skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But the ways in which a LLM can “talk about” the universe (and everything it contains) are limited to the ways in which humans have previously talked about the universe.

This is often said, but it isn't so.

The task of predicting the next token in human speech really well requires immense intelligence — potentially far more intelligence than possessed by the original speaker! Imagine yourself engaging in the task of listening to someone who isn't that smart speak and then trying to figure out what they'll say next — in doing so, you might make all sorts of extrapolations about the person, their motivations, their manner, their dialect, etc — calling on all sorts of internal models that you've built up about people over time. This is what models are being trained to do when we train them on predicting tokens.

There are concrete examples of models inventing new ways of thinking that are not described in their training set. For example, when training a transformer from scratch to perform addition mod P (and having no training data other than examples of addition mod P), the transformer was able to discover the use of discrete fourier transforms and trigonometric identities [1]. As we can see, neural nets can build all sorts of internal mental models that no one explained to them beforehand. These internal mental models can then be elicited and used for other purposes by e.g. fine-tuning.

I think a good mental model for transformers/neural nets is that they're automatic scientists. They figure out ways of modeling things in order to predict the output from the input — which is what scientists do! As part of this, they can de-facto discover new theories, and come to rely on the theories that prove useful in their prediction task.

Also, not all tokens in the training set are from human speech, so models are being trained to model all manner of data-generating processes.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05217.pdf
Tim Cook says Apple is building AI into every product
Try working from co-working space if you have something like that nearby, or working from a coffee shop, etc. Or look for any meetups for other remote workers in your area and if there isn't one, considering starting one, chances are there might be others in the same situation around you.
Society's complete lack of concern for psychological safety or building community is the real problem (at least in the US). Political offices and processes need reform before the world can be fixed. Then you might see people happily going into offices.
The addition of many remote positions since COVID has been a great hiring filter for us. For the type of work we do (AI, R&D), and the culture that we find most productive and enjoyable (enthusiasm because we love the work, a sense of working in a team), remote was a real downgrade when we tried it.

We advertise the job as on-site only, and because of that the applications self-select for those that want in-office work. It's made our interviews more focused on technical ability.

I think this is a better equilibrium overall. Those on either side of the remote/on-site preference can find the right respective jobs and work cultures.
Well, bears are free to file a lawsuit against humans in the local court of law. If they don't they have only themselves to blame for their situation.
'denier' implies that they're wrong whereas it's an objective fact: I have kids and a million responsibilities outside work and every 15 minutes saved by not commuting is 15 minutes that I don't have to do chores on the weekend or 15 minutes more with my kids or wife. Will not go back to office until they start pulling my teeth out.
I think these kind of articles tend to have a fair amount of truth to them, but a lot of the anxiety etc is caused by the all out denigration of remote workers. People being constantly undermined tend to be anxious about it!

Remote work has some elements that need different attention to make work. I feel isolated at the moment as a remote worker because it feels like suggesting an offsite or meeting in person once a quarter is going to threaten the existence of the remote work status quo.

Intentionally undermining the system to then make arguments against it seems to be the operating model at the moment for people who prefer to spend all their time in an office while making no effort to support remote work, and it is exhausting.
have always wanted to see time / versioning / history exposed as a first class citizen in sql schemas

and this invokes my eternal pining for datomic's approach to temporal history
2 days in office to see people, do all of the simian interaction stuff and get a break from my house.

3 days at home at my tricked out workstation that no IT department would ever give me an allowance for. Low stress because I can run small annoying errands whenever I want and optimize my time for flow state. A beautiful garden and park I can access and be back home within 15 minutes to give me an active break I’d take anyway in office.

The option to WFH is an insane force multiplier from me. Take it away at your peril.
I am not concerned about my job because I am at home rather than spending 90 minutes a day commuting. I am concerned about my job because our CEO constantly threatens to fire people and then makes good on those threats.
Not sure how much benefit there is in h265 over h264 or something like j2k at high bitrates, at low rates h265 certainly is beneficial.

Either way 500GB for 2 hours is still significantly compressed - over 90%.

Standard UHD 10 bit 30 bits a pixel, even at just 24fps is 384021603024 = 6gbit/sec just for the video alone without audio, ancillary information, and container overhead. I suspect movies work in 12 bit too, and work at 4k, so that's 409621603624 = 7.7gbit/second, or about 7TB for a 2 hour movie.
Not ready reading drive A

Abort, Retry, Fail?_
> Nobody hates poor people

Plenty of people hate poor people.

> Some people hate criminals, which are disproportionately poor

Part (or all) of the reason ”criminals are disproportionately poor” is or seems to be the case is that both law making and law enforcement are biased against poor people, in part because some people hate poor people.

> Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.

Yes, when the victimization is through, rather than prohibited by, the law, its not a crime.

None of which, of course, means that class or poverty should replace race (or sex, or LGBTQIA status, or ethnicity, or anything else) in our concerns—life is too complex for only one of those things to be a concern.
I am remote since 2000. I guess my productivity by now is negative and being utterly depressed I am contemplating suicide.

Cut the fucking crap and shove that managers propaganda up yours.
Seems to me you're missing a bunch of others.

3) Those who live elsewhere

4) Those who want access to a non local talent pool

5) Those who are local but still don't want to add a commute to their work day

6) Those who don't want to pay for an office. (Including workers who would rather see it in their paychecks)

We still haven't solved out the way to balance offices and remote workers, but I am grateful that we're at least being forced to ask the question. We are recycling formulas from factory work that need to be reconsidered.
This solution is like the birthday cake problem. One person cuts, the other person chooses which half they want
Rather than going into these strange discussions about the scientific method, nondeterminism and philosophical debates I'm still scratching my head when language became synonymous with AGI.

Forget all this highbrow stuff, my still intact test is, can something walk into any random house on the street, plumb a toilet and brew a cup of coffee. Moravec was right in the 80s when he pointed out that the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy. Simulating human cognitive abilities primarily exists to satisfy human testers, it doesn't say much about general intelligence.
Nvidia does have, at the very least, the best and greatest PhDs of computer graphics, and I think has been recently attracting the ML/DL folks. And of the three companies, it is the one that is still run by the original founder. Founder vision + best research team can't be a recipe for disaster.

Note: I dislike much of what Nvidia does (proprietary drivers, insane prices, ghetto anti-competition tricks, etc). But you gotta give it to them as far as innovation and quality of engineering goes.
If your handle is "music", "admin", "home", one-letter, ... you should expect this to happen. Of course it sucks, because you can sell it for money, but that doesn't mean it's yours.

As much as I find Twitter's rebranding stupid, I really can't relate to those complaints. Of course you should complain, you lost the potential to give it for money, but nothing was stolen from you. The idea that Twitter should compensate you is beyond my understanding.
There’s a different model of chatbot interaction where the AI provides hints that may be wrong, but they’re helpful, because you consider solutions that you didn’t think of yet.

This doesn’t require intelligence. The Oblique Strategies card deck does a similar thing, and you’re drawing randomly from a deck of cards.

AI-provided hints are considerably better guesses than a deck of cards can give you. When writing code using GPT4 and Code Interpreter, it often guesses right the first time about what the bug is in some code.

Other times it will guess wrong, repeatedly, so I need to undo and tell it more specifically what to do.

Does GPT4 understand trigonometry? I went back and forth on this. Yes, it does! But no it doesn’t, it just got lucky. But yes, it does, if you ask it to explain the math first. But no, it doesn’t, it got lucky again.

What seems clear is that it “understands” context very well. It will make guesses that are entirely appropriate when writing code that does calculations using trigonometry. It will come up with plausible explanations, given that we are doing trigonometry. They still seem to be guesses, though.

In the short term, AI chatbots don’t learn, cannot learn, because they implement a pure function. When you start a new chat, the state is reset. Instead, we learn to give them better context and get better results. The learning is in the prompt engineering.
Everyone has a range of reasons to have many emotions and beliefs. It doesn't mean that we roll over and adopt those emotions and beliefs.

Indigenous Africans were dispossessed, murdered, and enslaved. Sugarcoating it for us fragile white people does no good.
Lol, if you say so.
I'm pretty sure it's more an issue of "fatal road rage incident renews debate over how many cars are too many". You won't be doing much in the dangerous velocities department with enough cars clogging everything up.
A tshirt is better, at least you can wear it.
It's not that I own Twitter and want to see them suffer. It's that I'm a regular person without a Twitter account who is tired of hearing every event at Twitter being painted as a humanitarian catastrophe. It doesn't matter, it is utterly zero-sum. Everyone apparently agreed to that when they all signed the TOS for the Twitter ball-pit.

Giving anyone significant control over your identity or emotional wellbeing is a bad idea. It hardly qualifies as news though, and feels like a bad submission this far after Twitter's takeover.
Not in real life. It was a really common theme in sci-fi, though; Data on Star Trek TNG could manage logical reasoning but not painting, say. This is more how we imagined we’d be superior to a non-existent form of AI (the Asimov/Star Trek style) than anything to do with LLMs.
Use the 2h daily commute you're saying to join a club.
Your first sentence is correct.

The idea that the choice of homework vs TikTok is the choice of wealth vs destitution is a valid concept for relatively low values of income, generally within the realm of working for other people. This is because performance on homework is not necessary and not sufficient for actual wealth, only for a relatively safe employment outcome.

What we are talking about is making major bets on all the wealth you have accrued to date. To the point where a single major bet moves the global average wealth.

If your homework told you how to build the next Amazon/Tesla/Facebook after having enough money to start it, then it is relevant to this wealth discussion. Otherwise it is just a myth that got you to a relatively healthy, stable income.
The top 50% of taxpayers control 97.6% of the wealth.
I feel/think[1] that when AGI happens, it will be so alien to us that we won't recognize it. There will be a "that's... odd." situation in science and maybe years later will we realize what we had/have.

As the article states, there's no understanding, "just" a regurgitation of sufficiently-trained language (which is utterly astonishing, don't get me wrong). So how does an LLM-AI turn into an AGI? Can it? Should it? How do we tell?

What should be a 21st century Turing Test? Perhaps giving an AGI-candidate a novel situation and seeing how it reacts. I think that trying to apply a rigorous scientific method to such a test might end up being as "messy" as psychology is viewed as being today. It would be quite gratifying if we really did need Asimov's Susan Calvin to tell jokes to Johnny 5!

I also find the prospect of an utterly incomprehensible AGI really interesting in that maybe intelligence isn't only possible via a big messy blob of neurons soaked in a chemical soup of weirdness. Maybe there's a regimented, strict path towards an intelligence that surpasses us in every way?

Does anyone else think we'll be unable to recognize AGI when we see it?

[1] A little column a, a little column b[2]. It's a gut feeling. Will AGIs have guts?

[2] Aren't footnotes great? I still think HN needs more markdown support, but I wouldn't want to be the one to implement it!
this is a sword that cuts both ways though. in my experience, employers are much more interested in minimizing the attack surface for subpoenas than jamming up employees for indiscretions that took place over company comms. companies I've worked for have retained emails and chat logs for the minimum duration required by law and aggressively purged anything falling outside that window.

as always, you do need to be careful with written communications, but I highly doubt companies are recording slack huddles of rank-and-file employees. it's expensive and creates unnecessary risk. there's no real reason to do so when the alternative is, at worst, paying 6-12 months salary while the unwanted employee is managed out.
That’s generally optimizing for cost over speed, empty sites are cheap and going slow tends to save money. It also lets the company constantly move people through a backlog of projects at different locations rather than adding a few people then having breaks in work where you have to let people go.

There is also real physical limitations when moving dirt around. If you quickly make a big pile it settle quite a bit. So instead you add a few inches at a time and bring out heavy equipment then let it settle, do some tests, and repeat.

https://youtu.be/22W5tRWbUVI
Immune cells fighting cancer get exhausted within hours of encountering tumors
Going to an office likely helps this actually, when remote we only interact with people explicitly which is much more of an echo chamber than sitting at lunch and casually joining a conversation about politics you never would have had online
But they don’t account for patients going to other hospitals and dying there instead.
So you've done nothing and decided to post on HN anyway?
Yes, you're right, and this occurred to me after I posted but while I was in the shower so I couldn't correct it :-) I should have said "if it is possible to bring all of the constituent particles in a system to rest for a non-zero time..."
TFA did not deliver. I'm left with the idea that I waded through a load of overly verbose propaganda.

There's many quotes from VC people and executives, which is suspicious. Several advantages for remote work are mentioned in an attempt to do steelmanning or whatever, however, the refutation falls flat on its face: Several purported disadvantages for remote work are then paraded around, as apparently evidenced by some questionnaire, without clear presentation of the questionnaire outcomes.[0]

What is this?! Completely untrustworthy, unconvincing article.

[0] there's a page linked on the top stating "the results are in" with some lame pie charts, from which I conclude that people are unhappy if their pay is too low, and that this questionnaire was predominantly answered by people in game dev.
> By the numbers, visitors to the heart of grizzly country in Yellowstone National Park have about the same likelihood of being killed by a falling tree as being killed by a grizzly.

It’s too many bears when this number goes way up, not until then.
It's also not learning from individual humans. It's learning from all the humans.

Different humans have different strengths, including within chess.
I'm not sure I see that as "worker exploitation" either. If you were hired remote and it's part of your employment contract, then yes, RTO is a breach of your contract. But most of us were hired for in-person, and remote was a concession that was made during COVID and some folks chose to move away. 3 day RTO makes it possible for these folks to still live far away and come in 3 days a week.

This 3 day arrangement was common in many companies even pre-pandemic, as a concession to higher level managers and directors who didn't want to relocate from where they were living because their kids were already in school, and they didn't want to move the family. Not everyone had that privilege. The rest of us had to relocate.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nb4z/the-oral-history-of-t...
Imagine that other people have different experiences from yours.
> Stop hijacking my typical browser shortcuts for use in your own app I've seen this happen with ctrl + f for opening a custom in-app search bar.

Ah the Discourse classic. But did you know if you hit ctrl+F twice sequentially you can override that annoying behavior!
There's some random town in Texas with its own German dialect, so I'd believe it.
I discovered Vim around a decade ago when my IT career was just starting. Since having a friend walk me through how to use it, I have never stopped using it -- and it's not an exaggeration to say that I use it every day.

Vim is a piece of software that has changed my life. Rest in peace, Bram, you will be missed. Condolences to Bram's family.
"This argument doesn't hold up in practice, because currently, the powerful are already protected"

Not on social media. Anyone can post a video or article attacking powerful people and groups, and thus "we" need new laws that will protect people on social media.

I am blocked by my local elected representative on Twitter. I was able to get better constituency service publicly on Twitter than I can via email or voicemail. But if I can be blocked, no problem.

Censorship and safety tools on social media need to be very carefully designed because at scale they get abused.
Why bank websites remove the ability to paste? You have already copied the text when you realize you cannot paste. So what is the point? Writing things by hand are prone to errors and if your clipboard is poisoned you have already copied the stuff by the time you realize you cannot paste…
> RTX 4090 has 2x the TFLOPS computing power than the killer AI Skynet used in Terminator 3. The writers back then probably though 60 TFLOPS is such a ridiculously high sci-fi number

Also a fact worth noting but is routinely ignored in the popular press is that, these astronomical peak floating-point ratings of modern hardware are only achievable for a small selection of algorithms and problems. In practice, realizable performance is often much worse, efficiency can be as low as 1%.

First, not all algorithms are best suited for the von Neumann architecture. Today, the memory wall is higher than ever. The machine balance (FLOPS vs. load/store) of modern hardware is around 100:1. To maximize floating-point operations, all data must fit in cache. This requires the algorithm to have a high level of data reuse via cache blocking. Some algorithms do it especially well, like dense linear algebra (Top500 LINPACK benchmark). Other algorithms are less compatible with this paradigm, they're going to be slow no matter how well the optimization is. Examples include many iterative physics simulation problems, sparse matrix code, and graph algorithms (Top500 HPCG benchmark). In the Top500 list, HPCG is usually 1% as fast as LINPACK. Best-optimized simulation code can perhaps reach 20% of Rpeak.

This is why both Intel and AMD started offering special large-cache CPUs, either using on-package HBM or 3D-VCache. They're all targeted for HPC. Meanwhile in machine learning, people also made the switch to FP16, BF16 and INT8 largely because of the memory wall. Doing inference is a relatively cache-friendly problem, many HPC simulations are much worse in this aspect.

Next, even if the algorithm is well-suited for cache blocking, peak datasheet performance is usually still unobtainable because it's often calculated from the peak FMA throughput. This is unrealistic in real problems, you can't just do everything in FMA - 70% is a more realistic target. In the worst case, you get 50% of the performance (disappointing, but not as bad as the memory wall). In contrast to datasheet peak performance, the LINPACK peak performance Rpeak is measured by a real benchmark.
> The data points above can lead to a hypothesis that remote workers desire more job security because, without strong in-person connections, it's easy to imagine becoming a layoff statistic.

This is such a clear "are we the baddies" line it hurt XD
I think this is the first time I've shed an actual tear for a famous person passing away.. RIP Bram Moolenaar. Vim was life changing for me and continues to be for many.
AMA, received a warning from Google because I haven’t badged in since Covid
> Pip is slow because it doesn't store the dependency metadata and has to download all upstream dependencies during the resolution phase.

This isn’t really true and hasn’t been for a long time. It relies on package authors to include the dependency metadata, but pypi has published it and pip has used it going back to at least 2017, if not earlier. They could do more to enforce it, but there’s a lot more to the story of why pip is slow than this.
Because it is reductive and unhelpful. What is happening now is called triage. Of course helping all of the wounded is the goal but you tend to those bleeding out before those suffering from slivers. To stand up in the ER and exclaim “but we are all suffering! We should all be helped at the same time!” is simply counter productive at best.

It is absolutely important to spend time imagining solutions that could help change the system itself to prevent future suffering but to offer them to people directly engaged in immediate disaster response is not productive.

To put this in nerd terms don’t be the guy who suggests switching to Haskell/pure FP as a solution to the problem you are debugging in a production legacy OO system that needs to be fixed immediately. Like logically and long term you are probably right but what was the point beside making you feel smug?

Also: intersectionality.
> I OWN these discs and no licensing agreements between corporations can deprive me of watching or listening to what I paid for.

Are you sure?

> The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Access_Content_System