skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is, to put it bluntly, bollox.

A prime example of a "health tax" such as this is the Scottish Nationalist Party's tax on alcohol - in a bid to increase health by putting a minimum pricing on alcoholic beverages.

The result? Nothing has changed, there is still the same amount of health problems in Scotland caused by alcohol.

Sugar taxes have also been proposed in the UK, and heavily combated.

It just will not work.

The best you can do is to highlight how bad sugar is to health in general, and hope it influences people to change their habits - I for one try to reduce my sugar intake whenever possible.
IME, browsing the web with iCloud Private Relay is much better than Tor, since your client is not outright blocked by websites. I have not browsed the web much behind a VPN, so I can't compare the experiences.
What exactly is insane about wanting a software engineering job to allow you to work remotely? Obviously it’s entirely possible to do remotely, I’m curious what I’m missing that makes this insane?
This is really well made! I know from my experience building Cakedesk [1] that the requirements of invoices vary greatly from country to country and from user to user.

Some things you can add to appeal to more people that are useful to most:

* Keep track of clients and personal info so the user doesn't have to type the address / invoice IDs every time

* Allow users to keep track of which items are paid/unpaid

* Allow users to declare sales tax on the invoices

* Allow users to upload their own HTML-based invoice designs

* Allow users to add subitems to items

Good luck with the project, it looks well-made and it will be useful for many people!

[1]: https://cakedesk.app
This general pattern is so dangerous, politically. Using taxes to shape behavior opens up a potentially very invasive, nanny-like attitude towards individuals, and ultimately codifying what is vice and what is virtue in law. The slippery slope here is obvious: fining people for not going to the gym enough, a screen tax to curb excessive computer usage, etc. But ultimately the issue is a combination of hubris and distrust: hubris because you have to think you know best to implement these policies, and distrust because you take that decision away from individuals. (And don't get me wrong, THAT argument is also abused by providers of outright poisonous products. I'm arguing for deep reluctance to do things like this rather than the libertarian position of never doing it.)
Funny how we're coming back around to pop-ups, except they're called "modals" now.

I had to use a browser without ublock a little while back, and I honestly don't know how people use the web anymore if they don't have an ad blocker. The ads are literally trying to prevent you from accessing the content for as long as possible so you spend a few more seconds staring at their garbage.
Cannot attestation in Chrome be "fixed" by patching an attestation function so that it always returns true (even if there is an adblocker)?
I use Raycast Pro, which includes Raycast AI. It's awesome: it offers a clever integration of LLMs into the operating system.
Ironic everyone is, and has been, discussing this as "adults" except the author (with passive-aggressive tone and unprofessional P.S.).

Perhaps look in the mirror and get off the high horse? If Google bestows someone with some middle-managerial role, they don't get to assume everyone in the outside world is also one of their reports and have to suck up to them otherwise their Perf rating would suffer.
Thank you! I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out why I’m completing so many captchas recently.
Or run one of the "blessed" or "compromised" (depending on your point of view) distros in a VM purely for those types of things.
It only has to be very good if the things being replicated are very fragile. If you only need 50% accuracy, replication can be very sloppy. And remember, thanks to selection, we can start off sloppy and improve.
A good example of this is Nextcloud. The SW is FOSS. Over 400K installations are hosted in many ways including on home single board computer servers, Synology NAS, on a VPS, or as a service from providers such as https://ppp.woelkli.com/ or Hetzner.com. The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.
Some of the takes about why attestation is bad seem purposely false because the author dislikes the feature. If attestation isn't triggered then prior behaviour will happen (captcha etc).. this is a progressive feature.. and the point of the attestation isn't to prove you're using an approved device, it's to prove a human is actually present, of which, a verified software stack is needed, otherwise the feature is useless..
Of course, that is the most obvious consequence of this whole mess.
> Like... unless I'm wrong... the kernel is the main process,

A nice way of thinking about it is the kernel visualizes the CPU among multiple programs.

Great reading material on all this OS stuff: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
Reclaiming My Time
This subject of this article is OpenBSD; it's reasonable to be discussing OpenBSD. I'm not saying that guy is blameless.
So Apple may provide a way to prevent their users from seeing captchas, but their competition is not allowed to. You see why this is a morally bankrupt position to hold, right?

"Tired of seeing all those captchas? Get an iPhone or a MacBook."
Crystal can grow itself if you put it into or let it touch a solution of its own kind.

I would say solid state is more complex than fluid.
People are constantly misapplying The Paradox of Tolerance - which is an argument for protecting free speech in all cases other than one: opposition of free speech.

Somehow that got contorted by modern-day activists into "I can shout down or physically attack people I don't agree with" -- which is exactly opposite of what was being argued by Popper. It's an argument for more permissive expression, not less. He notes that the best path is nearly always rational argumentation of opposing views.
The speed on the northeast corridor probably has a lot to do with the sort of track available, no? Making high speed rail grade tracking in the US is totally unprecedented. Grade separations. Smoother and larger curves. All of this demands eminent domain. We’ve seen how expensive this land acquisition process can be in rural California. I imagine in the much more urbanized east coast such high speed rail building would be even more costly and time consuming than its been in the middle of California.
I haven’t noticed anything different with Private Relay enabled
I'd be impressed if a company of this size could do a perfect job, but ya
We have a sugar tax in Seattle. The primary opponents were fast food places. End result: the $1.50 hot dog and a soda combo at costco comes with diet soda now, so I no longer get it. Aside from that, I'm drinking as much soda as I ever did, I just have less money ¯\_(-_-)_/¯
It's been clear for a while that Musk has had these sorts of issues. There's the infamous pedo guy incident stemming from Musk's unwanted attempts to help in the Thai cave rescue. Before then, there were quite a few reports during the early ramp up for Tesla Model 3 about several of Musk's bad ideas re car production. There were also several reports that SpaceX was only as successful as it was because it had a COO who could insulate the company from Musk's antics.

So it's been clear for at least a half dozen years or so that a successful Musk company needs a team to manage Musk and keep him from unnecessary interference in the company, but it may have required paying more attention to what he did. What changed when he bought Twitter is that he is now articulating a vision that is far less comfortable for many people ("stop banning fascists" is rather less inspiring than "I want to live on Mars"), and also, many of the failures of his micromanagement are far more visible to the general public on a large social media platform than a low-volume rocket or (at the time) auto manufacturer.
Sure, but government isn't a leviathan; it's a shoal of fish.
The "no thanks, I have friends" argument?
Organize your local political machine to declare each flu season an emergency, and enforce lock downs again.
This is Monash U in Australia and seems pretty explicitly focused on the Australian context. Maybe corn is as subsidized there as it is in the states but a cursory search makes me skeptical. At any rate, this forum does attract a fairly international readership, but if we wanted a US-centric study we could maybe look at the long term outcomes from cities that have levied taxes (nothing state level it seems like), such as this study in Oakland, CA: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

I suppose we'd see something similar on a broader scale w/ a reduction in subsidies, but in terms of knock on effects and scale they're not _too_ comparable (i.e. SSBs are a single product, corn in general goes into a lot of different products, etc)
> web that is populated by identified humans

This is not going to work. The governments will create millions of fake identities to spread their propaganda, same way as they are making fake passports for spies.
Piptrends
That's a mischaracterization, the comment was pointing out "intolerance of wrong think" on the right. There are other criticisms to be made of that comment (eg it violated the guidelines by devolving into personal attack), but "intolerance of wrong think" isn't one of them.

Even if it were, it wouldn't matter. If I cared to I could construct an equivalent comment baiting right-wingers and declare victory when someone took issue with it.

If you're going to take someone getting pissed off as proof of something, anyone willing to engage in such rhetoric will be able to convince you of anything.
I fail to understand how these could have been the results of vested interests from existing structures, and not Musk's questionable behavior:

- insulting a kid saving cave-diver a pedo;

- getting into a buying agreement with Twitter's shareholders, as a "joke";

- repeatedly asserting that FSD is a solved problem, and will be production ready in 6 months, for 6 years;

- repeatedly claiming to be free speech, but continuously enforcing politically backed censorship over Twitter;

- refusing to pay Twitter' suppliers.
Nope. I have extensive experience with both.
RLHF does change the parameters.

The way to think about it is that backpropagation changes the parameters of a model so they get closer to some sort of desired output.

In pre-training and SFT, the parameters are changed so the model does a better job of replicating the next word in the training data, given the words it has already seen.

In RLHF, the parameters are changed so the model does a better job of outputting the response that aligns to the human's preference (see: the feedback screen in the linked article).
Sometimes X problem is just an X problem.
Absolutely, if they applied the laws evenly. Which they don’t. Ever.
I think the question is who popularized it. Arguably, Signal did, by bringing it (both via its own app and via its protocol) to the masses.
> There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.

This is like arguing that the Trans-Siberian Railway is not viable because the distance is just way too large: the Trans-Siberian Railway is not even a high-speed railway.
Uh no.

He purchased a huge amount of twitter stock, and simultaneously made the public offer at like 4x twitters current stock value. Twitter pumped on the news, which was exactly Musks plan.

The stock market crash did not all of a sudden make twitter worth next to nothing on the offer. Musk was attempting to pump and dump the stock, and it backfired on him.

Even at the “rainbows and unicorns” drug induced tech stock valuations we’ve been seeing lately, twitter wasn’t worth 1/3 what musk offered to buy it at.

The stock market tanking has literally nothing to do with why this was a bad deal.

When you’re a public company and some coked off his ass idiot billionaire offers you 3x your companies current already highly inflated value, you are essentially forced by the shareholders to sell.
From a financial point of view, the most consequential thing ever to happen to me was joining the right company at the right time. More or less total chance. Lots of people could say the same. (Though, some will give themselves an inappropriate amount of credit for it after the fact)

Luck (in a random chance context rather than a supernatural context) is real.
Goodbye, waitlist. Hello, Arc 1.0
It's funny in that it was such a pivotal work looking back at it. It's possible in some filing cabinet at Xerox or elsewhere (from what I gathered in the thread). That said, it may have simply seemed somewhat obvious to many at the time and nobody bothered to hold on to or archive it. I suspect it's true of a lot of now commonplace software design strategies.
He makes an offhand comment implying he doesn't feel they're incompatible, but not in any official stance as an Oracle lawyer. He then qualifies that by saying, more or less, Oracle has not come after anyone over OpenZFS, so everyone should be taking that as an indication that it's OK with Oracle.
I bought the cheapest HP printer a few years ago. As every HP printer I ever tested, it has problems with the paper feed (grabs multiple pages at once or, usually, can't grab any at all). However, in regards to the printing heads, no problems for years, and I had probably over 10 one-month pauses between printing.

Meaning, you're just wrong, inkjet printers aren't nearly as unreliable as you portray them.
"Crypto VCs & ”builders” making a hard left into AI"

This is a humorous intro graphic caption, but this sentiment appears on here constantly and it's self-destructive. This response might seem a bit over the top to a funny graphic, but I am replying to the general "ha ha AI like crypto amirite?" sentiment that is incredibly boring and worn out.

When confronted with challenging new technology that we don't understand, some knee-jerk to acting dismissive. As if that has any hope at all of changing outcomes.

It's especially weird when people who are clearly on the "I must desperately learn this as quickly as I can and try to present myself as some sort of expert" still incant the rhetoric -- "joking on the square" as it were -- as if they need to defend their prior dismissals. Constantly on here there is yet another trivial "intro to tokenization" blog entry that brays some tired crypto comparison.

Stop it.

The Venn diagram of people at the forefront of ML/LLM, and its advocates, is almost entirely separate from the web/crypto sphere. There is astonishingly little overlap. Crypto was hyped because some people truly saw a purpose, coupled with masses of scammers and getrichquick sorts. AI/LLM/ML is hyped because it is revolutionary and has already yielded infinitely more practical impact than crypto ever did.
He's done just fine considering all of the fud pieces spread by mainstream outlets and hacker news comments that are mostly lies and only part of the available information about him and his companies.

The salt amongst engineers / developers that are not working for his companies should be a thing of study, methinks it's mostly driven by jealousy.

Looking forward to what comes from all this 𝕏 stuff.
This isn't a watermark though, the idea of a watermark is that it's inherently embedded in the data itself while not drastically changing the data
It's not. Until you need to deploy it.
It's bad for Apple to add attestation, but it's not a threat to the Open web when they do. It is a threat to the Open web when Chrome does.

If that bothers you, support browser competition and consider breaking up Google. I'm sorry, but it is a fact that it is more dangerous for Chrome to take harmful web positions than it is for Safari to take harmful web positions. That's just the consequence of having a browser monopoly, and Google has to live with that consequence.

Morality has nothing to do with it. I don't support attestation on Safari, but it matters more when Google does it. It's not "fair" because the market isn't fair, there is a dominant player and their actions matter more. Again, if that upsets you, get upset at the unreasonable power dynamics that Chrome has over the Internet. They are the reason for the extra scrutiny.
How could it only need 50% accuracy? That gives you a genome of 1 bit. That's completely useless and doesn't explain how this process is going to lead to anything with higher accuracy.
Scratch is "games for kids." They are very prescriptive and have guides - you know, lesson plans - for everything they can teach. Either it supports Steam Deck or it doesn't.

If they're 14+ Unity is realistic and is the same thing the pros use.

I haven't tried Unreal Engine for Fortnite but if they play it, it is probably the best option.

Minecraft, Bloons and Terraria modding is also pretty good.

You can give them a GPT4 sub and it seems to do a good job answering basic computing questions if this is going to be their first time e.g. installing a professional tool.
Once this goes mainstream, someone will offer a service where a robot arm operates an iPhone for you and streams back the screen video. Like remote desktop into a VM, except that it's a real device which passes all of the attestation. And it'll be glorious for spammers to finally be counted as "more human" than actual humans (using Android) ...
I think Private Access Token is a reasonable design, and it should be standardized with multiple attestation providers that any client can use. That seems like it would move the web forward, unlike simply not making headway on the problem of spam and fingerprinting/tracking as an anti-spam measure at all.
Only on Linux. On other systems it's a VM.
Seems like it's already mentioned, but I've also had a great experience with https://cal.com/ :)
Planned obsolescence is a cancer that should be eradicated through legislation...!
> WeChat is what it is in China because it replicates (in a sense) how things are in Chinese society.

I put out a version of this that is WeChat is the way it is because of the way China regulates its markets. Chinese regulators prioritize e.g. surveillance so that it makes sense for them to have fewer competitors that do more things. (Note that they do not regulate their hardware markets this way, so there are many more companies operating in that space.)

Regulators and market incentives are different outside of China, so there is no pressure to end up with an everything app.
Slow Down Rate Limiting Deep Dive
Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote
But you can use console controllers with it?
I’ve been working on a side project that utilises the segment anything model for satellite and drone imagery digitisation, but allowing it to run as a web application, purely in the browser using their ONNX model export. No need to run the model locally on a powerful PC.

The demo video shows its performance on drone GeoTIFF imagery, and how it looks when loaded into a map.

Another demo video also shows its performance on, fairly low, resolution satellite imagery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs1nFzO7zy4&t=1s

The intention is to provide a quick and easy “AI assisted” way to segment imagery and save time on digitisation tasks, and then export it to your GIS application of choice (QGIS or ESRI software support the export format, which is GeoJSON).

If anyone wants access to the online demo shown in the video, just email me at geosegmentanything@gmail.com. It'd be cool to know if any remote sensing or GIS people would be interested in this.
Some stuff:

1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up.

2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.

3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.

4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively.

She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.

Mozilla, as it exists today, is a convenient project for Chrome to point to and say "look, there's competition" - perhaps the only reason why Google continues to fund Mozilla.

Microsoft and Apple are at least competently run and have incentives to push to reduce Chrome's power.
It was a time, to be sure. I remember hearing the ads in favor of the tax (something like a grandmother worrying about her grandchildren drinking too many sodie pops), and as soon as they came they disappeared.
Nobody ever asks why this has all become "necessary" even though it is literally the poignant question. Why do we need such ridiculously strong attestation of identity? How did the Internet get along so far without it, if it's really needed?

Well, nobody is actually proposing this at the moment. Heck, neither Apple nor Google's scheme even gets close. All their schemes purport to do is ensure the "integrity" of the platform.

Integrity how, exactly?

> For example, this API will show that a user is operating a web client on a secure Android device.

So basically, it does not tell you that the user is a unique person, or give you any kind of usable identifier for a person. All it tells you, in case of this example and Apple's, is that the device is not rooted or jailbroken.

In practice, is this concept useful? Only as part of a larger cat and mouse game. Just like copyright protection schemes, remote attestation schemes are limited by what they're actually attesting. Very little can be done to stop cam rips in movie theaters, or any number of in-between steps that exploit the fact that a movie is just a series of pictures and frames of PCM samples at the end of the day. And likewise, devices may be expensive, but there's nothing stopping someone from acquiring many of them to do operations on. In fact, many people already own swaths of Android devices specifically for cheating the system. When they can be had for as cheap as $50 a pop in some cases, it's not really a meaningful barrier.

So what does this actually do? It just makes it more expensive and complex to run bot operations, and if you can raise the cost enough to sink the break-even point of doing so, then theoretically you've won! ... But it won't, because there's a lot to be gained by spamming and scamming people. All of these years of countermeasures and we're not even close to getting there. The amount of money that flows in the industry of cheating these systems is more than enough to just pay the cost.

Adding government IDs to the mix won't change anything. Almost every SPAM operation has a real person behind it, so getting a blind attestation that a person is indeed a citizen tells you almost nothing about them. I think just about the only way that could aid in any way is if it were set up in such a way that you did in fact receive a unique ID for each person, rather than just an attestation that you're dealing with a legitimate thing.

And if that's the end game of the Internet, then honestly, the whole experiment was not worth it.