skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree fully. This is how I used Reddit, but with the caveat that it was fairly well exclusively with third party apps. There’s a functional argument to this conversation in my view.

My workflow was essentially one of the following:

1. Read through my topic-specific subs;
2. Append “site:reddit.com” to Google searches to make Google return results that weren’t a waste of my time. Reddit links opened in my client(s).

Unfortunately for me, the official app and the new site are both absolute garbage. Wasted space, poor user experience, more ads than content, harassment to use the app, and they’re both just so _slow_ to perform basic operations. None of that has to be that way. Good design isn’t antithetical to ad revenue. I’d argue it’s the opposite.

I don’t really have an enjoyable way to engage with Reddit anymore, and that’s my biggest “pedestrian” gripe. Though I do take exception to Steve Huffman and Tim Rathschmidt’s absolutely asinine handling of the API changes outwardly. But since I have no enjoyable way to enjoy Reddit, my ideological disagreements are effectively immaterial.
This sounds interesting, but I am not sure I fully understand. Could an analogy be the object model to loosely correspond to sth like Amazon cdk and the Ansible part being the derived Cloudformation (any other analogy should do, but those are things I understand a bit more although I use quite a bit of ansible, but I am no network Person)? I still don't fully understand the database part. Is it a better way to manage env variables/allows for more flexible input?

Thank you
This is a great way to put it.

The counter to "current generation AI is terrifying" seems to fall along the lines of it not being nearly as close to AGI as the layperson believes.

But I don't think that matters.

I don't believe that LLMs or image/voice/video generative models need to do much beyond what they can do today in order to wreck civilization level disaster. They don't need to become Skynet, learn to operate drone armies, hack critical infrastructure, or engineer pandemics. LLMs allow dynamic, adaptive, scalable, and targeted propaganda.

Already we have seen the effects of social media's reach combined with brute forced content generation. LLMs allow this to happen faster and at a higher fidelity. That could be enough to tip the balance and trigger a world war.

I don't think it takes a huge amount of faked primary material (generated phone calls, fuzzy video, etc.) that's massively amplified until it becomes "true enough" to drive a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a Russian tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine, an armed insurrection in the United States.

We're close to there already.
Doesn't Apple repair the M1 Macbooks if you take it to the Apple Store? From what I've understood, the macbook repairability issue is more to do with Apple's pricing and self-repair than the device becoming e-waste.

Apple also, I think, offers trade-in for the devices, recycling the components and preventing them from becoming e-waste if the device is a total loss.
> A theorem that says intelligence is in some ways universal, and that our intelligence will be compatible with all other forms of intelligence, even if they are much "smarter".

I would not be so reductionist. Intelligence doesn't seem to be an universal thing, even IQ (a human invented metric) is measured in terms of some statistics. If you have an IQ of ~60 you have intelligence but a completely different one from an IQ >85.

> But humans are intelligent, human languages have a universal grammar and can be indefinitely extended with new words. I think this puts us in the intelligence species club, and all species in that club can all discuss any idea.

Humans have different intelligences. You can be intelligent (per the human intelligence definition) but a math ignorant. Again, this implies intelligence as we know it is not an universal thing at higher levels: not all people can have a physics Ph.D. as not all people could be a good artist where good techniques are recognizable, same for music, etc.

Yes, a cockroach is in another level of intelligence (or non-intelligence) but that does not mean there is not a super-intelligence that makes us relative cockroach.

Also, without any intention of talking about religion or "intelligent design", we can theorize that the Universe is supersmart because it creates intelligent creatures, even if it is not conscious about that. I would be very catious to define intelligence in an universal way.
Person observing Trinity test: "Wow this is really dangerous and could wipe out a city"

Very astute response: "An atomic weapon has never wiped out a city"
Location: New York, NY, USA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: python, javascript, typescript, java, ruby, django, flask, celery, react, postgres, spanner, kubernetes, AWS, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dcyfj8y5w15qk2jijwenb/Alexander-Yankov-Resume-2023-07-03.pdf?rlkey=hzado5uym118mfi0orf01slux&dl=0
Email: contact info in resume

Full-stack/backend engineer with extensive experience in tech companies and finance. Looking to join an early to mid sized startup that is doing something innovative and useful.
Impedance Mismatch: SRE vs. Dev Speed
It would be interesting to see what the numbers are for IT 4 IT systems , scripts, batches, integrations, countless programs in countless languages including programs where nobody who knows anything about the system or language is available and no help or documentation or vendor is present anymore.
Calling conventions aren't (mainly) a C feature either though, but are defined by the ABI specified for a specific OS/CPU combination (and all languages which want to talk to system APIs need to implement that ABI, not just C).
Wind power is generally higher at night.
This isn't true and it's odd you believe it.

I just asked Chat GPT 4 to explain the religious significance of the Wizard of Oz as a literary critic. Here's some of what it gave me, it doesn't write anything like you claim it does:

"Moreover, Dorothy's companions -- the Scarecrow seeking a brain (wisdom), the Tin Man seeking a heart (love/compassion), and the Lion seeking courage (strength) -- symbolize spiritual virtues that are often extolled in religious texts. They embark on this quest together, mirroring the communal aspect of many religions.

The slippers (silver in the book, ruby in the film) can be viewed as sacred objects, or relics, that assist her in her journey, providing divine protection and eventually leading her to salvation (returning home).

Finally, the revelation that the Wizard is a mere mortal, and that Dorothy had the power to return home all along, imparts a spiritual lesson often found in religious narratives: the divine or the sacred is not external, but within us."

If I was a student I could have easily expanded on these concepts (with or without GPT) and turned in a good essay.
More likely a play to reduce battery lifetime by increasing incidence of full discharge...

Note a year ago they settled a lawsuit about throttling CPUs with updates on older iphones for the same purpose. The environmental footprint of an iphone is significant no matter what offset fake math they employ....
> given tech's ignorant libertarian bent of "I can do better on my own"...

Tech is uniquely positioned currently I think where skilled labor isn't as prevalent as the demand. Hence; 'we can do better on our own' for (many/most, not all) of us.

As soon as that balance tips; I'd agree with you.
> Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them?

You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?
Using an ad blocker can certainly make a device use less energy...
Would make a lot of sense if it was just built into the counter-top imo.
Researchers found a rare octopus nursery 2 miles below sea level
Yeah, it always struck me as odd that the main quantum computing research labs went for the "VLSI" approach straight away rather than building room-sized computers with qbits that are known to be more stable and don't require such aggressive refrigeration.

Between the costs of refrigeration/fabrication and the increased speed of decoherence, it's not hard to imagine that the approach of using superconducting qbits may be a dead end, despite quantum ECC.
Is that honestly your strongest evidence? I'll save everyone the time, it's nothing spliced in with a bunch of super annoying unrelated clips, sound effects, and visual clutter.
A decade+ of acquisition as the default "exit" (and the idea that you have to be driving for an "exit" in the first place) made people straight up forget how companies normally work, apparently.
Geoff Canyon, Product Manager

Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes to almost anywhere, but especially to the Bay Area.
Technologies: Usual mix of PM tools, plus SQL, Python, design and video tools and more.
Résumé/CV: http://geoffcanyon.com/geoff_canyon_resume.pdf
Email: gcanyon@gmail.com

I am a product manager with 15 years of experience in AI, NLU, machine learning, SaaS, and managing innovative products that serve millions of customers. I have managed other product managers and team leaders and delivered user-centric products that drove org-level growth. I have a background as a developer, so I have a higher level of technical and analytic skills than usual. I love developing creative solutions to technical, growth, and user challenges.
My MBP is currently running at ~800 MHz; it will be until about October or November, when I feel the coming chill of winter upon my skin. macOS thermally throttles the chip down, even if the chip is not actually that hot: the CPU is only ~65℃. But the surface temp on the keyboard is 109℉. All I can guess is that even though there's plenty of thermal headroom at the chip, you'd roast the user's hands if you attempted to use it. The fans cannot move the heat away from the CPU and out the back sufficiently fast, and too much ends up bleeding out the keyboard.

But now you have a 2.4GHz i9 limited to 800 MHz. During a meeting, it can't really do anything else, VC eats the available compute.

This is pathetic. Perhaps IT is different where you are, but my IT is out to lunch. IT is "hand new hire a new MBP" and … that's it? Unless a literal hole ended up in it¹, they're not going to replace it, ever.

Spolsky wrote that one of the "rules" for SWE firms was "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" — he wrote that that was table stakes, and if you're not doing it, you're nuts. He wrote that in 2000, nearly twenty-three years ago.

But tech cos love the MBP; IT teams only want to support one model of machine, regardless of how much of a lie that is (there are multiple models of a MBP deployed over time in a company) or how ill-suited a MBP is for the task at hand.

Absolutely I'm losing at least 20% if not more waiting multiple seconds for keyboard input to show up. Being unable to look things up during meetings, meaning mistakes get made, begetting more meetings.

¹Hmm. HMM.

Then there's the keyboard. The display cable connection. It goes on and on…
I completed the technical prescreen and never got an answer. Not even a rejection. Also, emailed the poster on last month thread and still no response.
I wasn’t aware of Autocrypt before this, and its description on Wikipedia is not confidence inspiring[1]:

“Key exchange is during the initial handshake and valid or invalid keys of peers may be replaced anytime later without any user interaction or verification. This makes it very easy to exchange new key(s) if a user loses access to the key but also makes the protocol much more susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks than clean TOFU.”

This is almost the exact opposite of the properties you’d normally expect in an attempt to provide encrypted emails, and offers neither recoverability nor even detectability for the legitimate parties.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocrypt
I think posits are better. https://posithub.org/
That's an overly simplistic situation.

Maybe the bottler bottles for multiple companies. Maybe Coca Cola could redesign their own bottles to target specialized bottle-filling machines, and Coca Cola would have enough volume to use all of that bottler's capacity.

But the bottler won't invest in the machines, because they don't want to only bottle Coca Cola products. And absent that, the bottles never get redesigned and the efficient machines never get bought. And absent that, Coca Cola is more expensive than it could be.

Or maybe absent an integration, the product offering isn't what the market really wants, because it doesn't want to have to combine two things.

Vertical integration can breed efficiency.

It can also breed monopoly, but you need to address the iron man if you're making an argument.
> I repeat everyone that is loling at x-risk an idiot

I mean this is the nicest possible way and hope that you consider it constructive: you're willfully misconstruing what I am saying and then calling me an idiot. This isn't a nice thing to do and shuts down the conversation.

If I believed you were operating in good faith, I might take the time to explain why my practical/scientific experience makes me incredulous of what's technically possible, and why my life experience makes me suspicious of the personalities involved in pushing AI x-risk.

I might also provide a history lesson on Einstein and Oppenheimer, which is instructive to how we should think about x-risk (spoiler: both advocated for and were involved in the development of atomic weapons).

But since you're calling me an idiot and misconstruing my words, I have no interest in conversing with you. Have a good day.
80%? How did you get that number? Van you elaborate a bit?
On the State of the Web
> Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?

Because they are expecting that the startup will turn into a profitable business, maybe?

Being acquired is very far from the only way that an investor can see returns.
My anecdotal recollection is that Deep Blue is a big part of what put chess into everyone's mind and rejuvenated the mainstream interest in playing what had previously been a nerd niche.
Yeah absolutely. I just don’t think that consumer tech companies which make 10 year plans (instead of a broad high level vision) and try to stick to them tend to be that successful.

> are all pretty much orthogonal to the app distribution model.

I’m not sure it’s only the distribution but the entire existence of native third party apps that they weren’t sure about.
That's like saying you can't steal from the grocery store because 99% of people don't steal from the grocery store.
I’d like it to draw enough power to not use the internal battery but avoid charging when driving in a car if it’s at least X percent charged.

I kinda do this with a crappy USB charger in my car.
Ooooh I got 99 miles on guess 3 and then started guessing 2000 miles away because I assumed they would be distributed.
The system is neither dynamic nor robust enough...
Exactly the term I had in mind: Rube Goldberg. And it gets so much worse than the examples you've given. Trying to shoehorn all the leaky abstractions together across the dozens or hundreds of pieces of technology I use every day from different vendors and open-source projects, with each interaction having hundreds of arcane failure modes, is absolutely soul-sucking. I'm impressed by the people who still do it, regardless of how much they earn for doing so.
Apple replaces the whole motherboard. That’s not repair, that’s at least $1000 worth of electronics thrown away for pro max models.
What’s the insider report on the Goodreads technical staff? Did they all quit after the site was bought? Did they stay, and they’re just coasting? Did Amazon nix the tech team? The site has received almost no technical improvements, so there’s clearly not an effective tech team anymore. Can someone at Amazon share the the gossip?
This.

If Tesla presented its numbers the same way that Toyota and Ford did, they would both have higher profits-per-car than Tesla despite selling many cheaper cars, due to the huge markups on their real moneymakers: trucks sold to U.S. customers (Ford's profit on an F350, their most expensive vehicle, can exceed the retail price of a Model 3.). The profits on trucks are why Musk is trying to get into the truck game with the Cybertruck.
Taiwan Looks to Ukraine Playbook in Race to Build Satellite Internet
If you want to learn more, I recommend a paper by John Daugman - inventor of the encoding system used to store and verify iris data:

https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~az/lectures/est/iris.pdf

By far the largest database of irises is the one created by India’s Unique Identification Authority, with more than a billion people enrolled:

https://www.irisid.com/indian-national-identity-program-tops...
Summary:

> When Clean Energy Charging is enabled and you connect your iPhone to a charger, your iPhone gets a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid and uses it to charge your iPhone during times of cleaner energy production.

I suspect this is an extension of the existing battery management system in iOS, which also helps protect the life of the battery by managing charging rates according to your usage patterns so that your devices are ready to use when you typically need them — like by charging at a slow, steady rate while you're asleep so that it's fully charged by the time you typically wake up.

I bet this is little more than an additional input to that system, adding carbon footprint to the reasons to charge the battery more gently during the day, which ultimately has the benefit of prolonging its life just a little further.
You skipped Audible which I would add to the list of give it just enough oxygen to stay alive but no innovation allowed strategies. You can't even connect your Audible account to your GoodReads. Audible is the app I would most like to replace that I use almost everyday.
You saying nobody starting web dev should use CGI.pm? Or CGI in general? Because CGI itself has its uses even today. It's much easier to understand and get off the ground than something like Mojo or Plack (I've used them all), and has its strengths compared to the others.

However, if you are saying no one should use CGI.pm, then I agree. That module is a bloated mess. Much more efficient ways to use CGI without that thing.
Yudkowsky represents the extreme end of risk concern. You can't fault others who estimate the risk at 10%, with huge uncertainty about when this risk will materialize and its chances, for not behaving as you'd expect him to.

Believing that people will take extreme actions, which would ruin their careers and likely backfire, based on a 10% chance of things going terribly wrong in maybe 30 years is strange.
Fortunately this is answered by the linked article. (This is often a great place to check for information relevant to the discussion title.)

> When Clean Energy Charging suspends charging, a notification on the Lock Screen says when your iPhone will be fully charged. If you need to have your iPhone fully charged sooner, touch and hold the notification and then tap Charge Now.
You can replace “any” with “a vanishingly small number” if it makes the comment more palatable to you.
Why US only? Are carbon emissions only a problem there?
Either Nassim is missing the point or you are misquoting him. I think this is more about should experts be in charge of their own domain.
It's a shame that large language models are mostly moving to 4 bit weights for inference, and a bunch of papers have shown promising techniques for training in 4 bit too...

Remember that switching from 16 bit to 4 bit lets you have 4x as many weights, 4x as many weights loaded from RAM per second, and ~1/16 of the silicon area for the calculations (a multiplier scales with approximately the number of bits squared). That smaller silicon area will let you do more per $ too...
If many people mistakenly believe something, does that make it true? Was the Earth flat 500 years ago?
The HDD may be having to retry reads on weak/bad sectors. Run Steve Gibson's SpinRight on it. It spots sectors that are having problems but not yet totally failed, and tells the controller to swap them out for spares (which is what the controller would do when they completely failed.)

It also works on SSDs, and yes, SSDs have the same problem because the drive controllers were not written from scratch.

(No affiliation here. It's just a tool I use because it works.)
In medicine they use a pain scale with faces when they need to find out from kids how much pain they are in. Something like that might be a better system?
How do you know they are observing false inputs, as opposed to creating false outputs? (acting as if they have seen halucinations)

How do you know that the LLM is not observing false inputs but creating false outputs? Would an LLM which tells you very convincingly about how it obtained a false information make you change your mind?

> This experience is available to you and is well documented.

You are misunderstanding what I'm asking. Sure, drug induced hallucinations in humans is very well documented. What I'm asking if this purported difference between "hallucinating on the inputs" vs "creating false outputs" is meaningful distinction.
There is the German word "Rechner" for Computer but nowadays it is seldom used.
This is such an excellent way of concisely expressing a major fallacy I see whenever I talk about AI/modeling/etc. (I.e. “it isn’t racist it’s just numbers” and other nonsensical takes). I’m borrowing this language for the future.
LLMs are not going to do anything but the next class of models may well. They will have a physical understanding of the world, like us. Slap some sensors and a body on it and you will have something that might look scary.
How do you show hidden folders in Finder? You literally have to memorize a keyboard shortcut. How do you switch apps in full screen mode, you need to know trackpad gestures or keyboard shortcuts. Every post like 2004 addition to MacOS seems to be reliant on trackpad gestures to the point using the operating system with a mouse is a negative.

The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
> Not the guys working at OpenAI or anthropic or deep mind.

A lot of them do. A huge percent of people who aren't speaking out are rolling their eyes. But what are you supposed to do? Contradict your boss's boss's boss?
Watching the first dot matrix printer output a page of text: “This might print out text that summons Cthulhu”
Why do people save their empty Apple boxes?
It was assumed that Putin was rational enough not to make the blunder he did.

The uncertainty bands would seem to be wide, in both more- and less-competent directions, in gazing into the navels of autocratic regimes.
> it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff;

In short, shifting to Doctorow's "enshittification".
I had a job waiting tables when I was a teenager when my co-worker got busted for writing down credit card numbers and info when she took the tables' cards to charge them. Apparently she had racked up over 100 thousand in fraud over time.

What stops a business from doing the same thing?
There are lots of early-investor-to-later-investor exit paths; it would just cut down on the "built-to-flip" model, which is a distraction anyway.
Some of our internal tools have command line options along the lines of:

--yolo Yes, I really want to overwrite the production database and get us all fired.

where "--yolo" is our standard flag for such things. When I find myself about to type that, I go back and double, triple, quadruple check that I really intend to do the thing that I'm asking it to do.
Cool to know that I can write simple Java code and it's almost in the same order of magnitude as the insane sanic version.