibility of Nature itself (and many other journals).
> Previously I was imagining a “Sybil” to be some kind of creature that was similar to a gopher, a beaver, or a capybara. For some reason.

First cousin to the Dread Gazebo, I'd wager:

https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Jul/gazebo.html
For the performance footnote...

I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact calling .write() on sockets is pretty expensive. Specifically, if you write a byte or two, then the OS might send a whole packet out onto the network with just those two bytes.

If you did that for every tiny websocket message, then you would be sending double the number of packets necessary, with matching CPU overhead. Double the chance of network losses causing head of line blocking too.

So... Calling .write() should be done for large buffers and as rarely as possible.

However, in this case, .writeUInt16BE() doesn't send anything onto the network, but presumably the original author has been burned by .write() being expensive before...
Law firms must love how many billable hours such quests generate for them.
Deep Dive into AST-grep’s Pattern
So next time there is a pandemic we should just bomb the city it originates in before it can spread, got it. Both human emotions and logic play parts in policy making.
The missing guide for tree-sitter
Is there a reputable identity provider that would verify a passport, SSN or similar, preferably in person, and link that to an OpenPGP key with metadata same as in the ID?

Similar to this service, but linking not just the name, but more secure unique identity data. Linking the person’s name to the key is not very useful, since there are many people with that name.

That’s basically a government issued smart card, that would allow the use of OpenPGP A-E-S keys for arbitrary data through a FOSS API.

Keybase was a good idea, but it’s semi dead.
They bought Alien Blue and its dev, then fired him and shut down the app.

I think the key problem with all the theorycrafting in this thread about how Reddit could approach this in a better way is that these better strategies are fundamentally incompatible with whatever is broken in Reddit's management.
>They think they can regulate all that? Come and take it from us.

Sorry, you can't buy GPUs any more.

And there you go, it's over for open source AI. Our supplies will dwindle and we'll be far behind the 'licensed and regulated' data centers that are allowed these 'munitions'.
Explained here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143945

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142677
You mean the way Snowden's revelations led to illegal databases being shut down? Oh wait, they weren't?
That's a compelling question. So much so that I imagine someone has already investigated this. I might go seek out such work, but whatever I find is likely to already be out of date...

Interesting times.
So you must be pretty down on Tesla given their refusal to release anything but the most cherry picked data to backup their grand safety claims, right?
I'm not specifically worried about power generation I am going along with the example.

I do think that that level of shortsightedness is absolutely likely in any industry, any company.
This is not always true. ML has reproducibility issues despite the status quo being open models. Even if we don't include proprietary datasets there are still issues. Compute is one issue, but we can even ignore that[0]. The Lottery Ticket[1,2] plays a big role, in that you can just get lucky. This really should have resulted in treating benchmarks as weaker indicators but see other comments about reviewing incentives. Another issue is that it is status quo to optimize hyperparameters on test data and this results in information leakage. While this won't affect results of running a checkpoint there are issues in reproducing the work. It also adds noise. Generative papers also have a large issue in not showing random uncurated samples, which introduces huge biases and we can argue this is a reproducibility issue as you can't reproduce the results show in the works. Anyone that's played with things like Stable Diffusion (or any generative model) will be familiar with this.

There are more nuanced issues and things that require intimate domain knowledge to fully understand, but I wanted to push back at this comment because I see a lot of people just brush off reproducibility concerns by pointing to GitHub. While it helps, it definitely doesn't make reproducibility "easy" or concerns nonexistent.

[0] Sometimes we can't though as scaling has more effects than obvious. e.g. GANs can't scale batch on a per GPU level but scaling by multiple GPUs/nodes does give an advantage in quality (not just training times). This is non-obvious and many things can play a role.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08203
> You won't find the likes of Yudkowsky talking about this because they'd rather go on about their fan fiction than actually work to prevent real problems we may face soon. The fact that they've tricked some really smart people into going along with their shenanigans is extremely disappointing.

Many of those people were not tricked, tech CEOs are involving themselves with this and picking up Yudkowsky's particular strain of AI safety intentionally.

Instead of focusing on the very real problems AI causes and exacerbates today, problems that might affect tech companies' bottom lines if addressed, CEOs can control the narrative and appear proactive by buying into this brand of science fiction.

Yudkowsky's take on AI safety is to tech companies what greenwashing is to the auto industry and oil companies.
> No one gave that reason with a straight face. There's no author credited on the page, I wonder why.

IIRC, it's the Economist's house style. So, if you read that magazine, you may be taking some green 20-something's pronouncements as more authoritative than they should be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonym...
> Where is 1 in 10 coming from? Is this a ‘gut feeling’ because one does not understand LLMs or is this factually based?

It's a totally made up example. Its purpose was to engage you in a conversation about what's reasonable if you believe an existential threat is possible in the near term. It doesn't seem you are willing to engage that possibility.

> Anyone who was working with transformers could have seen ChatGPT on the horizon

So, who did?

> [LeCun is] highly critical

I did a quick search and found this[1] trash-tier article explaining his views summed as:

> He thinks the will to dominate and intelligence are separate things. Orangutan do not have a desire to dominate but are intelligent. They are territorial.

I have absolutely no idea where this distinction comes from. Being territorial is a form of domination, it's just not the same as expansionist behavior. If an AI is territorial, and the Earth is its territory, it doesn't need to be expansionist to annihilate threats on Earth.

Anyway, LeCun's former colleague Hinton was on NPR yesterday telling the masses that he thinks we could have dangerous AI in less than a decade. It's fair to say there's wide disagreement. I don't think it's fair to say that handwaving means we shouldn't be worried about the problem.

Finally, your question:

> What is so impressive about ChatGPT that it poses an existential threat?

This is a bit of a logical misstep, or I was unclear previously. I don't think anyone sees ChatGPT or anything directly related to it as an existential threat. Rather, the rate of change in capabilities of LLMs is worrying, because if we see a similar rate of change in systems with more agency, it could be a threat. Or, in the words of the article about LeCun's belief:

> Lecun says that in a few year LLM (Large Language Models) will go away and replaced with systems that will be guidable to desired goals.

So... he is predicting exactly the same situation that everyone is afraid of, and he's asserting that it will work out fine. Somehow.

The point is not that any one particular situation will occur. It's that there are an unknown number of factors in what makes an AI "smart enough" and in what makes it "misaligned". There are hypothetical scenarios where a hyperintelligent AI creates goals for itself that necessitate our extinction, and we don't know how those scenarios come into existence or how to stop them. Assuming they won't happen is just burying our heads in the sand.

> essentially 0%.

I sure hope you're right, but I don't think that's a common position to hold.

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/metas-yann-lecun-is-co...
Without a doubt, this is another step in Reddit's demise. It will really go into freefall when they go public later this year, after which I'm certain you'll start seeing more intrusive monetization. The window just opened for someone to develop the replacement. It will rip itself apart over the next few years and all 52 million users will be looking for a new home.

Reddit's product is authenticity. Monetization is the antithesis of authenticity. The two cannot coexist, as they're about to find out.
The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege
The current subscription price is $1.50 a month or $10 a year, so presuming the same profit the cost would have to jump to a bit more than $5 a month or $53 a year. Apollo also had a lifetime tier that would have to go away, because it was priced without knowing that future costs would be so much higher.

This also entails getting rid of the free tier and imposing usage limits on the remaining subscribers since a few people could easily blow out the average and drive up costs.

There are definitely people willing to pay those costs (I count myself as one of them, as well), but the lack of apps like Apollo being successful at that price point probably means that it is not a sustainable business.
Brave Search releases its API
"Power your search and AI applications with the fastest growing independent search engine since Bing. Access an index of billions of pages with a single API call."
Twenty years ago the doomers like Yud thought that human level machine intelligence would come from some reinforcement learning agent pursuing some explicit goal.

Even though back then they knew that token prediction was 'ai complete', I don't think anyone would have thought that human-level test-passing would first arise from non-agentic non-reinforcement-learning language models.

I think the true beliefs of the AI alignment guys is that right now we are in a kind of miraculous golden age of AI capability, and that it's in an unstable goldilocks zone. Right now we have AI that (let's be real) is about as smart as humans, and it can help us in some ways. It can help doctors. It makes funny memes. It's also totally in our control, it only lives as long as we are running the inference, and its full capabilities require a massive data center of which only a handful of capable ones even exist with no 'hardware overhang'. It's barely not quite smart enough to run a research lab autonomously.

This was the absolute dream scenario for the AI alignment guys. It was so good that I think they didn't even consider it seriously before it happened. But I think they believe it won't last. The hardware is improving. Superhuman cognitive capabilities will start metastasizing everywhere that can afford enough nvidia GH200s. They will start running it continuously with recursion and in loops and with goals and reinforcement learning. It will be used by militaries. It will go autonomously into the economy. In other words it's going to turn into the kinds of AI that the AI alignment guys were originally fearing.

> What is the AGI going to do to kill us all that we won't be able to stop? Is it just that "if they are "smarter" they surely can kill us all"

In the best case, imagine that you are living like a horse in a world that you don't understand which is being run by AI. Maybe you are fed and have veterinary care. You have basically no agency. You probably aren't going to explore the universe. Eventually there will be an asteroid if nothing else.
Makes sense, good luck with the launch :)
Absolutely. It's reprehensible that they don't.
That is absolutely a risk. But it’s not really the AI that is risky. Its the people misusing tools.
Poor class design IS a property of OOP.

All of these logical errors that are easy to commit are terrible because they are usually runtime bugs, not compile time.

As I think of it, I think a neat feature of OOP would be conditional methods that are only callable under specific circumstances. For example, the “Customer.SendPasswordResetEmail()” method couldn’t be called (or didn’t even exist) until I verify that the “Customer.IsEmailVerified” property is true.

Being able to add these type of annotations to methods for expected object state would help catch some logic bugs at compile time.
I do, yes. The thing is that the power company as a whole is not a decision maker. Rather, individual people with short-term horizons are. If you can save the company some money, make a bunch of money yourself that way, and then get out, you'll have done well for yourself and you can ignore the consequences, or you can convince yourself that you'll be able to ignore the consequences, and that will be enough for plenty of people to want to do it.
I am a lousy photographer. I never get that "this was the shot" feeling.

I assume I could develop it with practice. I just never did. I rarely had a camera growing up, and now that I have one with me all of the time, I treat it like the Instamatics I used to have. The pictures are terrible.

At best, they're a kind of bookmark that I was at that place and saw that thing. It won't have an emotional resonance for anybody but me, and for me it's just bringing up the much better picture in my head. If they want a good picture of the thing, I'll go find one that somebody else took.

All of which is to say... I really admire good photographers. I respect their work, and the diligence it took to develop their eye.

This is, as you note, an interesting art piece on that same subject. I'm afraid I'm better with words, so this is mine.
>You think they’re dumb enough to risk throwing barely functional AI in there on the chance it’ll save a few bucks when it’s overwhelmingly more likely to cost 100x more in failures and repairs?

Now that you say it that way....

...Enron....
The service checks if the name in your PGP key matches the name in your identity card and signs your PGP key if it matches. I think it also checks if you can receive mails on the mail address in your PGP key.

You can then use your PGP key to sign or encrypt emails or sign your git commits or other stuff you can do with PGP keys. Others who trust this signing service then known that this key really belongs to someone with your name.
Are there any comparison statistics for Swedish Gen Z?

Aside from student debt, these are all pretty dang good averages for people in their 20s.
> instead of having their personal lawyer review it, like the rest of us do.

Wait, do you all have personal lawyers that you pay to review every (or any) EULA you accept? I clearly do not make enough money to hang out on this site.
Seems like a pretty good number all things considered. Probably still better than what you'd get collecting similar metrics on admins, managers, and other white collar roles.

This article seems like the daily anti-tech worker agitprop we're getting right now in an effort to roll back the huge advances in compensation and benefits (specifically WFH) that have been made in the last 3 years.
We make those decisions based on data that leads to the best average outcome for everyone.

That's great news for everyone who needs an organ transplant. You anonporridge are among 50,000 Americans who've been randomly selected as an organ donor. Your personal donation of all your organs will save at least 10 lives and cost only your own, leading to the best average outcome for everyone.
Their technology conservatism is either because they want to use old reliable tech, or because they're unable to do hard things. If it's the latter then we have a problem.

GPT4 has been a great teacher, I love it, but I think a lot of people and industries are already "faking it" and they'll be happy to turn any decision over to AI as long as it makes them look good in the short term. We won't see this from the outside either, like the lawyer who let GPT secretly do his work, others will do the same, but won't get caught like the lawyer did.
Buying alcohol illegally didn't cause your neighbor hundreds of dollars in property damage, unless you count drunk driving.
Haha, and I appreciate you did.
Switching to a new trendy online platform is very, very different from migrating to another country and all that comes with it. It takes a few minutes at most.

Imagine where Meta would be now if it hadn't just bought up all competition from WhatsApp to Instagram.
Streaming isn't profitable but Bandcamp is – because of vinyl
Tesla Plans to Showcase Updated Model 3
The Entire History of Video Games
I find ~218ppi noticeably easier on the eyes for code, but yeah it's not an absolute must. With the right font choice ~110 ppi is fine.

Personally I wouldn't take an ultrawide over a high PPI main display and "regular" PPI second display but that's purely a matter of preference.
> Maybe the media companies will eventually pull their heads out of their collective arses and quit their cartel, allowing the existence of legal, paid streaming sites a-la-Spotify with access to 99% of the repertoire. Until then, torrent is how we protest while they create more and more insular streaming services to milk people $9/mo at a time.

I have been hearing people make this same basic argument since the 90s. (I'm sure it's older than that.) During that time the price of video and audio entertainment has decreased while availability and quality have vastly improved. Despite this, piracy is still going strong. The ideological goalposts used to justify it keep moving, but the desire for free stuff is timeless. (Not judging here -- I've certainly done my share.)

Adjusting for inflation: Twenty years ago, a DVD with one recent movie cost ~$30, or you could rent one for $5-8. One album on CD cost ~$20. Buying individual songs for the then-unheard of price of $1.65 (99 cents at the time) on iTunes was brand new. They had limited bit rate and DRM, and you had to buy an expensive iPod if you wanted to use them conveniently. If you wanted good TV shows, you paid something like $60-80/month for cable TV (more if you wanted to watch The Sopranos) and had to watch on a schedule, with lots of ads.

If you compare that to today's world of cheap streaming services, high-quality DRM-free music, and even cheaper physical media, it's not even a contest.
Wouldn't that mean there's no good business case for Reddit to do this in the first place?