skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some types of alarm yeah, if within the window of things it's statusy to be alarmed about.

Most of the AI concern that's high status to believe has been the bias, misinformation, safety, stuff. Until very recently talk about e-risk was dismissed and mocked without really engaging with the underlying arguments. That may be changing now, but on net I still mostly see people mocked and dismissed for it.

The set of people alarmed by AGI e-risk are also pretty different than the set alarmed about a lot of these other issues that aren't really e-risks (though still might have bad outcomes). At least EY, Bostrom, Toby Ord are not also as worried about about all these other things to nearly the same extent - the extinction risk of unaligned AGI is different in severity.
Focusing on the financial side is okay, though I would mention that the energy cost is only half of the total cost, according to the literature. But desalination is not only about money. It has an impact on its environment, because it pumps fresh sea water and reject brine. These operations have a high cost for the local marine life.

A large desalination plant means large patches in the sea where life is not sustainable.

BTW, if an average US house really needs 1m^3 per day, that's appalling. These past years, my house has used less than 10m^3 per year and per person. 30× less. I'm afraid most US homes will keep wasting drinkable water and pressure society on building desalination plants, rather than halve (at least!) their water usage and protect the environment.
The article is pretty light on details. Does anyone have any specific information about this? Me drives seem slow too, but I might just be impatient.
Parties exist to solve a collective action problem: getting your face and message out to enough people to win elections means that in the absence of political parties, the odds that a non-oligarch will achieve high office becomes even smaller than it is right now. Plebians very rarely held high office in ancient Rome.

Doing away with political parties is advantageous to the status quo, because, in the absence of parties pooling resources to promote an individual, gaining sufficient power to change the status quo requires first leveraging the status quo to acquire sufficient resources.

There is also the issue that exercising the kind of power that goes with these high offices requires a sort of moral ambivalence that I think precludes "good" people pursuing, let alone holding, these offices.
Should I be at all suspicious that the first two comments are both from accounts made the same day, both have no comments or karma except the ones here, and both are brief and extremely positive?
> While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade

Is there something like a formal proof of this? From what is evident , openAI will use language data to train its superscientists. But that contains descriptions that were made in human brains, and it s fair to say a very large number of the linear and nonlinear compositions of those descriptions has already been tried in the brains of other humans, and so far we have not had the ingenious to solve some fundamental issues. It is possible that the superscientist is limited by the human scientist in a fundamental way, and will not be able to abstract beyond what humans have already done and can already do.
But good, wise, and just men and women cannot effectively win races in our current political system. Instead, power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths willing to form unconditional alliances with powerful groups and sacrifice any moral principles to 'win' debates, bury controversy, and gain advertising dollars will instead get selected at every first-past-the-post race above the hyper-local.

When you write:

> People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job.

The most important part of that sentence is the "that they believe" part. The actual goodness, wisdom, and justice of the people who form the set of all eligible candidates has almost nothing to do with the distributed beliefs of those eligible to vote; the process of disseminating information about the former to the latter is EXTREMELY lossy. And power-hungry, hyper-wealthy sociopaths can successfully exploit that.
It seems like the site doesn't really need a server so people have made offline versions.

So should be able to burn something like [1] to a disk.

[1]: https://github.com/ibaaj/Regex101.com-offline-app/pull/1/fil...
From the images it seems they removed the "latest" tags yet no comment on it in the post
So many great game studios were founded by demosceners: Rockstar North, EA Dice, Starbreeze Studios to name a few.
> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright.

It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws.

> Here's a free ebook on the subject

Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.
The water storage might be tough here. Especially in California, there will be a ton of evaporation (which will raise salt levels) and make it less efficient.
Heating under usual winter conditions would consume more energy than cooling under practical conditions. Yes.

But that's very different than claiming than cooling is more efficient than heating. In A/Cs the ratio of energy (in the form of heat) removed to energy consumed is very low, around 10-15%.

In furnaces the ratio of energy added to energy consumed is around 90%, which was pretty good until the emergence of heat pumps. There almost all the energy consumed is added to the output in addition to all the energy removed from the other side. That's why the efficiency in heat pumps is beyond 200%.

In summary, no. Cooling is not more efficient than heating. But given the temperature differential when cooling the energy consumption is usually higher.
I'll add Adam Ragusea's Hickory syrup experiment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT9IJXuHbKs
Yes! I was inspired by levelsio's use of PHP but I don't want to use PHP. I was once enamoured by Python but it still hasn't fixed it's dependency management problems. Go occupies a nice place with the simplicity of Python but with static typing and better tooling.
This is not true. That only happens if the money supply exceeds the productive capacity of the economy.

If the government didn’t issue any money and economies continued growing (which wouldn’t happen because you need slack in the money supply to allow for growth) there would be deflation. So the government could issue money in a growing economy and still see deflation, until the ratio hits a tipping point.
Yeah, unfortunately some of our workstations are MacOS and Linux based, so I can't solely rely Kerberos, we have to have LDAP (ideally LDAPS) involved. We were also advised by our email provider that they have used it for the company's Exchange provider but that was set up before I joined the company and I am not really seeing evidence of a cert being issued for that purpose, though I very well could have missed it.
Florianópolis is a peculiar little island. It has gotten much bigger and trendier in this millennium.[1] But it is still the island of witches and other supernatural creatures.[2] As a dinosaur from the 8-bit era, I appreciate and resent both worlds. As a first generation islander (manezinho), I am neither Little-Endian nor Big-Endian . I love it here.

On top of that, we are in the mullet season. [3]

1 - https://youtu.be/fEK53W3Y-vE

2 - https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=florianópolis+frank...

3 - https://youtu.be/9YftNiFyQ9E
or “pain driven development!”
You can't drink hydrocarbons.
Great. USA and Europe using different standards ...
Type 2 will not go nowhere in Europe and USA will choose the Tesla Connector.

Oh. Just into the rabbit hole, Japan and China also use different Standards.
That’s why I mentioned it as a thought experiment. We have been burning energy for centuries to keep folks alive in both extremes of climate.
That’s the same argument said about wind and solar not that long ago. People are repeating history by saying the same thing. In the end, you are making something with just wind, sunlight and water. Since they are practically infinite resources, the cost will trend towards zero.
You've pretty much nailed it except for one minor nit:

> It takes less energy but produces a concentrated liquid waste stream that must be disposed of.

This implies that creating a concentrated waste stream is a problem unique to reverse osmosis. It isn't. No matter what you do you're going to end up with a bunch of salt that you have to get rid of somehow.
It takes less energy but produces a concentrated liquid waste stream that must be disposed of.

I've heard that this brine is toxic. Does this make disposal an issue? Is the toxicity true or hyperbole? I mean, do we know how bad it is, and if we can do anything safely with it? It seems like "salt" is useful in a lot of contexts, including industrial, so can we do something with the brine besides disposing it somewhere?
It's quite likely to have been the world's hottest day since long before the record started though. Perhaps for many thousands of years. And all to soon, since hundreds of thousands of years.

There was a brief rise spike in global temperatures in early Holocene, a little over 10k years ago, and we don't know the peak, but it seems likely we will cross past that all too soon, whatever that was.

After that milestone, the next threshold would be sometime in the chaotic Eemian period, 115-130k years ago, one of a number of massive spikes during the largely glacier-filled largely-cooler Pliestocene, going back a million years. The Pilocene before it was cooler averages by far as well, until about 2.5 million years ago. That was the last time earth was steady state hotter than where we are rapidly heading.

We won't ever know for sure where the historical thresholds to cross are. The Eemian probably had some fantastically hot days. But the statistical probability of having crossed to the hottest day in the Holocene is already, I think, non-zero. And climbing.
The text of the bill includes "indexing" and "ranking" as equivalent to displaying. So even making them searchable (with just links) would cost FB/G.

Also, the thumbnail/blurb is usually in the html head tag for use like this. You can literally set it to "click through to learn more" instead of a summary and FB would respect that.
I think it's just impressive to folks that the CEO of a public company is still coding and putting out useful PRs.
If you built a desalination system say… 500 feet under the ocean and have the pressure above pushing water through the filters, is it possible to lower the amount of required energy just a little? Then you’re more pumping water out of the system than pumping it through heavy filters
If you wish to make an Apple pie, you must first become dictator of the universe
It's very easy to forget that we use orders of magnitude more water than comes out of our tap. A pound of beef is about 2,000 gallons, so that would be a nontrivial price increase.
This is relevant to my interests. You might also suspect (rightly) that I have Some Opinions(tm). I'll have to go digging into this at some point...
Is there a way to use OpenAI API that allows for internet access similar to the Bing plugin?
> The term "Lisp" is undefined

This hasn't been a problem in this thread thus far, but to be explicit, this seems like a good definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%2...

Given that definition, we can see that there are many actual standards for programming languages with specifications under the name "Lisp". Scheme - as was mentioned in this thread, is one such standard, along with Common Lisp.

> Anyway, if you would be allowed to reimplement a built-in operator, then from then on you would be using the new operator and you would be limited to its syntax.

I think you're arguing the merits of doing something like redefining define here, which is not the subject of this comment chain. Of course such behavior is questionable at best. The comment chain is discussing if such a thing would be valid in Lisp - and, in some dialects (such as Scheme) it is.

Scheme also has a feature called "libraries" which makes such behavior more feasible, as you could still have access to the shadowed primitive. Consider:

gosh[r7rs.user]$ (import (prefix (scheme base) base:))

gosh[r7rs.user]$ (define (define x) 5)

define

gosh[r7rs.user]$ (base:define x (+ (define define) (define define)))

x

gosh[r7rs.user]$ x

10
We do warehouse analysis using autonomous robots: https://www.dexory.com

Hardware is hard – not just the actual work, but the different approaches needed to development, management, and fundraising. We started in the consumer space, moved to the retail/customer service space, and only really hit our stride when we pivoted to the logistics space.

Our series A was announced last week so there's plenty of momentum and the industry generally is enthusiastic about technology. Ongoing improvements in robotics technology generally is finally making this sort of application feasible!
There's an operational argument to make, but fundamentally it's about performance, and secondarily about what having an ultra-fast local database does to your performance budget and thus how you build things. The premise is that in a typical web application, each request incurs multiple round trips to the database, and those round trips add up to eat a chunk of your budget. A database like SQLite can essentially eliminate that round-trip cost.

It's not just about making snappier applications; it's also that even ordinary apps burn engineering time (for most shops, the most expensive resource) on minimizing those database round trips --- it's why so much ink has been spilt about hunting and eliminating N+1 query patterns, for instance, which is work you more or less don't have to think about with SQLite.

This premise doesn't hold for all applications, or maybe even most apps! But there is a big class of read-heavy applications where it's a natural fit.
Correct, for multiprocessing support it uses Redis, the idea is that you have a sidecar with your service that will sync metrics between all of them for scrapes.

The default are blocking operations and they are fast, they are pipelined for scrapes (retrieving all the metrics value is the slowest part sped-up with this).

If you are curious there are some benchmarks tests that I used to make sure the library was correct comparing with the official one, in my tests this approacher is faster than the mmap files one but they are testing a really limited scenario so take it with a grain of salt: https://github.com/Llandy3d/pytheus-bench#the-results-

Correct for the TTL, if a metric doesn't get scraped/incremented for more than ttl, it will be cleaned up. 1 hour is the current default value.

To go a little further into details, the Rust based backend has a separate thread for changing metrics value, so on your python code, wether sync or async, the operation is extremely fast. On the Rust side, the operations are collected and pipelined together asynchronously.
From the tests I've made this is enough, but if someone has an insane amount of metrics to modify, it is possible to add support for multiple "writer" threads, the important bit is that operations for a single metric are done in order, but this can be easily achieved by hashing with the number of threads. I hope this answer your questions!
A Massive Scale Semantic Similarity Dataset of Historical English
There was a time 150 years ago national grids didn't even exist as a concept. Now you're never more than 10 ft from a plug at any given moment when inside a city. A current lack of places to charge is easy to build out of.

I'm for hydrogen subsidies, just not for personal transport. Use the money for heavy transport, agriculture, and forestry. If that also happens to make fuel cells cheaper all around and changes the economics of fuel cell vehicles, that's fine, just don't subsidize hydrogen personal cars directly because it's deeply unlikely they will ever be more than a curiosity.

Thermodynamics means green hydrogen always has to pay the round trip conversion loss, so it will always be more expensive than raw electricity. I do agree there is opportunity to soak up excess renewable generation with hydrogen, but if you're right about hydrogen demand that won't ever affect the price more than a few %. Raw, direct electricity use will always be cheaper, so people will figure out ways to make that arbitrage work for them in ways other than hydrogen storage.

The lack of losses with batteries will mean there is a huge incentive to shoehorn them into anything where it possibly makes sense. That doesn't necessarily mean current lithium chemistry and that's where your innovation will come from.
This has nothing to do with IP laws, and everything to do with baby formula laws. You don't seriously think that without the ability to sell the recipe, nobody would invent a safe and effective baby formula, right?
OK on Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there - even with Harvard's "ground breaking things" and "college that matters".
> LOL. I think competing in markets is an objective criterion for success.

"LOL." That kind of thinking is myopic and dated. Pretty much every year from 2020 onwards had yielded high-profile new lessons about its flaws. The market doesn't optimize for some pretty important things.
Deserts are far more alive and biodiverse than people think.

> The Sonoran Desert encompasses 120,000 square miles of southwestern Arizona, southeastern California, and in Mexico, northwestern Sonora and most of the Baja Peninsula. With nearly 3500 species of plants, 500 species of birds, and 1,000 species of bees, the Sonoran is the most biodiverse desert on earth.
Complexity management is key in any project. Lots of successful forks reduce total complexity. NetBSD and OpenBSD are excellent examples — one could argue that their goals and innovations (in portability and security) would also be useful in the «mainline» FreeBSD, but that would explode complexity.

The FreeBSD community is carefully watching progress across many forks and cherry-picking / importing a lot of the cream.
> It is quite literally copying and pasting from StackOverflow

Not necessarily.

They've already said that certain emergent properties as the models have scaled beyond certain thresholds are responsible for some of the abilities. The ability to code as well as some of them can has been included in this.

> ChatGPT is very useful reference library. It blows google searching for examples out of the water, but you need to be very careful with the results, and very knowledgeable to use them properly.

I agree that you need to know what you're doing to make use of them. I've been a SWE for over two decades, so I certainly know what to feed them (and what not to - such as proprietary information) to get a coherent answer. Yes, they need a lot of context on a given issue, without that the model can only guess at what you are looking for (variable names, UUIDs for primary keys, schemas, interface definitions, 3rd party components, etc). And they will occasionally suggest using deprecated methods or not the latest suggested approach, due to the cutoff date.

However, I stand by the opinion that if given the right inputs, they are capable of unique solutions to complex issues. The models are seemingly capable of taking points A and B from one StackOverflow post and combining that with C from the language documentation and D from a third-party vendors site and combining them into a coherent answer.
There should be public Apollo-level projects to fund AI research towards creating this AI-scientist. The need has not arisen (because private companies have enough money to play with it), but as a matter of public policy, and considering its importance for our future, this research should be done publicly, in academia.
> Most people aren't particularly good drivers. Indeed the vast majority of lethal accidents (the statistics are quite brutal for this) are caused by people driving poorly and could be close to 100% preventable with a properly engineered FSD system

I'm gonna take issue with this. A properly engineered FSD system will refuse to proceed into a dangerous situation where a human driver will often push their luck. Would a full self driving car just... decline to drive you somewhere if the conditions were unsafe? Would this be acceptable to customers? Similar story for driving over the speed limit.
Couldn't they just replace fossil fuels with nuclear and solve the emissions issue?
Thanks. I don't know why these custom viewers are attempted. They're invariable terrible.
It's important to recognize that the model is fully capable of operating in open world environments, with visual stimuli and motor output, go achieve high level tasks. This has been demonstrated in proofs of concepts several times now with systems such as voyager et al.
So, while there are certainly some details that are important, much of them are the annoyances that we devs deal with all the time (how to connect various parts of a system properly, etc) the fundamental capabilities of expressivity in these models are not that limited.
Certainly limited in some sense (as seen in the several papers applying category theoretic arguments to transformers) but for many engineering applications in the world, these models are very capable and useful.

Guarantees of correctness and safety are obviously of huge concern, hence the main article. But it's absolutely not unreasonable to see these models allowing humanoid robots capable of various day to day activities and work.
Are there any surprises here? For me, it's how well the .NET regex lib does in compiled mode.
Being “anti nuclear” made a lot of sense until a madman decided to attack Ukraine.

And with the world economy stabilizing after that mad man’s actions it’s again making a lot of sense as nuclear continues to be far more expensive than other renewable alternatives.
It is, however, an interesting hypothetical to ask: if journalism itself is entirely unprofitable, such that all the newspaper companies eventually shut down, and private journalism stops being done — then what should we, as a public, do to retain our duty to be informed? Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
The article is saying that we can't expand biogas to replace all our current gas usage. Which is fine, as electricity meets most of those needs better anyway (e.g. heat pumps for home or industrial heating/cooling, renewables for the majority of electricity).

But the article also states that non-food based manure biogas could be expanded to 3x current with no impact on food (well, except to make German meat and dairy more GHG friendly). Food waste is another source that doesn't compete for land. Coal mines and landfills leak methane. New satelitte tech can pinpoint small sources and fine people that don't capture it, providing both a stick and a carrot.

So, the small amount of unavoidable gas usage, can be met by capturing stuff that would otherwise be released as methane. We already have gas storage and gas turbines. We can mix in green hydrogen too if need be.

50% is the capacity we need, not the amount of energy that needs to be supplied.

Here's a Wartsila projection for Germany suggesting 8% "flexible gas" is what's required, with 59% of peak capacity. That is, a very small amount of the year, it's used a lot. Luckily we already have large amounts of gas storage built. (Also, we've done a complete loop on this thread: "Gas generation capacity is different from GHG and other pollutants caused by actually burning fossil gas. Don't be fooled by people implying they are the same.")

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
It sounds like they're ok with that.