skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this couldn't be any more incorrect.

I think the first thing people get confused about here is the fact that AI is trained on predicting the next word. What they don't realize is that predicting the next word for all of English is a really really hard task. It's not something you can accomplish simply by repeating common phrases. These generators have to actually learn to do things to do their job well.

In fact we know what this looks like, Markov chains have existed for ages and we know those sort of output they give as statistical models of language. They are trash in comparison to what we have today.

Imagine saying something like this about a human, "they're not actually intelligent they're just machines bred to reproduce". Don't confuse an error function with the thing that was created as a result of training on that error function.

Instead, I believe that we are going to see the last vestiges of the era of homogenization ending. Television was homogenization. Radio was homogenized. Our current entertainment, short of platforms like YouTube and Spotify, are also homogenized.

AI takes the power from creators to create, and gives it to the individuals of the world. This is going to result in one of the most dramatic personalizations of media that we have ever seen.

And yes, whatever people ask for is going to have to be within the bounds of AI, but humans are not going to sit idly and let the AI determine what they get, they're going to continually try to improve and customize it to fit their needs. Humanity never sits still, and this tool won't make us do so either.

We're already seeing an explosion of individuality empowered by things like youtube and Spotify, and AI is only going to make that even more individualized.

These are not mass produced media machines, what they create is not just copy paste. When you ask an AI machine for an output you get something that is unique from everyone else, and what you ask it is going to be unique from everyone else.

People are soon to have self-expression unlike any we have had before, and we should be more excited for this than we were for the internet as a result.
First one is annoying, but it makes sense, to some degree. You say the default is this particular instance that gets created when you define the function.

Second is just how things work, the function is a closure that evaluates the non local variable when you run it.

Third one... Iterating over the generator does NOT yield an empty list, it raises StopIterator. As does trying to iterate after a generator is done, so there's no way for list to know what's happening. You can argue that's a bad design, but I'm not so sure, an iterator is something you need to make sure you don't try to iterate over twice...

I don't get the 4th. Comparison operators have the same precedence, so yeah.
Have you truly observed this type of degradation?

I do archive work and have 20+ discs from the 2010 era. Mostly the first generation of PMR drives. I have never had any data degradation problems.

You can also find lots of YouTube videos of people spinning up drives from the 80s and 90s which still hold their data without problem.

More scientifically, the phenomenon you talk about is modeled by the Arrhenius equation (1), where the activation energy to flip a grain is given by KuV/KbT, where Ku is the anisotropy of the magnetic media, V is the volume of a grain, Kb is the Boltzmann constant, and T is temp in Kelvin.

HDD manufacturers engineer this ratio to be >60 (usually targeting 70-90 to be safe). Media manufacturing is imperfect, so there is a log normal distribution of grains on real-world media, but if we assume that 60 is the energy barrier for all grains, a KuV/KbT of 60 would mean it takes 362 million years for half the grains to flip, assuming an attempt frequency of 10^10.

Where is my math wrong?

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation
As is often the case with one's memory, it bears a grain of truth but distorts reality. I've been using Elm 0.19 for side projects and enjoy it.
For a piece that warns of homogenization, it's rather unoriginal, even down to the historical inaccuracies. (The early internet was not a “place where anyone can say anything“, it relied on the NFSNET backbone, whose policies banned many forms of speech. And of course the “anyone” part is somewhat suspect, too.)
You can. First you can just use it like Reader Mode. Safari -> share menu -> open in News for any HN link you click on that has too many popups.

Or, in the News following tab, click Edit, remove all “suggested by Siri” topics, and block low-quality channels. I blocked the National Review, WSJ, USA Today, and People Magazine and my feed got a lot better.
Cool. Thats why many dont. No one wants to work in such conditions and no one should. Wondering if he’s going to be as cocky when taiwan will need western help against china.
My problem with GPT-4 so far is that it's most impressive at doing things that I don't really need any help with, but when I ask it something that I find genuinely challenging, it's error prone and often generates suboptimal code. Of course, it's an extreme far cry from Markov chains and earlier models, but at the end of the day, I think it's skipping too many steps right now.

To be clear, it's still really impressive. Being able to ask an AI assistant to implement e.g. a Fourier transform in Rust and getting an answer that is correct or quite close is pretty damn impressive. That's something that a lot of programmers would struggle with. But, in a lot of other ways, GPT-4 feels very skin deep, and the illusion is pierced when you realize it has just made a bunch of shit up in its impressive-sounding answer.
Why is this getting downvoted?

I fly regularly and with wildly different luggage configuration.
I want to pay for what I use, not less and not more.
Sometimes I fly only with hand luggage. Once I flew with 6 suitcases totaling 160 kilos from Dubai to Zürich.

What I want are customizable options with clear prices. Frequently it’s only possible to add more than one suitcase over the phone…
I’m actually more worried about soil depletion and pesticides than climate effects.

(Does that make me a bad person?)
I use it (GPT4) to explore ideas. Come up with names, explore domains i'm unfamiliar with, etc - all while assuming everything is wrong and i need to validate everything. Which is basically the same as Google/etc. I just use it as a frontend for Search, generally.

I don't use it to write anything concrete, i have not found it to be good at that. I also use FastGPT (Kagi's GPT) as a .. faster search frontend. FastGPT fails to find stuff frequently but it also is so damn fast it feels faster than me searching+clicking_link+skimming_page.

I also like ChatGPT for exploring APIs which i may not know, but can easily validate. It's wrong often, but when i can validate it's not a big deal, and what i get out of it is the ability to Q&A. I find API documentation frequently frustrating because while i prefer documentation, i frequently don't know how to get to my answer. Documentation often feels like i need to read the entirety of everything before i can reliably get any answer, and frankly i'm impatient. GPT gives me a more interactive exploration of content. It either knows the answer, or can often point me in the direction to find it myself.

All this is to say ChatGPT & friends have not revolutionized my work. Hell during my day job i rarely use it because it's a domain i know well. But i do have the belief that it helps me enough to justify the cost, currently.
Either Andy Kaufman the spy or flipped virgin.
There are more and more eyeballs over time competing in fewer and consolidating media markets. Content trending towards homogeneity is a real thing, especially on the streaming services.
For issues 1 and 3, I usually have success asking ChatGPT to correct them. Ie "Can you write this with fewer callbacks using async/await?" or "Can you make this code faster to execute?"
> Our biggest change is the prominence of ambient "background music," which isn't as fun as, say, the rise of gangster rap or grunge to me.

This is very dependent on your POV. I've always really liked ambient and instrumental/non-vocal music and it's vastly more accessible now than it was 25 years ago. Grunge + gangster rap and a lot of popular music post the 70s was pretty overstimulating in an unpleasant way to me. I think those of us who like calmer sounds or who listen for ambiance (rather than lyrics and/or the spectacle of shows [ which are of course valid ways to like music and probably more common]) are eating pretty well. I think it's fun - I'm listening to more new stuff than I did from 2000 - 2020.
They don't.

And when you're an expert in an area, you find ChatGPT presents folk opinion rather than expert opinion.

It's very much a journalist of the internet
> It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported nor required with OpenObserve. OpenObserve provides its own UI which does not require separate installation unlike kibana).

This seems contradictory. If OpenObserve doesn't support Kibana, how can it be a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch queried using Kibana? Even if the OpenObserve UI has similar features, I can't just replace Elasticsearch with OpenObserve and keep the rest of my workflow the same, which I would consider a precondition to call something a drop-in replacement.
> The law of large numbers strikes again

This is not even remotely what the law of large numbers mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
As someone who sold shareware a long time ago, and had to invoice companies now and then, there is some overhead to getting yourself setup to invoice, look like an actual business, and accept payments made out to a business. There are services these days so it's not that expensive or hard. But it's something I see a random software developer not wanting to deal with for the odd small payment. There are also approved vendor lists, etc.
There is survivorship bias but we also know as an objective, verifiable fact that building techniques/components/materials have become more standardized.

I.e. yes sometimes craftspeople executed their whimsy and it came out very badly and was later destroyed, but yes also there was more variance across the board.
> We are talking about domestic usage, not corporate

No we're not, nobody said that.

> NAT is something which should not have existed in the first place.

It was an absolute necessity when it was introduced, since there are less IPv4 addresses than there are people on earth.
Of course you're gonna have some like me chiming in with: actually yes underground culture still exists.

Today's punk/alternative ideology is to reject the ad driven visibility industry. Thus it is invisible to everyone not actively looking for something like this.
Does dang actually do this manually?
I don't have any super concrete examples, but I can confirm it _helps_ in writing software for me.

Things it has helped with, that are now part of a codebase I work in and get paid for.

Generated example css to center a text element onto a sibling image. I'm decent at css, but I didn't know I could do this easily. This definitely saved me a decent amount of time

Write some boilerplate react hook wrapping over an axios request. Something along the lines of "Write a React hook to make a request to ..., using these parameters ... Return ..."

The one that I've probably used most is "Write a MySQL query to ..., these are my schemas: {COPY PASTE RELEVANT TABLE SCHEMAS". I can write MySQL queries just fine, but getting one with some decently complex calculations takes me some time. GPT-4 gets very close most of the time. For exploring the database GPT really has helped save me quite some time. I just don't now MySQL as well as I do my primary languages like TypeScript, PHP and Python so this is a godsend.

Otherwise, I also use it a decent amount in some other scenarios. The Phpstorm plugin I have gives me a right-click menu that pastes my code in a chatGPT window. It has stuff like

1. Refactor

2. Explain

3. Write docs

4. Write a custom prompt

I use these a lot. They save me a decent amount of time. They're super quick to access right in my IDE. In some cases using the "Refactor" command, GPT-4 gives better results than myself. I found that it doesn't really make typos in making sure variable names and stuff stay the same, and it also doesn't mess up control flow which I sometimes do. And yes, this is an admission that I do sometimes refactor without tests, I'm working on it :x
AI Basketball Referee Could Aid NBA Refs
Csexp: S-Expressions over the Network
In my experience that's more of a side effect from TFT displays. Each pixel has its own gate and can hold a charge for quite a long time.

It can also be a side effect of older LCDs, when power is lost the crystal can take a long amount of time to depolarize. If you apply backlight you'll see an afterimage.

LCDs are driven by the controller and have no knowledge of the framebuffer location, or even access to the host address and data busses. So if you see an afterimage, that's in the pixel.
Ah yes! Would love to know how the crowd that protests better public transit, pedestrian paths and bike lanes as “taking away space from cars” will respond to roads being further clogged with… empty cars?

We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
I'm not interested in delving into pedantry, so I'll stop after this. My intuitive understanding of this phrase is that strong or weak opinions are generally a measure of magnitude more than stability, while strongly or weakly held opinions are a matter of stability rather than magnitude. Someone might have a milder opinion of something, like "Pepperoni pizza is fine" vs. a stronger stance, such as "Pepperoni pizza is the BEST pizza." How easily that opinion is changed does not necessarily correlate. Perhaps the person who thinks pepperoni pizza is the best has never tried salami pizza and will be an instant convert. Maybe they're the worlds BIGGEST pepperoni fan. Maybe the person with the weaker opinion on pepperoni might be very very unlikely to change it because they don't care enough about pizza in general to consider it much. Maybe they love pizza, but are one bite of pepperoni pizza away from saying "bleh, hand me a slice of mushroom."
What is this K8 blog that you are mentioning?
(I am the person you are responding to) I grew up completely ignorant of religion and my first foray into that was the study of yogic tradition. Once I got a taste of what exists, I was very lucky to realize my ancestral faith has incredible depth, beyond that which is even understood by those say they are kinda religious (ie, many people who say they are religion X don't know how much there is to X)

On the toxic part, sorry to hear that. I think anything can be toxic originally to the value of the concept. (ie someone may have a horrible experience with a coach but that doesn't take away from the value of fitness in general) but it sounds like you have a pattern that works well for you.
If you're worried about the spy agencies, data is safer inside the US that out.
The madman will most likely be some isolated small entity. Yes it can do some damage but will be wiped out of the face of the Earth by the rest of the world.

As for massive, world ending attack - hopefully over the time all those treaties, agreements and monitoring that were in place before this attack on Ukraine will be restored over the time and improved.
There could be a metric for rated activities/products that penalizes high ratings if given by ‘pro-homogenous’ raters i.e. who tend to be diehard follower-mindset people who avoid anything really novel.

I don’t think this kind of metric is useful for most people though. You can go anywhere in the world and for example the highest rated TripAdvisor lunch place is likely to have eggs benedict (with a sprinkle of local spices!), and most people find that a feature not a bug.
Be that as it may, it does not change the realities on the ground. In one country you get to learn the language by speaking with locals, and in the other you do not. Perhaps you consider this unimportant, fine, but then also expectations on immigrants learning German really ought to be adjusted.
> When you talk about not being able to analyze these based on their code do you mean because today they're all just calling out to OpenAI or whoever?

I mean that ML models are inherently inscrutable, it is extremely hard to determine how they operate internally, so no-one can identify any definite boundaries of what it will and will not output, or why. Hence prompt engineering, Bing's Sydney alternate personality, and weird hallucinated image artifacts.

Sure, if a user is calling OpenAI, they obviously can't understand the details of how it generates text. But neither can OpenAI! And if it produces something surprising, there's no way to fix it by directly modifying the model, the only way to do it is via ML techniques in the first place.
Thought experiment: what if we banned all acquisitions and mergers? A corporation could be like a "person" in that regard, strictly not for sale. I think the process of determining which acquisitions or mergers are acceptable vs. not to be completely arbitrary and impossible to judge the correctness of.
The idea that Covid19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab has moved from conspiracy theory to mainstream view of many US gov't agencies with the most classified information available to them.

John Ratcliffe, former Director of National Intelligence: “My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense. From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”

https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hea...

The Furin cleavage site is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence. 1.5 years before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute applied for a grant from Darpa to explore mutating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans, particularly through the addition of a Furin cleavage site. (Darpa declined to fund the research).

The Covid-19 virus is notable for being the only coronavirus to have a Furin cleavage site. Not only that, but it appears to be basically a perfect mutation that specifically modifies the 12 nucleotides necessary for the Furin site, without modifying other base pairs.

Here's a quote from email excerpt included in the recent Congress hearing:

"Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat
CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are
essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect
insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its
whole length essentially identical. I really can’t think of a plausible
natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar
to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide
that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function
– that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t
figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment
of the spikes at the amino acid level – its stunning. Of course, in the
lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you
wanted."

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Lette...
Sadam tried to be ambiguous about having WMDs so he could used them as a deterrent without the problems with actually deploying them (kind of like Israel does, but less credible). Sadam was violating UN orders in regards to WMDs, but there was no automaticity so the US was not actually supposed to go in. I think it's plausible the UN would have gone in anyway if the US had waited.
Clippy wasn’t as bad as the ribbon.
Video removed. Looks like even archive.org might not have caught it fast enough. https://web.archive.org/web/20210828142953/https://www.youtu...

But Chomsky is overrated anyway imo. Really smart, but an Ivory tower elite at the end of the day.
At least initially they need someone else signing off with them and potentially even submitting on their behalf. But as it is now, it looks like if you submit high quality contributions for a sustained duration, they can eventually submit as just themselves.
None of this is about writing software? Sure, these things are useful for building products, marketing, etc. but none of it is technical - how am I going to write better software with ChatGPT? Believe me, I've tried, and it's not that good!
Sure, but those options varied between small regions. For instance, while some television programs would be distributed nationally or internationally, others were filmed at the local stations, and stayed local.
I refuse to believe Java has gone through 20 major revisions since 1.0

I remember when 1.5 came out and Sun's marketing folks insisted it be called Java 5. I think thats when they jumped the shark, and haven't corrected course back since, versioning-wise

And I wonder if someone keeps track of what the proper traditional Java major version should be now. I'd guess its on 2.x or 3.x at best
>Tells you all you need to know.

Thanks for the subtle reminder that your statement is most definitely not "all I need to know."
Media used to exist based off of classified ad sales, then tech companies absorbed all that cash flow. After that, most local media died.
Oh it will be. Already everyone can program, be a voice artist, draw paintings, write poems, and what not. The actual skills will be lost, because cheap and quick beats depth and intent. Basically every time.
It can generate example data for tests but why would I want that when, if I use a good property testing framework, I already have that; and it can shrink examples sensibly so that I get the minimal failing example for my test?

Generating code seems worse too. I agree that you don’t need “perfect,” software if you’re building a blog for your local soccer team. Maybe you want more precaution if you’re initiating trades in securities. And definitely a lot more scrutiny if you’re building real-time control systems for helicopters. Verifying that code is correct with regards to its specification first requires a precise, formal specification; and second, is still a lot of work.

Eyeballing every line of code to catch errors ChatGPT introduces into your code isn’t going to work. You’re not a compiler or theorem prover and you’re bad at finding errors in code. Really bad. It’s not your fault; code becomes incredibly complex quickly.

At best, right now, it’s a curious toy and maybe useful for some folks as a “smart” autocomplete. But beyond that ChatGPT seems to struggle. And I struggle to find a use for it myself.
If true, it's probably good that they were incompetent in leaking the virus and incompetent in making a vaccine to front run the virus. Wonder if that would have started world war 3 of they successfully vaccinated their population then either accidentally or on purpose released the virus.
I think one can also run a git repo without history. That would solve the "dirty stuff in the history" problem.

I don't think binary blobs should be included at the beginning. The "content" file should be just a text file.
Homogenized cultures come and go. Postwar 1950s monoculture came and went so will everything else.