skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What annoys me is the censored answers. It's impossible to get useful information out of ChatGPT, especially on controversial or otherwise risky topics.

Five paragraphs of disclaimers that it's not a medical professional, not an investment specialist, that every case is different and it's normal, or that I'm stupid for being interested in the topic I am asking about, only to answer a completely different question than I asked. I have a feeling that in the beginning, it was easier to get ChatGPT to answer my questions without having 80% of the answer being "defensive".

ChatGPT is getting worse, on the other hand it also showed me how bad of an experience is searching answers with Google. So I'm kind of frustrated...
That photo was so ridiculous but I badly wanted to believe it was real!
Imagine having an app on your phone that turns any ebook into an audiobook.

Imagine replacing crappy phone menus with polite virtual assistants that actually understand what you're saying.

Imagine an AI language tutor that speaks every language in the world fluently. Or a universal speech-to-speech translator.

And that's just off the top of my head. Clever people will come up with a lot more uses, I'm sure.
> I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text

I feel like this doesn't get enough attention; its writing style is _incredibly_ grating. It's not just corporate gobbledygook; it's a parody of corporate gobbledygook. Just awful.
1. Connections talk, but money talks even louder. The companies they buy are also trying to sell for top dollar and rarely court just one buyer.

2. CLOs are definitely problematic, but the current rate of default is vastly overstated. If private credit defaults at the rate people seem to think it does, we'd be looking at a GFC-type situation. I can't say if there's systematic risk in CLOs a la MBS, but any possible risk hasn't materialized yet. The biggest PE firms today rarely default. Blow-ups such as Toys-R-Us are newsworthy for a reason.

See my comment below for more information. I'm not in PE, but I am very familiar with how the sausage is made.
Well I for one appreciate it. I was drawn in after a couple of paragraphs, and then started to doubt and figured I'd check the comments for exactly this kind of thing before I run off and tell my child about an amazing animal I just heard about. Thank you.

After reading about parasites that turn ants into zombies to do their bidding, I'm pretty much all out of "that's just a nonsense story" when it comes to nature's variety. I'll be skeptical, but I tend not to outright dismiss immediately.
The gamma ray spec is a spectrometer and not just a detector that gives the exact energy of a radioactive decay so it can tell you what exact isotopes are present.
I've averaging a few conversations a day. My usage does not involve asking it to generate large chunks of code or anything mind blowing, but the usage I do get out of it makes me feel very fast, efficient, and confident in my abilities to tackle every little task I face every day that has any bit of unknown to me.
It requires looking farther back into where the energy comes from. Humans are rather inefficient at converting calories in carbohydrates into movement. Electric motors are comparatively better at turning electric potential energy stored in batteries to kinetic energy.

Keep going this way and you'll eventually reach the efficiency of converting solar power to movement, which is again directly comparable, and electrical systems win compared to biological systems.
Another tangent: I feel this speaks to the hazard on building on these generative AI APIs. Your product may work great on Day 1, but there’s no way to guarantee it’ll still work as well on Day 500. Either due the models being nerfed, or due to the models becoming stale over time.
I'll let you figure that one out on your own.
Huh? Nowhere does the author suggest that the electric powered system was "eating him out of house and home". The motivation here was clearly resiliency and creativity. He also mentions the importance of addressing leaks too.

"Empty tanks" is probably just shorthand for "pressure too low to run the tools".
How much does the read/write buffer size matter for socket throughput?
The link to Laurens Lapre's LPARSER is dead. Is there a more up-to-date one? I couldn't find it with a brief search.
> you actually experience and participate in the city you live in. You learn the small roads, you see other people and they see you, you spot tiny businesses and interesting parks.

And you get cussed out by either drivers or pedestrians, because street design pits you against either one or the other...
Renewable power sources have risks. Renewable power operators can buy insurance against those risks. Can nuclear plant operators buy insurance against nuclear risks? Or are taxpayers on the hook for that?
Can anyone summarize in layperson's terms any standards that these securities must meet?

For example, is there a standard saying that the thing invested in must being legal? (No ETF based on illegal crack cocaine manufacturing, nor a fund based on illegal human-trafficking?)

Is it OK if the thing is imaginary, but everyone just pretends it has value? (Even if Gold is sometimes treated as imaginary convenience, at least it's based on a physical commodity with industrial application.) (Edit: Other than fiat currencies backed by states.)
A lot of this does feel like reinventing the wheel. However, it's slightly more convenient than being tethered with a wire.
The verge now requires a subscription
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/331/
All the OpenAI devrel types on Twitter say it hasn't been meaningfully lobotomized.

Based on past Gell-Mann amnesia, especially on this site, claims of "corporate leadership is telling baldfaced lies!" are likely to be false.

And finally, this is a product that spits out randomized answers, and we have gotten over our initial wave of euphoria and settled into hedonic adaptation, so we are likely to be less tolerant of failure.

I don't want to say you're wrong. But these are reasons to doubt. There are very strong cognitive biases pushing us toward the conclusion that it's gotten dumber, whether it has or not.
Making a Studio Ghibli Wallpaper Carousel (For macOS)
Studio Ghibli have dropped almost 1k movie stills into the public domain (and counting) over the last few months. I turned this into a rotating desktop wallpaper for my Mac, and thought I’d share the (tiny) process.
I would be good if I could change the start date.

I piled through just to see what it was, and now can't see how I can reset to begin my detox tomorrow morning, since today is almost done.
Fusion isn't a good example. It's not getting anywhere near the funding it requires. Maybe I've become cynical, but it seems like all the big new technology products which have come out in the last decade or two have just been software products mostly designed to predict human behavior more accurately to advertise to us. AT&T invented solar panels, the transistor, radio astronomy, as well as computing innovations that we're still using today. It's hard to imagine we'll hold Google, Apple, or Facebook in the same reverence 100 years from now because they created some interesting consumer products which distract us for a couple years before going in the trash to be replaced by the next, slightly more distracting version
If xAI produces a competing product (which Elon stated is their goal) I wouldn't be surprised if it is less "limited" than ChatGPT/Bing/Bard/Claude/etc.
Exactly. Parkinson's Law states it best: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. A manager whose main function is to hold meetings will fill their 40 hours with meetings.
Yeah, like how alcohol consumption totally stopped in the US with the passage of the 18th amendment.
To get an idea of what this could be like - https://imgur.com/a/Y1ccx5D except done as braille.

The instructions for the toaster oven are encoded in the QR code.
Managers who didn't want to go remote were forced into it and decided they needed to force as much face time as possible.
> Many managers...realized that their jobs are unnecessary

I hear this a lot in forums, but to me it rings out as something that perhaps-disgruntled workers want to be true about managers, but isn't really grounded in measurable fact. It's true that as a manager I don't produce a lot of code, but at the end of the day my job is to know who the experts on different topics are and to know what the zeitgeist (and maybe even plan of record) of the org is so I can get the right people in a room together to solve problems. If we left that up to each individual contributor, especially the more junior ones, we'd never be able to achieve a large scale goal. Imagine if you were trying to build the Golden Gate bridge but you eliminated management and just turned a bunch of workers out on the site to do whatever their skills and experience led them to.
Looking at the first sheet, it doesn't seem to be cumulative in the sense of a running sum. If it were cumulative, the first values would be 0, 1, 3.
That’s one of the great things about react native and react native web. It’s like CSS with about 25 years of crud removed.

Of course there’s some downsides, but it’s refreshing to use.
I was completely taken in until the octopus hat. There's no way 1920s fashionistas go from feathers to a pile of brown turds on their heads. The 2nd ddg hit was the Wikipedia article, the second word of which was "fictitious".
I've never heard of any place that required a license for any of the 3 formal electric bike classifications. If you need a motorcycle license that is because the thing you intend to ride is, in fact, a motorcycle.

The bike featured in the article, a BESV PSA1, is considered a "class 1" machine under the most common framework. It has a low-power motor, pedal assist, and no throttle. I am not aware of any place that requires licenses or insurance for such a bike.
> Though a lot more people can read software than can write software.

Huh? As someone who's been doing both for a couple of decades, I'd have said the opposite, really. All programmers, more or less by definition, can write software. Bad programmers, however, often can't read it.
It’s great. I’ve never enjoyed daily life as much as bike commuting with my son, even in lousy weather.

My favorite memory of the trip to daycare happened on a shared path where I’d often see another dad taking his sons to work on a long-tail. One fall day, the boys were wearing superhero costumes and those bike helmets with the Roman warrior crests, and they were standing up on the running boards cheering him on as they raced down the hill. It was like a triumphal procession — and quite the contrast with all of the unhappy, raging people on the roads nearby.
Everyone knows fraud exists, yet fraudsters continue to flourish; they are good at leveraging new technology and tropes to rebrand themselves.

Consider the frequent complaints about scammers marketing substandard products on Amazon; the issue is well understood, the markers of scammers are well identified, but Amazon does nothing about it because the lesses from disgruntled customers are less than the revenue from shapeshifting scammers.
ReBCO is a huge boon for magnetic-confinement fusion. The comment from their CEO that "In fact, from a physicist’s standpoint, our machines look kind of boring [...] we could get extremely high performance through the brute force of the magnetic field” hits the nail on the head.

Experiments like DIII-D have spent the last 20-30 years trying to eek out a few dozen percent more performance by fine-tuning the shape of the plasma & the current distribution inside it, etc. Some of the configurations they've tested are right on the edge of instability, requiring high-speed control systems to walk up to (but not over!) the edge of an invisible cliff in parameter space. If we learned anything from Three-Mile-Island and Chernobyl, we do not want that kind of twitchiness in a nuclear context. Sure, the worst-case fallout isn't as bad, but the multi-billion dollar reactor could be crippled for months/years, depending on how things play out. Boring is good, in a nuclear context.

The downside to the use of brute force is literally the forces involved. The original design (a class project) estimated that the structural steel required to hold the coils of a reactor together would run almost $5 billion & account for ~80% of the total cost of the core. (See Table 11 of [0]) This is for a power plant that would deliver ~ 250MW of electricity. The total plant cost would probably be $10-15B, which is not economical. However, they say "there likely exists a better economic optimization of magnetic field strength versus mass for a full power plant." Most likely, that involves reduced field but larger size reactors, which might be slightly more expensive but significantly more powerful. (IIRC, the latest designs for ARC are inching up toward 4 meters major radius.)

I doubt this approach can reach economic breakeven, but I think they have a good shot at exceeding energy breakeven. OTOH, I'm a physicist rather than an engineer, and I work for a competitor, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

[0] https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/reports/2010/15ja/15ja0...
It’s people! Zoom fatigue is people!
You can also replace the socket on the NES itself for relatively little, it took me about 20 minutes a couple of years ago and it made it much more reliable.
> And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale?

given that YT has been doing it since 2005, I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat' aside from just sheer scale; I would presume if YT decided to alienate their entire userbase that some 'threads'-like overnight competitor would get spun up to suck the leavers up.

I don't think that it's reasonable to assume that there will be some kind of multi-media vacuum formed in the absence of YT. there is a lot of good will to manipulate away from YT should their decision-making process get excessively heavy handed, and I think someone with money or power would jump at the chance to do so.
The pyrometallurgical methods of separation are a bit nicer. Way less liquid waste than Gen 1 WW2-era separations like PUREX.

https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/12_Pyroprocessing_bro_5_12_v14[6...
Check out bike YouTuber ZeroEnigna. The man does nothing but road rage at pedestrians.
Do e-bikes generally have regenerative breaking? I assumed that given their weight the amount of energy captured would be very low also bikes have very different braking patterns compared to cars (unless maybe if you're going downhill and don't want to go too fast).
Have you tried Google Cloud Studio voices?

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet#studio_...
can you expand on the results part of 2 ? who/where/what are the shifts
I asked midjourney for photos of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and the results were impressive. Time to update the sightings page of the website.
I like prologic's Tube. Way simpler, single Golang binary. Hosts video, not much else.
Lot of text to point fingers at search engines and not a single idea of how to fix it. IMO it isn't Google's problem and at best they could help for their own reputation, not being forced to play police. Search engines should index, policing should be done upstream.
Ever notice big huge font on the phone of older people? So big that a screen may only contain a few lines of text. Or that people has to pull out their reading glasses every time they check their phone? Text to speech is a godsend in that case. Enormous benefits to an increasingly older population.
> working code with an excellent security track record

It seems we are talking about different projects.
Yeah, but How Fucking Cool would it be it if was a real thing.

I think it is begging for B movie treatment... OK Down vote me as being Reddit-esque... But come on, it's Sunday afternoon, have a little fun...

Tree Octopus's on a Plane..
Tree Octopus- nado
Suction cups... We're gonna need a bigger backpack.

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.

I love this PNW Myth, deserves love right up there with Sasquatch and DB Cooper.
Ah gotcha, such is the case with any controversial thing. The reality is much more mixed. Vitamin D is a good example of what the opposite looks like. Mostly positive entries but is largely debated. Maybe in another 50 years we will have more data.
Whoa, did you launch a website? :)
You are getting downvoted (at least at the moment), but interestingly enough, you're not far off from what the VP of Product at OpenAI has said himself:

> No, we haven't made GPT-4 dumber. Quite the opposite: we make each new version smarter than the previous one.
> Current hypothesis: When you use it more heavily, you start noticing issues you didn't see before.

https://twitter.com/npew/status/1679538687854661637
I used Ubuntu and later Ub Mate for about 15 years. Unfortunately, it has been deteriorating steadily. Fighting obnoxious snaps and breaking classic themes etc. Small regressions every release adding up. The lack of investment was becoming impossible to miss.

Then I tried Mint Cinnamon and it felt a lot better. More modern, but gratuitous change avoided. Many rough edges fixed.

I still have some quibbles, software is getting old (stuck on LTS), and doesn't support wayland, which I plan to move to in the near future.

Also have Fedora KDE, Wayland on a travel laptop, and liking it almost as much. Took a long time to reign in kde, and while still messy it is mostly tamed to my liking. (With exception of konsole's context menu, which makes me annoyed every day. May install kitty or?)
This is nothing short of amazing. It is exciting, a bit scary as well, what the future will bring.

It just makes me sad that I cannot open this page on Safari. It will not play a single audio, yet Chrome plays it fine. So here we are, able to generate audio, video, code, do amazing things with AI, but a simple website that has text and audio is not working on the most popular laptop out there.
> I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat';

Except that whole video costs a lot to deliver at scale and YouTube piggy backs off of Google’s existing infrastructure.

Not to mention all of the content-id technology that YouTube has to try to fight copyright infringement.
Regarding burnout I know individuals in the medical field who wish they could control their schedules by reducing the number of clients per day, but they simply are not allowed to because leadership expects them to turn certain levels of profit.
They're putting DRM in everything these days.
The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
If I were you're user, I'd appreciate a setting to remove all such delays. That is, assuming I've little chance of convincing you to remove them permanently. (-:
I don't know if that's necessarily the case, in practice. Aside from the cases where a PE firm does keep the company public, there's at least one case where short-sellers weren't made to close out their positions when a company was taken private (Next Bridge Hydrocarbons, if you're curious).
Nobody outside the enterprise does this.
I doubt the US govt is doing any such thing. There is no advantage for them in doing so even if extraterrestrial intelligence does exist. Space is too vast to allow for visitation or effective communication between planets never mind solar systems.
They would have charged me $30 for fixing a flat but refused to fix it because the tire was close to the maximum wear line... I ended up fixing it myself with a $8 kit that can be used again... I used their free air compressor to inflate it.
You should have read back up the thread, and see who turned it into a pissing contest and ended up distracting from the moral and ethical arguments by vague quibbling about the methodology.
> In fact, trying to identify as anything more specific that "human" leads to massive over-generalization, and the emergence of division and conflict.

While I agree, in general, with your point, I think I disagree on this point.

It is entirely natural, and has been for all of human history, for people to make statements about themselves like:

- I am a woman

- I am a physician

- I am a knitting enthusiast

- I am...

In those ways, people sort themselves into categories, very naturally. Among the single most significant self-identifications people separate themselves into is the thing arising from their biology to produce common traits shared by distinctions of gender. If it is natural for us to say "I am a woman" or "I am a man" why would it not also be natural to speak of people in groups as men or women?

What we have people struggling with is "if I am a man, as I believe, what does it mean to be a good one?" And the specificity matters, because there are traits, again driven by biology that produce statistical clusters of people who will behave differently than someone in some other group. Therefore, attempting to erase gender, or pretend that these differences don't exist and treat everyone with a single standard, is also not helpful, and in many cases harmful.
School lets out about midway through my work afternoon.
> bookkeeping

Bookkeeping?! Ah, yes, let the thing that makes shit up with impunity do your books for you. The tax authorities will be very understanding when you're audited, I'm sure.
ReBCO still isn't practical for grid transmission AFAIK. It needs to be cooled to something like 20 K to achieve high current. That's ~4x warmer than traditional superconductors (~4.5 K) but it's still not "high temperature" by anyone else's standards.
A very taoist way of living life. Love it!
Yes, I suspect people saw a wall of text and went back to look for a shorter answer.

I would guess google A/B tested those results till python.org fell off the front page.

More to the point, I don't think either google or the people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python __init__?".
If you ask ChatGPT an exceedingly trivial question, it’ll typically spend the next 60 seconds spewing out five paragraphs of corporate gobbledygook. And of course, because ChatGPT will lie to you, I often end up back on Google anyways to validate it’s claims.

Meanwhile, I could’ve found conclusive and correct answers directly from Google in about 10 seconds (I’m a fast Googler).

There are exceedingly few situations where I find ChatGPT is worth the effort. At least for factual Q&A-style queries like this.
Once it's widespread in consumer gear, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before people start hacking it to operate over longer distances, similar to what's been done with custom WiFi antennas, parabolic dishes, etc.
Drone Show Festival Gijon, Spain 2023-07-15 [video]
this exists: https://www.twitch.tv/turbo
OMG Flashback memories of my internship there.

It really should be turned into a tech museum or something.
Im in love with my EUC - electric unicycle. The learning curve is steepish only for the first half hour then tops off in about a couple of hours training. Pros: hands are free to carry items, it’s fun to ride, easier than walking after a few days of training. Good for training a good posture. Cons: lack of physical exertion, you’re basically standing on a floating platform with a wheel in the middle. All in all I highly recommend it for running errands or just pure fun.

Another pro is that it’s so small you can easily take it indoors so no risk of them getting stolen.