skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SpaceX (at least) was a government venture, funded by DARPA and the CIA to enable a program that isn't too hard to figure out when you look at the people involved.

It's rather political, and debated within the clearance community.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
TL;DR sort of yes. But they're also useful for reasons not related to computational "power".

An example here with an actual algorithm, although it's been a couple of years so my explanation might be a bit wrong in places. and/or i might have gotten the completely wrong end of the stick with the current thread.

--

The CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification [0]) algorithm maps a sequence x with length X -> sequence y with length Y.

i.e. in speech to text we might have some audio features that correspond to the following class predictions (post softmax classification)

x -> hellllloooooooooo wwwooorrrllld

we want to get this as the output

y -> hello world

we have the alphabet as classes we try to predict for each sequence item in x.

we could just removed all the duplicate in the first long sequence, but we would end up with `helo world` ... we need to preserve one of the early `l` characters in `hello` somehow

CTC uses a blank token (aka dummy) token to handle potentially deliberately repeated items in sequence x.

By adding the blank token to the classes predictions, we can get the model to predict something like this (post softmax classification)

y* -> hel~l~~oooo~~~~~~ w~~o~~r~~l~~d

The CTC decoder (non-ML decoding algo) heuristically removes repeated tokens. Turning the above into ...

y -> hello world

... the duplicate `o` and `~` characters are removed.

It was a decent enough algorithm for speech-to-text prior to attention/transformers etc.

However, it makes CTC vulnerable to well designed adversarial example attacks because there is a massive bias within models to predict the blank token -- meaning it's very easy to modify input sequence x to switch the output sequence y to include blank tokens for nefarious purposes (the subject of my unfinished phd).

[0]: www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/preprint.pdf
It's just physics unfortunately. You might be able to use an IR camera to take a "Picture" of the ambient temperature and kind of take a stab at guessing, but a simple thermocouple is never going to be able to do what you are asking of it. However, that won't stop Garmin from selling one to you!
> Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?

I don't see anyone asking that besides you, so it really begs the question why given all common sense and reasoning, you'd have to ask this.
Funny story about lead rulers:

An alternative name for them (and the name that I originally learned for them) is a "Lesbian curve" because the lead to make them originally came from Lesbos. I once went up to a woman working at an art store and asked if they had lesbian curves. Immediately after the words left my mouth I noticed that she was wearing a lesbian pride pin and based on her reaction probably misinterpreted what I was saying. I awkwardly made some excuse and left the store in embarrassment as quickly as possible. -_-
time is time
Author was too self deprecating about their blog, didn’t read further.
> it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now?

Are they just fine today, too? To judge that, you have to look at the date of the question and its answers, make an educated guess at what OS/language/library versions they are about, judge whether that makes a difference for the version(s) you’re using, and only then evaluate whether the reply even was correct at the time (it may have had a thousand upvotes, but still be dated)

I think a really good Q/A resource would require posts to be tagged with version info. Most people think manual tagging isn’t fun, though, so it’s hard to get such a set from volunteers.

An alternative would be to require test cases that the site can run to check what version(s) replies are valid for, but writing such tests that do not break over time is hard, and, again, in general volunteers don’t like writing them.

That leaves generating tags or test cases. I don’t think we’re there, quality wise, to do that.
>Not one killer app has emerged.

Surely the “killer app” is ChatGPT itself?

ChatGPT has already put some copywriters and journalists out of work, or at least reduced their hours. The app is quite literally “killing” something, i.e. people’s jobs. For those people, it’s not just empty hype. It’s very real. Certainly it’s already more real than anything having to do with blockchain/crypto.
Isn’t the summarization of text like legal documents where the notion of hallucinations come in as a huge blocker?

Is the industry making progress on fixing such hallucinations? Or for that matter the privacy implications of sharing such documents with entities like OpenAI that don’t respect IP?

Until hallucinations and IP/PII are fixed I don’t want this technology anywhere near my legal or personal documents.
This reminds me of the SAT, which is a major college entrance exam in the US. One of it's original goals was to level the financial playing field with an objective measurement of abilities. But then SAT preparation classes became a major thing and more affluent students were earning higher SAT scores due to the additional preparation. I hear some universities are considering removing the exam because it's no longer an accurate indicator of the student's abilities.
I kind of get both sides here. If we take the "see the best of others intentions" then a web that is populated by identified humans (and their authorised proxies!) is likely to be the "cleanest", most ideal web space we can see (a web full of sock puppets and link farms is not ideal).

The clearest end point for this is some government issued digital ID that just asserts who you are, acts as a login etc.

You can see this as a stepping stone to there. if you squint.

Is it the idealism of the 70s coke to life? No. Is it some sane compromise - I think so.

What if we cannot trust our government ? Sorry it is pretty sure that no internet is going to solve that. That's on the real world.
Constructive dismissals aren’t necessarily illegal, they’re just not resignations. A “resignation” that is actually a constructive dismissal would usually qualify that employee for any legal benefits they’d receive as a fired employee, like unemployment.
G3PO AI is OpenAI’s answer to Microsoft x Meta’s Llama 2 AI
Could you expand on what you mean by this?

Module design doesn't seem any harder than class design in JS or Python.

Do you mean the language is generally harder for non-developers? Or that Elixir is harder for JS/Python developers to pick up and write good code? Or something else?

Writing well designed Elixir code does seem to require a fairly different approach from most common OO languages, at least at a surface level. (Although IMO that's more because you can copy OO patterns you've seen before without thinking much about why they're good patterns than because good design in Elixir is much different from OO)
On Intel & similar platforms, some forms of attestation are bidirectional. There is both a remote server attesting to the code's validity and the local device is able to attest that the code is ran in a manner that doesn't permit the user to modify or inspect it. This is the basis of almost all practical DRM methods and is provided under the guise of the Trusted Platform Module.

One interesting application of this kind of technology was to remove the 'analog hole'. When playing protected content, even the video stream from your PC to your monitor is actually encrypted in a manner that ostensibly prevents anyone from interecepting it.
It's not. That's why the moderators are on strike.

See: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-s...
i have a question, and i understand perfectly well this is a horrible idea

but, is there an actual need to change how internet traffic operates? is there something currently broken?
The market share of the iphone is about 20%. So I think your comparison falls short with the very first item.

I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in the apple-ecosystem, because Androids market share is so much higher. If the iPhone fails to be a good product I will just switch.
I am okay, to be totally vendor locked in gcp, because aws is a thing...
It is not unreasonable, at least in ordinary usage, to say “plants grow roots to get water.” Note, however, that your original phrasing was "a plant wants to grow its roots to find water."

In the context of your article, the use of "wants" here invokes, tacitly, the concept of agency. Furthermore, this is done as the coda to a section in which you discuss cockatoos learning to open garbage cans from one another. There's no problem, in the case of humans dumpster-diving, saying that they want to find food (or evidence or secrets, depending on the case.) It is a bit of a stretch, but not much, to suppose that the cockatoo behavior is driven by wanting to find food (especially, if, as you suggest, they are acting on a mental model of garbage cans as good food sources.) In the context you had set up, introducing "wants" into the quoted phrase question-beggingly prompts the unprepared reader to tacitly accept the not-explicitly-stated notion that plants want to get water just like cockatoos want to get food.

Perhaps you are thinking that there is a little bit of agency in what plants do, similarly to how some people will say (and have said to me - I'm not making this up) that a building with a thermostat is a little bit conscious. The problem with this sort of claim is not that it is provably wrong, but that it is practically useless, as the differences, between how a building regulates its temperature or a plant gets water on the one hand, and, on the other, how humans - or cockatoos - act on the basis of learning from one another, are so great that trying to discuss and analyze one in terms of the other leads to confusion rather than knowledge. If things reach this point, it has become a discussion of English-language semantics rather than anything about the natural world.
The excellent Arc browser is now available for anyone to download
Mermaid also connects boxes automatically. My point was WYSIWYG tools make working with svg just as effortless. The automatic connections are fine, it’s all the manual fiddling that ends up making the markup almost unreadable.
Seems more than a little debatable to me... could my employer require me to move to Alaska? if it's not in my employment contract, isn't it up to them to renegotiate or fire me?
I picked up a PSVR2 at launch. A couple of friends popped over to check it out with me. We decided to give Resident Evil Village a go. The graphics, comfort, ease-of-setup, all astounding.

What really blew us away though, was the haptic feedback on the controllers. There's this one bit at the beginning where an on-screen indicators beckons you to grab and slide out a drawer. The feedback in the (move controllers?) I think they are called manage to simulate actual resistance/friction. Everyone took turns opening and closing the very same drawer, in awe. We then put it away and watched some YouTube. I might try openy closy again on the weekend.
I don't have access to this article, I would take it as changing conditions or duties to the least pleasant or practical that still fit within the terms of employment.

For example required on premises work, assignment to undesirable projects, moving to a different office.
It's not about being in the office, innovation, or any of that BS. It's about control. The employer cannot control what they cannot see and monitor. In their minds, WFH employees are getting the job done but the risk to security, working for competitors simultaneously, or themselves for that matter on company time, and it instills this paranoia. Power has shifted to the employee and now the employer is working to take it back.
LA actually isn’t a desert, although there is desert in the LA area. Most of LA is classified as Mediterranean, and gets enough rain (the closer to the coast, the less deserty it is). Lots of mountains make for interesting climate zones.
This happened in the Bay Area, too. Prior to everyone adopting "RTO" (return to office) policies, my commute to the office regardless of the day was about 20 minutes (leaving from SF). After, on Tuesdays through Thursdays, it can easily be 30-40 minutes. And getting back home? Horrible. Before RTO I could leave the office at 4 or 5 and be back in my nice apartment within a half hour. Now it takes 10 fuckin minutes just to get off on Sixth Street after a 20-30 minute drive. And if there's a wreck on the 80 going to the east bay forget it--it's another 10-20 minutes just to get through the last 2 blocks of traffic.
Motion sickness depends heavily on both the person and how each app handles motion as well. I can get motion sick depending on the app, while my dad gets motion sick if anything is even slightly off.
I would not necessarily disagree with any of these points, just sceptical that these are enough to create the substantial investment by diverse actors to create real alternatives. The example of Julia non-adoption is very important to keep in mind.

Python was not designed for ML, it happened to it, the way Android happened to Java etc. Loosely speaking the Mojo project serves a function similar to that of Kotlin in the Android mobile world. Trying to remedy some recognized friction points while maintaining the benefits of a widely established ecosystem.

Obviously not holding a crystal ball: if the ML hype mutates into something more permanent and very widely embedded across different verticals (not just the big tech sponsored pytorch / tensorflow platforms and use cases) and if the Python/C++ combo becomes a recognized bottleneck then the conditions might spark another approach.
If I remember correctly, you get about 3 years of security updates, because Apple provides updates for the 3 most recent macOS major versions
> It may be that Signal pioneered E2EE chat

Also false. XMPP OTR existed long prior.
both examples seem pretty contrived and I think this comes down just what language you are used to. Their other code seems very JS-y.

I work in both python & js. The python reads like natural language:

Processed items is a set of some transformation of each item in bar.baz() where something is true for that item.
then Foo the smallest in that list.

It reads like english.

JS-y stuff doesn't read like natural language, but I do think its more concise and fits the IDE function discovery workflow better.

Both models can be made into horrid messes or elegant solutions. Both are highly readable.

Now I like the python one because I find it natural to attach contextual "whys" or "because" comments to them.

Processed items is a set of some transformation of each item in bar.baz() where something is true for that item.
then Foo the smallest item.
# because foo is a slow function and we don't want to foo every bar and baz
When you’re doing RLHF are you actually modifying the weights of llama itself?

Or is something on top?
As an “extremist left winger” I can tell you that this is false. We got banned all the time for talking trash to nazis and proud boys (many of whom are now in prison for trying to overthrow the country).
what even is the reasoning they have for proposing and implementing this?
Oh? Examples?
We have a lot of other comparison points between Putin and Hitler of national leaders who are not generally considered evil, so it's not accurate that the sentiment is that anything short of sainthood is evil.

Besides, people aren't using relativism here. Relativism is the idea that nothing is truly good or bad, it's all a matter of personal or cultural preferences. That would mean that people were saying that that Mozilla's behavior about X, Y, and Z isn't really bad. But that's not really the argument here. People are generally saying that despite engaging in the bad behaviors X,Y and Z, Mozilla is still in balance better than Google, and arguably still worthy of some level of support. To phrase it in terms of Aristotelian ethics: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". You're unquestionably correct that Mozilla should be criticized, even harshly so. But you can criticize a company (or person, or party, or country) and still support them. Or if short of support, still prefer them to the available alternatives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862687
> People don't want the "convenience" of being able to do everything in the same app

I really really really wish this were true but It is not. People take the path of least resistance and companies have been working on superconducting these paths for years.
Maybe not impossible but my understanding is the TPM and the closed source nature of the system level code will make it difficult enough that 99% of users will not be able to do it, which is what industry wants. They're never worried about diehards and hermits. Those people will be confined to their caves & made irrelevant.
If only there were some way the employees could band together and negotiate equitable terms of employment.
> "For anyone"

> "It’s still Mac and iOS only"
VRChat is still the gold standard of VR experiences.

VR is still a bit niche and only VRC actually offers an easy road to creating experiences - it's way easier to get novelty junkies on VRC to checkout a world than to try to sell or market a standalone experience. Probably easiest to just run a patreon at these levels than actually sell games, too.
Keys sealed in hardware from the factory. SafetyNet already does this on Android from boot up to apps (that use it, which includes shit like McDonalds...). This would extend it potentially up until a website itself.

Really powerful and useful if you need strong integrity. Really really painful if you want full(er) control over your device.
Apple makes a big point of highlighting their privacy features and pushing back against some government requests for exactly this reason; to allay fears about consolidation and overreach. I doubt Tim Cook is a passionate believer in privacy as a human right, but it's effective messaging so he pushes it.

Musk's approach is the polar opposite from Apple. A capricious and petulant owner who goes out of his way to appease racists and dictators is not someone most people are comfortable with handing a lot of control and information about their lives to.
Great job!
Any planning on RTL (right to left?) ?
> Because saying "you can keep your job if you uproot your life" isn't a fair choice.

Surely an employer and employee are free to choose the employment terms and when the terms are deemed unacceptable to either, they can part ways?

If you're a top notch Amazon engineer, for example, and you don't want to uproot your life it would be fairly easy to find another job that is more suitable, don't you think? All employment relationships have tradeoffs.
If there's one thing Disney fans love, it's merch.
Exactly. SpaceX is just a public defense contractor a la Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman. Yeah, SpaceX may one day send you to Mars or fly you across the world in 30 minutes. But it's main revenue generator will always be the US government, whether that's sending astronauts to space stations or launching military satellites.

Elon is not here to save humanity or whatever BS he's trying to peddle to the world this time around. He's here to make enough money to become the 21st century equivalent of a god.
Most people would probably agree that Musk made some very bad and rookie-looking decisions since acquiring Twitter. Also he has said a lot of very controversial things in the last 1-2 years.

Before that he arguably was a lot more well respected as an entrepreneur - keeping a lower profile and building a couple of extremely successful businesses in parallel.

My big question that I’m still searching for an answer to:
Did he drastically change as a person in the last couple of years? Or was he just “lucky” to build SpaceX and Tesla into tremendous successes? Or is he still a genius and all of us simply can’t see how he’s making Twitter into the next big success in his CV?

If he did change as a person - why? What happened? Bad breakup? Drug abuse? Depression? Too much self confidence? Too much stress for too long? Something else?
But signing necessarily is happening on the user's device... what is to stop brave/etc from also signing their outgoing requests with the same key your local Chrome install is using? On a mobile device I can see how this would work but how would this ever work on (non-apple) PCs without exposing the key to anyone willing to poke around a bit?
Whisper's Word-Level Timestamps Are Out
Whisper’s initial capability was providing timestamps at the segment level, which allowed us to track when specific audio chunks were spoken.

However, the introduction of word-level timestamps propels this functionality to a whole new level, pinpointing the exact word spoken at each moment in the audio. This innovation brings about unprecedented possibilities.

Whether you're searching for that little nugget of wisdom that sparked your curiosity, or trying to efficiently sift through large volumes of audio data, word-level timestamps make the task virtually effortless. Yet, the applications of word-level timestamps extend beyond simple navigation. From making videos accessible for hearing impaired audience, optimizing video SEO, to capitalizing precise keyword ad placements, the benefits are manifold.

In essence, this feature can potentially lead to significantly enhanced user engagement and superior marketing results. Additionally, for the more technically inclined among you, there's a Colab notebook developed to experiment with generating word-level timestamps using OpenAI whisper. And if you're contemplating between transcription and translation, it's recommended to opt for transcription for more accurate alignment due to possible discrepancies in language translation.
Another alternative is Whisper-X. It offers enhanced transcriptions and timestamps along with features like speaker diarization and fast batched inference, although it currently supports a limited range of languages.
Have you tried the word-level timestamps feature of OpenAI's Whisper ASR system? Did it transform your audio navigation and analysis as promised? Let us know your thoughts and experiences.
It's a way to avoid paying severance. Most companies do it but it's not talked about because it's highly illegal. Essentially, you can just assign someone menial tasks, refuse to promote them, etc until they leave. There's nothing illegal about doing that (if it occurs "naturally").

It's called constructive dismissal. The burden of proof is on the employee and it's a very high bar. If the employer has any excuse it won't work. "We didn't have enough work for them", or "there was no budget for promotion" would be sufficient to squash the case.
If this happens, I expect the majority of Windows and Android devices to stop working too. They are also a diverse and hackable platform that is apparently insufficient for a future where I have to attest to owning certain hardware.

> except a few 'blessed' distros that will then become industry controlled, and not Linux in spirit anymore

You know, I hear this a lot but seldom hear the details of how it might happen. Industry-controlled UNIX is the reason Linux exists - if you take the spirit away from Linux, it gets forked into another community project. Unless you're stripping it of it's GPL license, Linux will be "Linux in Spirit" until it stops being used altogether.