skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It appears that they have been moving towards admins taking the moderator role for some time.

I wrote, pre-blackout, what I thought was an innocuous comment stating that I would not be offended if someone called me gay (why would I be?) and I eventually received a site-wide suspension for it. No concern was raised from the moderators of the subreddit it was posted in despite the fact that their rules dictate not violating the site rules, which I apparently did.

The panic over there is fascinating.
Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?
If they would only moderate for feeling power, they wouldn’t risk their mod position by going against the only party who can kick them.

Honestly, I also think that public forums such as reddit shouldn’t build up a walled garden like this and the information should be free to anyone, regardless whether they use it commercially or for research.
I've read up on it and while the ideas are interesting, the wording is incorrect, you should not use a word that means exactly the opposite of what you intend. The moment you want to impose a system of any kind, you stopped being anti-system. But I guess that's the essence of anarchism, using confusing terminology to a degree reminiscent of doublespeak.
Week old AI startup raises $113M seed round
The new AI models will seek novelty[0], pieces of facts not recorded before. It will directly hone in on newness not how it was delivered. Writing styles could be another vector in which novelty could be detected but that's a different matter.

[0] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/sice2009.pdf
> by every other country that is pursuing a nuclear waste management program.

This claim is simply false. Many countries reprocess nuclear waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
Comparing GPT with Open Source LLM’s
Capitalism is a pyramid scheme that feeds on population growth, but dealing with a shrinking population once is better than dealing with a large population forever.
A dead golden goose containing one last giant golden egg. They don't care if it's dead, so long as they can cash out on the archived data that can be sold for training.
I mean that is how everything in life works.

Most people lurk politically and are just pulled along by people who care.
> Will Tesla’s charging technology end up conquering North America?

No. It will be CCS chargers using Tesla's plug. It's remarkable how many articles have been written without grasping this.

The stupid thing about the situation is that North America failed to agree a plug and is still arguing about it.

> Nor is it clear how the charging experience of Tesla owners might change as more and more non-Tesla EV drivers line up at the same charging spots that used to be theirs alone.

Of course it's clear. Tesla opened its chargers to all brands in Europe over a year ago now. It was easy to do because EVs use the CCS type 2 combo plug in Europe. No adapters or arguments over plugs required.
This is less of a gotcha in the context of locking people in boxes, which we also normally don't do.
I'm actually a huge fan of ARPGs (e.g. Seiken Densetsu), just not the kind that are in the Diablo line. I definitely have unusual sensibilities for RPGs in general because I didn't like Planescape Tormet either (though I enjoyed the SSI Gold Box games when I was younger).
Yup, this would have been an interesting approach. Just let everything through and let god sort it out.
Apologies for the verbose response, but I just don't see how to avoid it because people constantly get tangled in knots in this sort of discussion.

I think this is continuing to miss the forest for the trees. The original code snippet could also just use `unsafe` to elide the panicking branch and it would still be just as correct while satisfying the requirement that there are no panicking branches.

But what's actually happened is that you've traded "panic when a bug occurs" with "undefined behavior when a bug occurs." Both things are valid choices depending on the circumstances, but the latter is not a realistic escape hatch out of the discussion at hand: whether one should completely elide all panicking branches.

The comment that kicked off this sub-thread:

> IMO (systems programming background), the litmus test for panic! vs. Result doesn’t exist. Don’t panic.

The "Don't panic" advice is correct but ambiguous on its own. If it's referring to the behavior of a program, then yes, absolutely, don't panic. Or as I like say, "if a program panics, it should be considered a bug." But if it's referring the source code, as in, there should be no panicking branches, then that is absolutely wrong. Neither the standard library nor any popular Rust library follows that practice. And they shouldn't.

I interpreted "Don't panic" as the latter meaning because of the claim that "panic! vs Result doesn't exist." That only makes sense in the latter interpretation. In the former interpretation, one does need to contend with a "panic vs Result" choice, as it's often a balance between convenience and how it's usually used. For example, indexing a slice with a `usize` panics.

So either the former interpretation was meant and the poster is confused (or just misspoke), or the latter interpretation was meant and is divorced from reality.

I'll post a link to my blog on this topic yet again, because I'm pretty sure it will clarify the situation and my position: https://blog.burntsushi.net/unwrap
Yeah thats what my current plan is after seeing all the advice and tips that I've been given here, give new users a demo and seeing if its something they want to sign up for in the first place
I like the new color themes and fonts.
A large part of that is that tools + procedures expand to fill the available space - if there are people willing to spend 20 years doing the same work, the work expands to fill 20 years of your life.

It's more about the social landscape than the practical requirements.
Yes. I already use GPT-4 to replace support for a 3D CAD system I use, since it is usually takes a significant time & effort to get through to tech support, and this often provides very good answers (up to 2021).

I think the best solution would be for them to train and implement a version of GPT-4 or similarly capable LLM on all of their documentation and support logs, then keep the live users to handle the issues where the LLM fails and to continue training it on new info.

(But of course, management will likely just dump the people before it is even time, as with the examples in the article, following the ensittification principle of monetization of evertyhing. Seems like that was missed in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.)
So where’s the music??
Engagement is my favorite form of metrics pseudoscience. A classic example is when engagement actually goes up, not because the design change is better, but because it frustrates and confuses the user, causing them to click around more and remain on the site longer. Without a focus group, there's really no way to determine whether the users are actually "delighted".

EDIT: For some reason it didn't compute with me that you already referred to the same example. I've seen that exact scenario play out in real life, though.
> IIRC France is the only country that does this

No, many countries do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#List_of_s...
I don't have a third party app, either, but I do care that a business values its customers and partners... And I'm really getting signs that Reddit feels its only customers / partners are the advertisers. They've made their own website unusable because it demands you use the app instead. And the official reddit app just isn't a good app or an enjoyable app—it feels like a play for them to maximize ads & tracking. They don't have great native tools for moderators—essentially their own pool of free labor.

I know these things almost always blow over, eventually, but this has been just another part of the spiral. If you think your only relationship is with your advertisers... someday the advertisers will be the last ones you have left before they too take their business elsewhere.
I'm glad u/spez cares so much about "democracy". For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.
Luckily, that's no longer true. Solar panels and $8000 EV's are cheaper than natgas plants and gasoline cars. And if the fossil fuel deliveries are interrupted for any reason, the economy doesn't immediately collapse.
> Payroll taxes are dedicated to pay for Medicare and Social Security programs.

Yes, and doing that as a dedicated levy on labor rather than general revenue is a policy choice. It doesn't somehow not count as a tax.

> The amount you get in old age is directly proportional to how much you paid in

No, its not. Especially not for Medicare.
Mods seem to think they own the subs they moderate. They do not; the subs belong to the community. Mods do have too much power at the moment.

The easiest way to resolve this is to perma ban all the mods of closed subs, then remove the ability for subs to be closed.
Stupid Template Languages (2010)
But the ability to detect, say, content generated by pre-2033 chatbots will open up a whole decade of previously contaminated content.
>for some reason

AGI
And those new mods are suddenly not going to need better modding tools? They'll just be happy with whatever Reddit has? It's just the current mods who get off on their power, the new ones won't?

Stop for a second and consider: why do these problems exist, and why should they stop?
When you call the feature flag, it’s going to put the user into one of the groups. The article is saying you don’t want to add irrelevant users (in the example, ones that had already done the action they were testing) because it’s going to skew your results.
Forward Indexes on JSON Columns in Cockroach DB
It's like they're following a playbook on how to burn a company to the ground
Lurkers are pure consumers, free-riders. They produce nothing. They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.

People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.

Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!
Not if it works for you.
If you're just someone who browses 20min/week, I'm not sure you represent the average user in any of your subreddits either much less one that should be weighing in on whether other people get to use the subreddit. ;)

"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.
The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.
I don't think that's happening, but Google's support document has this to say:

> Once regulatory approvals are obtained and the transaction closes, the billing and support services for Google Workspace (including G Suite) subscriptions currently billed by Google Domains will be managed by Squarespace. After close there will be a transition period during which customer and billing information will be migrated over time, subject to limited exceptions, after which your Workspace subscription previously billed by Google Domains will be managed in a Squarespace account and billed by them.

So maaaaybe? I have no idea what these two sentences mean.
In my experience, coding is not interesting to teenagers, generally. But making games is, as is 3D printing, and robotics.

So, don't teach 'programming', teach game development, CAD, robotics etc. Start with blocks / agent (turtle) based languages. Jump right in to doing fun things! Things like turtlestitch (Logo for sewing machines) turtlespaces (3D logo with STL export for 3D printing) cospaces (block-based 3D games) etc.

Starting with Python is always going to be a slog. Leave it for later
Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant.

Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew.

You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
>NSFW poison pill

Could you explain what you mean by this?
I was thinking about the connection between the death of digg and now the death of reddit. It's similar that they destroyed engagement by not responding to feedback. Social communities can be forgiving for missteps with acknowledgement and accountability, but Reddit seems to have just shifted its focus from being a community space into a data product.

Had an account for 14 years that I plan on 'deleting', whatever that means with the fast and loose intentions around customer data that reddit seems to have now.
> Seems like a recipe for having your software slowly evolved into a giant heap of dark patterns.

Just don't test for dark patterns?
I heard a lot of people say their main app is trash and lacks many of the basic features you see in third party apps.

They could have focused on fixing their app and only charging a fair amount to api access so they had a slight advantage over their data. It reminds me of iPhones to be honest. All the best jailbroken apps and features were slowly added to the iPhone over time. Reddit could have been following the same route and slowly killed off their competitors. There are many ways they could have added value to their app and thus get ad revenue and data but ignored it this entire time.
> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns?

Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.
Train LLMs on, gasp, published books and academic papers?
> How much more are you willing to pay to rebuild Miami after bigger hurricanes do more damage?

We have continued to build in disaster-prone areas. That's a real problem. But that is somewhat orthogonal to climate change.

Imagine a world without climate change. Are there still hurricanes? Is Miami still a low-lying city in a high-hurricane area? Do we continue to build more condos there?

Imagine a world without climate change and ask again: How much more are you willing to pay to rebuild Miami after "a big" hurricane does damage?
> to human knowledge it is currently the only viable way to handle the situation.

No, it's not. See comments elsewhere in the thread about reprocessing.
Not only this, but also books.

There's a big difference between ghostwriting (biographies and fiction) and then the now fully GPT-generated books (non-fiction, especially technical) for sale on Amazon.
> they are not representative of the overall community.

I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.

I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)
In Powerbuilder language, there was no decent exception handling, I used return codes and goto in almost every function, like you can do in C.
Math education has the same issue.

3B1B videos draw you in with a cool visualization that makes you ask the 'why' of 'why did this happen' first. This maps onto the techniques used by the best professors I've learned from. Hell, it is exactly how competent sales-men sell their product.

Start with a cool demo -> confuse the audience -> make them ask why -> this motivates them to want to learn the what -> all the tools learned in the 'what' comes together to teach you the 'how' -> you just made the cool demo happen -> MAGIC.

My favorite subjects were ones where the 'why' was obvious to me as I learned the 'what'. I distinctly remember disliking inorganic chemistry, because none of the facts seemed to go anywhere. You learned the facts for the facts. Nothing came together to reveal a grander intuition. I disliked history for the longest time, because I viewed it as some form of culture acquisition and status signaling. Once I started reading real history from an 'early warning system' perspective, I couldn't stop searching for repeating patterns and universal casual links within it.

With AI tools gaining prominence, it will actually be possible to build these fully contained dopamine cycles. "Dangle carrot -> difficult task -> reward", all within a single self-contained assignment. But even besides that, too many teachers simply do not have an intuition for how that dopaminergic cycle works.
> On the scale of drug hardness, alcohol is near the top.

That's a very subjective statement. Many animals seek out alcohol in the wild. For example, bears will seek out fermenting berries and get "drunk."

> drug hardness

There really is no objective distinction between "hard" and "soft" drugs. For example, spend a minute skimming https://www.gatewayfoundation.org/addiction-blog/hard-vs-sof.... "These arbitrary categories have no clear criteria or definition, and they also have no scientific basis"
The fact that JaneStreet hired both SBF and Caroline shows their interview process has a few flaws.
"That's right! Every file you've ever created, or anyone else has created or will create! Copyright infringement? It's just a few digits of π! They were always there!"

I didn't think that was actually mathematically proven yet. Was some proof accepted recently that makes that quoted sentence true?
Been on OpenMoko, SHR, n900... landed on Android and have all I need. Terminal, ssh, functioning telephony and messaging, Gadgetbridge, email, banking, fdroid. Degoogled (although not without Google services on the phone). Except of banking, all apps are open source (including telephony, thanks to simple mobile tools). Love Linux on desktop but unfortunately need to use Android on mobile.
The fun part is for me Reddit was pretty much already dead, as these moderators degraded the content over the past several years. I made no big decision to boycott, just subreddits were driven below an interestingness/quality threshold and fell from my browsing, so the only one I've looked at regularly in a couple years is local r/nyc. (which didn't blackout)

I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.
Yeah I've said this at least dozens of times. The subs for those who want a slower reddit and discussion linked to the subs for faster communication, probably with some levers like "you're talking too fast" or "AI has detected too. many cucks and soyboys, calm down, here's a 24 hour time out"
This makes sense for a site where all content is publicly available. Even if reddit were to cascade delete every comment and post a user had created, the data would be trivially available through web archives and public data dumps.

Changing the username to indicate the deletion of an account is helpful to show that a user cannot be interacted with any more, but no deletion process could truly remove content a user had created from the internet.
Key bit of info for the headlining person: "Mr Meadowcroft can't be certain, but he's pretty sure the AI replaced them."

It's possible his employer saw they could use AI and cheaper labor, but not AI alone. AI generated text for publication is not trustworthy at the moment, but it's possible with enough time and input it could be made to be that way. It will depend upon what happens the first time a company puts out something AI written, and intelligent humans find some glaring error and blow a hole in it.

I think translation and voice over is going to be the biggest AI replacers. Audiobooks by AI sound terrible now, but I remember the voice over feature on the first Kindles and it's come a ways.
A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?
“Having done this job once upon a time, I think the downtrend in title is inevitable”

I absolutely agree with this. It seems like a it inevitable for anything that a business needs to do but doesn’t really want to do. Another place where you see it is with project management, where there have been many different titles for the same role.[0]

https://chiefofstuff.substack.com/p/the-job-status-cycle
Yup, being someone who has done both dev and ops, that is what I see too.

In my current current company, the operations group’s name changed from “techops” to “platform”, … but there is no “platform” or roadmap towards that, and it is reflected in how people still call the group “techops”.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/forest-fires-and-n95...

Vinay Prasad said I shouldn't bother putting on a mask when the east coast of the US was blanketed in wildfire smoke.

> First, recognize that some baseline exposure will happen no matter what. Even in your house, you still can smell smoked salmon. The baseline exposure may dwarf any portion remotely modifiable.

I guess none of us should wear masks because you can smell cooking salmon in your house?? Seems like this guy is not that trustworthy
A sane CEO would instantly ban all the participating mods of the larger subreddits. And then pick off the rest that didn't get the message.
I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.
It's far more likely that training methods will improve. Humans don't have this issue.
There are no material repercussions for bad faith DMCA takedowns, as the evidence has shown [1]. The legal burden still falls on Reddit to triage and action them. With that said, you would want to own the Reddit accounts as IP in an LLC that holds no financial assets to shield you from any liability (not legal advice, we're just having fun talking hypotheticals). You'd own the copyright to the content, let Reddit try to argue in court the requests were bad faith. You didn't agree to the terms when the account changed hands, and you're now the owner.

You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
8. Don't go on major news outlets and come across as being on crack.