skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a comment here by the author of this patch which is absolutely extraordinary:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20230731083806.453036-6-hch@lst...

"Given that symbol_get was only ever inteded for tightly cooperating
modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to
being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA
circumvention of access controls law suites."

This is literally an attempt to claim the protection of the DMCA's anticircumvention law (which makes it illegal to "circumvent" DRM) for the Linux kernel, an open source project. It's also a tacit admission that EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is blatantly a DRM scheme (which it is).

Personally I loathe NVIDIA and have no particular interest in defending their behaviour; however, I find it extraordinary here that the Linux project is trying to claim the DRM anti-circumvention law applies to an open source project. It's pretty bizarre given there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.
Very happy to see oobabooga on the list. Everyone's contributing in different ways, and ooba serves as a fantastic portal to try out various models which I appreciate. Its readme even says it wants to be like the automatic 1111 of text generation. For beginners like me who are curious about this new world, ooba is a great entry point.
That’s not really “raw tiles” in the OSM or other 3rd party map provider sense. Especially since you can’t save/cache them really (and you can’t use them with something like leaflet legally)
I think for smaller projects just storing images as BLOBs in e.g. PostgreSQL works quite well.

I know this is controversial. People will claim it's bad for performance.

But that's only bad if performance is something you're having problems with, or going to have problems with. If the system you're working on is small, and going to stay small, then that doesn't matter. Not all systems are like this, but some are.

Storing the images directly in the database has a lot of advantages. They share a transactional context with the other updates you're doing. They get backed up at the same time, and if you do a "point in time" restore they're consistent with the rest of your data. No additional infrastructure to manage to store the files.
I was playing with their API for half day for code generation and the cost was few dimes. I was writing package for making matplotlib plots. https://github.com/mljar/plotai

Are you building some public service that heavily relay on OpenAI API?
I went there (to the Stasi museum) for the first time a few weeks ago. Its an absolutely jaw dropping piece of (very recent) history.

The thing that struck me the most was how banal it all feels. Unspeakable acts of evil were committed in that building. There are office memos on display telling the story - complete with hand written notes on them like "recommend this (protester) be put to death". And around the memo is corporate filing codes and such to make sure the note is filed correctly. And yet, the whole office feels so generic. It could be any office building from the early 80s, complete with generic corporate orange/brown carpets, interdepartmental telephone systems and offices for the secretaries. You can just imagine the people working there coming in to work each day and bustling around like in any modern office. "Hello Janice. Sorry I'm late - traffic was terrible. Yes I got the memo! Blah blah blah"

Movies show evil acts being committed in evil lairs, clearly signposted with lava and torture chambers. But I think the truth is far more bland than that. On the surface, where we work and what we do there looks more or less the same, regardless of the effect our work has on the world. How many people's work harms the world today? I bet most people, when confronted, react more or less the same: "What? This job is wrong? Nobody told me. It wasn't illegal. And anyway, if I didn't do it, someone else would. I'm just trying to feed my family. Its not my fault."

I hope history holds modern data brokers in a similarly dim light. I certainly do.
> Rather than leveling a whole compound your weapons can get inside and be more precise.

House, preschool, hospital...
So... in what way does opening the source of the driver makes the authorship go away?

You made a bunch of claims based on having no information about the subject that have nothing to do with the post you replied to...

Like... what am I supposed to do with what you wrote?

---

As an aside, from my personal experience, NVidia is a very bureaucratic company with very few people having much of an authority over software it writes. It also has a culture of restricting many freedoms to their employees (as in, mandating OS for their laptops, taking away root privileges on work laptops, requiring a lot of unnecessary reporting when dealing with programming issues etc.)

I would expect that the decision to not open-source the driver was based on some policy established ages ago. Nobody can remember who and for what reason made the decision, but nobody is bold enough to challenge it. Mostly because the organization grew too big and the decision must've been probably made by some title which no longer exists and whoever is in "position of power" now doesn't have any real power.

As for performance... well, I wouldn't expect it to tank. Here's one anecdote that I know about since I'm personally affected by it. On laptops with two graphic adapters (typically Intel and NVidia) where one is used for power-saving mode and another one for better 3D rendering, when such a laptop is connected via HDMI to a big monitor, NVidia's adapter starts overheating and using a lot of unnecessary resources. Turns out someone left out some kernel logging in the very hot loop of the piece of the driver related to HDMI probing.

In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if NVidia's driver would overall benefit from few extra pairs of eyes looking at it. It's hard to imagine that they somehow found a way to utilize system resources so much better than a legitimate driver would. And even if they did, there's a good chance they'd be able to convince Linux kernel developers to let them have it.
I think at best this can just help some people break through their cult-like fealty to whichever VPN provider their favorite trusted youtuber happened to introduce them to

because the VPN concept has limitations. It doesn't matter if the favorite VPN has proof of stonewalling a court case at some point in time, any other point in time it can be undermined and you wouldn't know until its too late....

it relies purely on trust and your use case. but if your use case ever expands to something law enforcement would be interested in, the VPN concept relies on too much trust
I don't understand? Why do you need to know the value of the constant if the name is descriptive enough?

X = 5; // File header offset

vs.

X = FILE_HEADER_OFFSET;

I don't think there's much value in the idea that just because someone can implement something badly, it validates the whole idea. You should always use constants instead of raw values if they have some meaning. If someone, somehow, manages to make that so complicated that it's a pain it's still not the fault of the concept.

> And in the end you almost always still need some duplication, because you have other files where you can't use the constants

And those will invariably end up out of date and incorrect at some point.
> I'd probably set up my own VPN box on AWS.

I did this for years (OpenVPN then Wireguard, run from a simple Docker container), but it's increasingly a losing battle - so many services, especially in the streaming video space, just blacklist all requests from IP ranges associated with VPS providers such as AWS.

Depends on your usecases, but accessing streaming services in another country is a big one for a lot of people. I've since given up self hosting a VPN for accessing region blocked video content.

If its just to secure access when using untrusted connections while traveling, self hosting a VPN such as Wireguard at home is a nice option as you get the benefit of your own domestic IP, as well secure access to your own LAN. Good use for a Raspberry Pi or similar, total lifetime spend will likely be less than 6-8 months of a paid VPN subscription.
On the Fediverse, No One Knows You're a Liar
ironically, phone and CC have tons of laws that prevent them from selling your data. well, outside the usa and uk.

that's why you have all those reward cards, programs and such.
It is known that alignment tax affects smaller models but in larger models (>~100B parameters) the "tax" starts to become negative at least when trained in RLHF:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.05862.pdf

The largest Llama2 model has 70B parameters. They ran the experiment with 7B Llama2.
I think it depends on where (or even if) you draw the line on free speech when it comes to verbal harassment.

Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.

Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.

If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
From presentation for best paper at OSDI '23 https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi23/presentation/berger

If you think the Simpsons should not be generously featured in an academic presentation, avoid this presentation.

Slideshow is very long but worthy of a quick browse because

a) good examples on how much 'fatter' python is vs c++ (eg: slide 29)

b) shows Scalene improving performance (eg: 90x slide 111)

https://github.com/plasma-umass/scalene
> It’s well established that you can’t use lethal force to protect property

Except in Texas.
HHS Calls for Moving Marijuana to Lower-Risk US Drug Category
The real reason, which I don't hear voiced often, is because you're not getting enough value for your data. Your data has value to advertisers, but to many other entities, private and public. Your data has value, and Google has high profit margins on that value. To be able to extract more value from your own data for yourself, you need to be able to deny Google access to it, and then sell it back to them. If enough people do this, it becomes something like a collective bargaining tool, and then some of Google's enormous societal windfall actually gets returned...to society.
"OVPN acquired by Pango, parent company of Hotspot Shield: what does it mean for users?"

https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/5/ovpn-acquired-by-pango...

Article updated 2023 https://blog.windscribe.com/the-vpn-relationship-map-2023/
You do notice the ads, though. That's the whole point of visual ads: you are being influenced to buy certain brands in the periphery.
Oldest Blockchain Companies (R&D and Exchanges)
If Uber could take 14 years to turn a profit, why can't OpenAI get a similarly long leash?
It's hardware, and usually userspace can't talk directly to hardware.
Nice. However the bigger problem for me is the mechanics. What motor do you use? Actually I think you also need some gear.

We and many other people we know are using the Kerbl (not related to KSP) chicken coop door which is quite expensive (around 120 Euro).

https://d3w207ykk8w4lq.cloudfront.net/public/thumbnail/33/a3...

You can see in the image it uses quite intricate mechanics with a lever and a spring. It's also supposed to detect a stuck chicken, however that has never happened to us (or we wouldn't have noticed because the Kerbl has silently resolved the problem).
Yes, the roller coaster is a great way to put it. One of my business partners had it so bad that whenever he was out of sight for longer than an hour or so people would start to worry if he was ok. We had a major crisis when he dropped off the radar for a full day, everybody pitched in until we found him (and not in a coma). Scary stuff, and with large variations between individuals in terms of severity and speed of onset of symptoms.
Because an organization can always keep seeking someone who will host them.

And if nobody will host them, it's not a totalitarian echo chamber, it's just "the people's will."

There is some risk of cleaving along ideological lines (so you end up with, like, "corporate Internet" and "KF-friendly internet").

I expect that process is currently in progress and I'm not convinced it's a bad thing. Maybe putting everyone on the planet on a flat communications plane was never an experiment that was going to succeed. Maybe we have countries and individual and collective ideologies for a reason.
> They then sell this data on dozens or hundreds of data broker platforms.

Oh? Which platforms? How did you come to learn that they were selling data to those platforms? Surely from either the platforms themselves or a respected news article?
The Transfer of a Russian ICBM to North Korea?
That's an example of being concerned, though. That is, people imagine a possible future and they are concerned about it.

When we think about the future, this is the stuff of imagination, storytelling, and mathematical models. It's mental constructs, not something that actually happened.

Many examples used in privacy arguments are like that. If you instead look for things that actually happened, it's things like journalists, activists, doxing, crazy exes, and so on. And certainly if you're in a war, good opsec is important.

These are certainly things that happen, but it seems reasonable for many people to look at them and decide their own risk is low, compared to other disasters you could prepare for.
In most cases I've seen in practice, you're querying against an index.

This drastically reduces the impact of unused fields compared to a full table scan.
yeah I think thats the worry, all this information is being gathered and sold to whoever will buy it and combine it and reuse it for whatever they want.

say an insurance company wants to see who they can raise the prices on without losing customers, then they can look at the data and work out peoples personalities and single out some that fit a profile of someone who wont go looking for a new insurance company just because their insurance premiums went up.

Same thing for health care, if a company wants to see how people live so they can anticipate if their children will be healthy or at higher risk depending on how their parents lived then they can know who not to cover or who will be charged more to cover in the future. it can become the new credit score but one you cant change.

whatever happens I just assume it wont be for my own good but for the profit of others so I try and be mindful of privacy when I can
Cache Eviction Strategies Every Redis Developer Should Know
there isn't that much technical differentiation. If you have a hundred companies selling the same commoditized service the only way for you to make any money is through some sort of brand or customer acquisition. On a pure product case VPN providers have essentially competed each other to the cost of production.
> The Apple Studio Display does not have any physical buttons and the only
> way to get or set the brightness is by sending USB control transfers to a
> HID device exposed by the display.
Would it be possible for the government to 'phase out' last names and instead rely on other forms of identification? Instead of putting in your name in an application form, you just list an id number and your address. Then when you show up, you only mention your first and middle name.
I disagree that it is "going reasonably well".

If you look at the headlines for this search:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ukrainian+counter+offensive+failur...
it suggests that even the US Govt is not rosy on the outcome nor is the main-stream media.
Researchers to probe brain mechanisms behind free will
When you say crackpots are you referring to Sam Bankman-Fried?
Most likely, they have some data telling them this is a good strategy. Otherwise they'd stop.
Do they have a plan to pay royalties for all the copyrighted materials they obviously ingested into their system?
Sounds like an abstraction is appropriate. We could call it a "device driver". Is there a reason so many things get baked into the kernel, rather than using, say, kernel modules?
> This was a reason I unsubscribed from the economist. A lot of times it makes broad claims and then leaves out the details to support said claim. Almost like it expects the reader to treat the economist like a first hand source and therefore no citation needed.

This is kind of the point of The Economist; its intended audience is busy executives who are on board with its ideological bias and don’t care much about footnotes and citations. Sounds like it wasn’t the publication for you.
nVidia's entire valuation right now is riding the AI bubble. All you have to do is convince the market that this disagreement might hurt that.
Their real issue is can they defend their position? I would say not likely. Google has a web scraping infrastructure in place and invented the technology. Facebook also has the capability. M$ will likely try to buy them or partner long enough to develop the tech and be a competitor. This isn't the car industry where it literally takes industry leaders years to figure out that electric cars are really a thing.

I think Google is the likely winner since this will definitely enhance search and be a service to sell to large multinationals.
Perhaps this is different for logged in users, but I’m seeing a page containing a single tweet and no way to find the rest.
Own Your Content
Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement
pic I took at the last HN Busybodies Secret Cabal meetup https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/storage/image/20230506-sw...
Aren’t VPNs much less useful unless they’re proven no-log VPN?

I remember going down the rabbit hole and people online were skeptical unless the company had a proven FBI raid with no logs taken, haha.
Well, at least this time a16z is giving money to actually useful technologies instead of bloviating about the world changing potential of cryptocurrencies. I imagine they've written down most of their cryptocurrency investments at this point.

That being said, these are some great grants for local LLM builders, local computation for such powerful tools is needed, and will continue to be needed, as industry incumbents like OpenAI continue to not release their models.
A customer base doesn’t spring from the aether.
Problem with ACH is you have to cancel your bank account to stop withdrawals. There are horror stories of people getting fired and being unable to stop ACH withdrawals (I'd rather my rent bounce this month than not be able to eat, etc) and ending up hosed. With a card you can just cancel the card number. It's best to use your bank's bill pay (push) instead of any external automated billing (pull).
The kernel doesn't necessarily need to know about every monitor specifically, there's lots of standards that divide this space into broad categories. But some hardware does custom things that need individual drivers, e.g. use the USB channels to announce a custom device with its own proprietary protocol.

Sometimes this may be intentional design to lower compatibility and cause these problems intentionally, but often it is just bad engineering, not malice.
Pretty sure this is what DDC is supposed to solve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel which is why this EDID post reminded me of this problem.

Problem is, regular DDC utils don't know how to communicate with this particular display.

Joke is on me, I shouldn't have spent $1,500 on a display that is pretty much exclusively designed to be connected to a Mac. But I was using it with a Mac for a while before building this new Linux box.
Vice, of all places, has a great article about it. The answer is that the folks who wish to discriminate by caste have a variety of ways to determine what your caste is. FTA:

Indians will not ask outright what caste you are, as it’s seen as overly discriminatory, but they use more subtle methods to identify your place in the caste structure.

“Sometimes they ask, ‘Are you vegetarian?’ If you say yes, they ask are you vegetarian by birth or by choice, before getting into which village you come from, because sometimes the village gives up your caste,” Sam said.

Another method described to VICE News is the pat on the back to see if the person is wearing a Juneau, a sacred white thread typically worn by the upper castes in India.

Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azjp5/silicon-valley-has-a-...
> Land value tax: you move to a cheap place, some time later its value increases and now you have to pay more tax, why?

This is already true for rent.
> most importantly it gives the government more money to spend.

Most popular carbon tax proposals are revenue neutral. Whatever the government collects in carbon taxes would be redistributed to everyone as a check.

You're correct that this will be painful though, especially for regular people. A lot of people believe that just because it's revenue neutral it won't be painful. Every tax causes a deadweight loss, regardless of how that money is spent. Climate change may, in fact, be a bigger deadweight loss, but the problem is that people don't perceive it as such because even if a carbon tax prevents a hurricane, nobody would ever know. Also, the benefits of the carbon tax would be distributed for everyone in the world, but the costs would be concentrated only on citizens of countries with a carbon tax.
> I think that's a particularly poor example, given that an estimated 99 percent of all species are already extinct.

Huh?

Anyhow, it is really hard to predict evolution over the long-term because of the ever changing context (environment, other species, etc.). Generally things happen and are tried out, experimented with and what works sticks around. Those claiming to be able to predict the future concretely from many potential futures are probably wrong (and are also likely fans of Azimov's Foundations series.)
Assembly Atlanta has 135 acres with indoor studios, plus outdoor streets to simulate New Orleans, New York, Tribeca, and "Europe".

It's under construction, but close to completion.
>Indeed. It's often said that's what's being traded away when using ad-supported products is attention, and that's true, but only partially. Users also trade away some amount of control over their own way of thinking and decision-making processes because whether one realizes it or not, no matter how hard they may try to firewall off external input, ads influence us.

I'd add that network bandwidth, CPU cycles, storage and RAM are being traded away as well, since the means to capture your data and attention also executes locally and are stored on your systems as well.

Which makes things even more unequal.
Nobody (I don't think) is advocating for absolute socialism and the abolishment of capitalism. And I hope nobody is advocating for the opposite: absolute capitalism. Both leave lots of people in misery. Pointing to the failed examples of socialism and saying it can never work is not a serious argument.

Socialism has worked as intended in many places. Look at the nordic countries (as others have mentioned). Features of socialism are good and we should implemented the best parts.