skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AI Companions the Future of Productivity?
I've been thinking a lot recently about how technology, particularly AI, can play a role in personal productivity. One concept that's caught my attention is the idea of an 'AI conversation companion' for tracking thoughts, ideas, and progress in various areas of life. Imagine having an AI that you can converse with on a regular basis, where it asks you thoughtful questions about topics you're interested in or working on. Over time, it adapts its questions based on your responses and generates summaries, which can be reviewed and reflected upon at any time.

Such an AI companion could act as a kind of automated journal or diary, providing a space for reflection and self-improvement, but with the added benefits of interactivity and adaptability. It could also serve as an accountability tool, reminding you of your goals and progress, and prompting regular reflection.

What do you all think about the potential of using AI to aid productivity? Have you used any similar tools or services? What methods do you use today to prep helping future AI companions understand your life/goals?
My favorite bit about Fucked Company is there are archived captures of it from 2002 in the Library of Congress.

https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0020126/
I wasn't dredging it up. I was replying to someone who dredged it up first.
Yeah, it's an isolated incident just like all the other isolated incidents in Rust. Anyone remember the Rust Foundation trademark oopsie literally a month ago where the RF wanted to control in fine detail the usage of the name and logo?
As an aside, those with large net worths should consider bankruptcy planning. It's not really "fun" but nobody intends to go bankrupt, and states vary widely in what is excluded, especially in the homestead exemption.

For example, Florida, DC, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas have unlimited (of various flavors, for example Texas is 100/200 acres rural (single/family) or 1 acre urban). Most require something like 40 months living, but consult an advisor.
The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked.

Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right.

So not only did crypto have much smaller goals than the Dot-Com era, but it failed pretty hard at those goals. And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.
> We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.

If that is your criteria, then nothing has ever changed anything.
Should be interesting if the accounting robots make the same hallucinations as the lawyer robots - dreaming up alternatives to accepted accounting standards, etc.

Or the HR robots - they just going to make up company policy on the fly and if so, will it have legal standing or just words for the (remaining) workers to chew on?
I tried to get at the root of the issue where you monkeys can understand, and asked GPT to simplify it.

In monkey language, you can express the phrase "AI will win" as follows:

"Ook! Ook! Eee eee! AI eee eee win!"
Before P-Code there were other ones, there were lots of bytecode based platforms.

Burroughs, all Xerox PARC, Lisp Machines, OS/400, Oberon, Limbo, original Modula-2, QuickBasic, Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit, VB, ...
Your vision is further than fastmail can currently take you, but a partial solution which I use is to just give out a unique email address to each company. that way when you get spam you can disable that address for future use and also use it as a conversation starter with whoever leaked your data to a spammer.

The format I use is {yourname}@{myname}.{mydomain}, so there's a unique address for every pair--some of which I've disabled delivery for.
Tech world warns risk of extincition from AI should be a global priority
Yep -- I wasn't thinking of business cards for this, but something like this would be required I think.
Ah. "Don't piss off the judge" can mean a lot of things to me, and the way I was using it here is (I think) actually pretty fair.

It could (but shouldn't) mean: avoid the judge's biases and pet peeves.

When I said it I meant: while Amazon may legally have the right to ask for 100x what it really needs, the judge will (rightly) ask them to bring that down to 1 to 5x, and if they fight the judge on it, they may lose the judge's patience for other more important issues.
They will do all the mistakes that have to be done. WASM GC is one of them.
Database reads all the time for your use-case.
In recent decades, ballot initiatives that allow the public to vote directly on a legal change have proved a significantly faster way to get something done than the legislative process. Indeed, in some US states initiatives that become law are subsequently stymied by the legislative or executive branches. In an era of instantaneous networked communication, the traditional model of governance and the informal party structure seem to function more as tools to divide and conquer the population than to implement its policy aspirations.
> But given the weaknesses of the models, perhaps OpenAI should not have released them for such flexible use for a broad audience.

I think the advantages greatly outweigh negatives - not only is ChatGPT an extremely useful tool, its also really helped to bring the seriousness of AI and its effects on society into the current discourse.

> If OpenAI had released a "fiction writing assistant" product, a "fictional character fun chat" product, etc it would likely be misused less.

I really feel that the misuses of this tend to be cases where I would say the issue lies with the user. At some point we have to take some level of personal responsibility for the tools and services we use. Consider the case of the lawyer who included a bunch of stuff from ChatGPT in a federal court filing - I would place the blame on OpenAI squarely at 0% on that one. This is a trained professional in a highly regulated industry who decided to outsource his job to a tool about which he clearly hadn't done even a little bit research. The issue isn't that ChatGPT hallucinated, it's that he exercised judgement that is obviously incredibly poor. I suspect if you went back through his work, you'd find other places where he cut corners and had lapses of ethics and/or responsibility. He's the problem, not ChatGPT.

Same thing with the professor who accused all of his students of plagiarism because he put their text into ChatGPT and asked if it had written it. On the one hand, he's trying to keep up with technology that's moving quickly and I have empathy for that. On the other hand, he's a college professor, so he should absolutely be able to do the level of research to find the many, many news articles on this topic that would have made clear that what he's doing is stupid. Making incredibly serious accusations towards students based solely on a tool you clearly haven't even tried to understand is a tremendous breach of ethics, which is the real problem.
> it's an all-or-nothing endeavor

I don't know anything about Jehovah's Witnesses but certainly there are a lot of religions that are comfortable with people coming by out of curiosity and/or participating sporadically.

I think that's how most people do it.
Don't bother much, that user just replies with "but the relative impact is low" to some of the most well-supported and obvious examples in this thread that argue presence of significant historical influence of imperial China on the region. In your case it was about confucianism, in one other, it was about kanji[0].

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118362
Your mistake is in understanding that crypto (Bitcoin) isn't just a transmission network, it is protocol with a defined supply rate.

Your payment pipelines become less valuable when nobody wants those Liras, Bolivars, Argentine Pesos, etc. transmitted over them.

And if you don't think that the US dollar is at risk of debasing itself, you should qualify why.
This - I find 2/3rds of my issues are platform vs driver. And there is no way to penalize the platform vs the driver + the driver then deals with the aftermath of a pissed off customer even if they were great. It would be as easy as having two star ratings, “how was your driver?”, and “how was your whole experience?”.
Yes exactly, on gold standard they would default, now they inflate.

The US can issue debt in USD and even print 1 trillion USD coins. But what happens to the value of the currency when they repeatedly do that?

Crypto (and other assets obviously) can act as a hedge against such bad government behavior.
I just can't tolerate apartment life any longer. I have 2 dogs. They won't live forever, they need a yard. I need stability. Also a home is not an investment, its a liability. I also want a place I own, that I can have paid off. Its a long term decision.

I'm also willing to admit I can miss the bottom price. I could save 15% and wait a year?
Google publishes Colab's Docker runtime image
Exactly the same here - the ones not deployed recently works fine!
I think yes, this would be required. An email address with random characters in it for no reason would certainly be questionable, but if the use case I'm proposing becomes at all known it would be much more understandable I think.
Yes, which is why it's unrelated to whether students punish other students.
Same here, both Staging and Production are completely down. Yet their statuspage shows no error at all.
When seemingly poor unit economics work
1) This is an accurate complaint. By my estimation (on the official discord) they interact in such a way for an amortized three of the 1440 minutes in the day.

2) The language is pretty great. Further serious investment is going to be primarily in the third-party libraries department.

3) You need make no contributions, financial or otherwise. I am probably a net drain on the foundation's resources.
Batten Down Fix Later
CLR was designed for C++ as well. About 20 languages supported on release day.

IBM TIMI was designed for C and C++.

Amsterdam Compilers Toolkit was designed for Pascal, Modula-2 and C.

Nothing new really.
As a non developer it's even more daunting because if I want to create something it's likely to be a web app and to learn about front end + back end + infra/hosting + security + database just to build a basic CRUD app it's a ginormous second step on the learning curve to push past the first step of taking a python bootcamp (with a session or two on Flask if lucky) for example.

I'm looking at the Odin project but more realistically I'll just keep slowly creeping upwards from no code (built a half dozen apps on Glide, Adalo) to Low-Code (Noodl, tadabase) to serverless (pythonanywhere).
Frankly, if people got a magic crystal ball and after hearing that warning in 1965 they would be able to know that there would be a 1.1C temperature rise by 2023 - in 58 years - then it still would make all sense for them to do nothing.

For these people, even if (a big if!) there would be a global consensus, then they would not approve significant cuts to the industry and consumption in order to prevent the limited effect that we're seeing now. The world was a much poorer place in absolute numbers, and wellbeing was directly linked to physical goods unlike the digital economy we have now, so even with perfect foresight, the big priorities of that era would still be increasing agriculture (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to feed people and increasing industry (through mass use of fossil fuels!) to reduce global poverty. The Green Revolution and economic changes of 1965-1985 were an enormous boon to humanity, and sacrificing THAT to slow down climate change would not be a good deal for us.

And of course, unilateral sacrifices make even less sense. At the height of the Cold war, neither the west nor the USSR could agree to simply restrict their industry while the other would do nothing, because then you suffer all the drawbacks and climate change doesn't get prevented anyway.
Dozens even!
There's nothing wrong with Firefox policy that led to IceWeasel. Mozilla owns the Firefox Trademark. Someone wanted to avoid that so they created IceWeasel.

This is working as intended. There's no controversy, there's no one saying "wow I can't believe Mozilla would own the Firefox trademark !", it's just... how someone wanted to play it.

It's incredibly unlikely that this was necessary or actually achieved anything meaningful other than "Mozilla's trademark policy does not apply to this"... but that's a whole other thing.

edit: Actually, what it achieves is that Debian can distribute a modified Firefox (because I believe they may modify source code for it) without representing it as Mozilla Firefox, which is great. Again, working as intended - now no one is confused, you know that the Firefox you are getting is not the one straight from Mozilla.
I feel like the ride shares need to commit to firm pricing and pickup times at booking, ride is discounted $1/min for every minute over the estimate.
The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same trademark policy. That's literally it. They're not threatening to sue you if you don't include disclaimers on everything you do while using their language.
People who are comfortable with Discord as a platform for support don't make purchasing decisions for accounting software.
> median salary for a developer in Spain is $30,000 a year[1], so 50-80k would easily place them in the upper 10% of the scale.

that's global market already. If apple, google, msft be confident they can hire thousands of high quality engineers in Spain for $30k/y, they would sure open dev offices there and cut jobs in California.
Take a shuttle to car rentals or a hotel, and then you'd be out of the airport area; doesn't have to be a "walk" walk.
This is very exciting. After Dell and HP dropped out over the past year, I've been waiting for a company other than Lenovo to build a well-designed laptop with a pointing stick. This company being System76 makes the news even better, since I know the hardware will receive first-class support on Linux. I'm glad that System76 is taking the community laptop suggestions seriously (implementing a ThinkPad-style TrackPoint is the top suggestion by number of thumbs up: https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions/issues/25).
Scientists warned then-president Nixon about climate change in 1972. They were concerned about GLOBAL COOLING, NOT GLOBAL WARMING.

News article about the Nixon global cooling letter:

https://www.thestreet.com/economonitor/us/an-important-lette...

CIA report about global cooling from 1974:

http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974...

In the 70s, they said there'd be an Ice Age:

(Linked to Google Cache below because the USG has removed the original (very well cited) content from the climate.gov website.)

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vtKwOK...
SwiftUI Notes Before WWDC 2023
They likely do use mapbox for rendering maps, as their SDK is really customizable, is designed to work with the OSM data format, and you don't need to pay mapbox to use it (at least for older versions). But mapbox is not necessarily a good solution for all of the routing requirements Lyft has. For example, at SFO ride hailing drivers are required to wait in a special parking lot outside of the airport, and then dispatching for rides is done based on which driver has been waiting in that lot the longest. You could probably make this work with mapbox, but it isn't necessarily a matter of just plugging it in and calling it done.
Opinions vary widely. There are credible criminal claims for stuff like "conspiracy to influence the FDA to ignore contrary evidence" that you could call either criminal or standard business practice depending on how on-fire your hair is.
I reached out to Molly White to have her on our show, but she declined.

Hi Molly. I was listening to Majority Report today and they had their old producer, Matt Binder on. He mentioned interviewing you about Web3 recently.

I had been meaning to reach out. Like many people, I've occasionally popped onto web3isgoinggreat.com to see the latest cringefest in crypto and adjacent to it. Unlike many people, though, I run a software company that builds decentralized applications on blockchain, but tries to be as responsible as possible.

Back in 2018, we raised around a half-million dollars, treating the tokens as securities. With that, we built a lot of Web3 software for communities around the world. We also grew a podcast/show where I interview people like Noam Chomsky, and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman), on sociopolitical issues around technology, decentralization, freedom of speech, etc. I also interview community economists, former regulators, some of whom are our advisors.

I was wondering if you'd be interested in coming on the show sometime to discuss what you see in Web3, the good and the bad. This February, I'm doing a panel with Noam Chomsky and David Harvey. I'd love to invite you on the show as well.

There is an important conversation to be had. Sadly, most of the Web3 world has been dominated by ponzi schemes and zero-sum games. But as crazy as it is, there is a real need for open source, decentralized platforms. The alternative is all around us, and it has been problematic. Our public forums are privately owned by small groups which are close with state governments. Twitter is privately owned by Musk, Facebook by Zuck, while WeChat and TikTok had a meteoric rise thanks to the Chinese government. WeChat has all but replaced cash, and the CBDCs only accelerate centralized control of the economy, as well as systems that increasingly coerce individuals, like social credit systems. Our mainstream media is also top-down controlled, and under capitalism, the news anchors are often no more than mouthpieces. This leads to wars, to support for forcible internment and re-education of various groups. So there has to be an open-source, decentralized alternative. On the show, I like to have these conversations and discuss the substance of what is good and bad about the space.

Hello,

I appreciate the interest, but I will respectfully decline.

Alright, sure. Would you be willing to share with me the reason? Is it because we are focused on a positive way forward for cryptocurrencies?

This is what a typical discussion on the show looks like:

1. Crypto and Securities Regulations with Sara Hanks, author of Regulation S at the SEC
2. Voluntary Basic Income with Thomas Greco, community currency economist
3. Web3 Identity and Civic Engagement with Eric Starr and David Boulet

She never replied.
We were ready plenty of times, Java wasn't the first.
The UK Coal one is significant because it had been burning coal continuously since 1882:

https://twitter.com/UK_Coal

This keeps a running total of coal free days, currently at 33 days without coal.
I'm more taken by the degree of apparent fervor and unceremonious abandonment for the next shiny thing.

I'm not surprised, I am just disappointed. Perhaps it's ego, but I expect better out of hn participants.
They're referring to what happens if you join the faith, and then leave it: Defellowshipping, aka shunning.
I like your usage of Hillary as a verb. I don't understand the affinity against Gmail though. With the fastmail forwarding service are you still not using Gmail spam service and have Gmail access to your email anyways (not that I'd believe they do unless wearing a tinfoil hat)
It's not that it's too easy, but rather AI models are not people. What do I mean by this? There is (for the purposes of this discussion) just one ChatGPT-4 model. This single model has to be all things to all people. It's not Ted. Or Jessica or Dante. You don't expect Jessica to have a reasonable answer to every question. You accept the fact that if you ask Jessica about public schools, she will go off the rails. It's not indictment on all humans -- it's just Jessica.

At some point we might have access to a variety of AI models where some will simply say, "I really only know physics pretty well. I prefer not to give my opinon on other topics". And others that will lie about most everything. But we will learn which are useful for what.
Typically a mixtape is a continuous mix with no song breaks.

If that is the case, track lists are using listed where the mix is posted, mixcloud, etc.
The next step could be language learning via Duolingo (which is also highly addictive) or browsing memes on 9gag.

Maybe getting a small phone like the iPhone Mini is a solution, because while it does phone things (music playing, photos) great, the small screen discourages social media and web surfing. Add a book case to the phone so you only see the screen when you decide to see it. This may remove the need to constantly look at the phone.
Tackling plastic pollution: ‘We can't recycle our way out of this’
People have recently enabled one person with spinal injury to walk via implanted microchips on each side of the injury and a wireless bridge. So that’s very strong evidence it is within groups of baseline human capabilities. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230526/A-groundbreaking-...

We don’t have DNA sequences for more intelligent humans because we haven’t tried to find them. It’s easy to point to things not done and say it’s yet to happen, but that doesn’t mean such things are beyond our comprehension.

As to math advancing via individual effort, it seems that way because we lump success to the individual. Fermat’s last theorem wasn’t some major effort but there was real progress in the community and the “lone wolf person” actually benefited from both collaboration (people pointed out a problem with his initial proof etc) and advances that didn’t exist until quite recently. That’s the thing problems become easier when you have access to the correct tools.
I don’t understand why I shouldn’t receive a $5 cancellation fee when drivers cancel if they are choking to charge me $5 for cancelling…
Well I for one had no clue about it. Shows you how interesting the average dev feels such things are.
There are quite a lot of varying degrees of casual believers in religion. I grew up in a family of Christians/Catholics who never go to church, rarely say grace, have never personally read the Bible, but still believe in God/afterlife/etc and have personal beliefs that are molded from religious teachings.

I know at least for the Christian based religious groups I'm aware of, you don't even need to share faith to be part of the community.

Believe it or not, they don't get into fist fights when they meet someone of another faith either.
Beyond the "both sides" problem, no State's representation (House and Senate) has any incentive to tangibly reduce spending. Federal money will always be seen as something to maximize for your constituents because it is primarily funded by the rest of the country. Even if you managed to elect some severely stingy representatives, they can only really manage to reduce spending to their own districts. That void would be filled by greedier and less fiscally concerned representatives from other states. Politicians that unilaterally cut spending to their own constituency run the risk of losing the next election to a candidate who has no qualms with bringing in the pork.