skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At what degree of computation does consciousness emerge? There must be some level of computation at which there’s zero consciousness and then one rung above that there’s a non-zero degree of consciousness.

Where could that line possibly be?

I personally cannot reasonably even guess at such a boundary, so panpsychism is a much cleaner explanation.

These two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. I.e. you can believe that consciousness is what it feels like to compute, but then “what is compute” except a particularly structured form of a thing that’s happening everywhere and all the time (particles and energy bouncing around) in more or less structured forms. And if you say “well not all energy/particle interactions are computation, even of an abysmally low degree,” then return to the first question: what types of interactions or what degrees of structure are non-computational where one rung above it they are computational?
Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI
I had a Dragon too, loved it despite its limitations. There was a great type in program in Dragon User that allowed you to switch into one of the graphics modes and type and run BASIC programs in there. Most impressive. (I remember 12 year old me bending my fathers ear clean off waxing lyrical on a long car journey about how clever the program was and why didn't they do this in the first place and maybe the Dragon could have competed with the Spectrum... not being computer minded he must have thought I was bananas, but he humoured me!)

And for the other infamous limitation (no lower case characters in text mode) late in its life Dragon User had another program that set up a semigraphics mode which defined new characters made up from the the individual horizontal scanlines of the standard character set and was able to cobble together serviceable lower-case characters. It then patched the OS to use this mode with the new characters, to all purposes creating an upper and lower case mode.

Witchcraft!
It’s sad to see that Google is such a hollowed out version of what was once a great company. The decline has been going on for years.

It’s just now the most cynical version of what people thought of it, a company that squeezes even more profits out of its ad business at the expense of its search quality and other products. I don’t know a single person who thinks Google search hasn’t declined.

This is the company that tried to scan all books to make them searchable, created an open source mobile OS, helped RSS explode in popularity, invested billions in open source and Linux.

One that, for a while was organizing the worlds information and making it accessible to all.

Those were good times.
Of course I would. I made it.
There's a chasm between banning people from procreating and not going to extraordinary lengths to guarantee them their own biological offspring. That type of bate and switch is used for other medically and transactionally complex situations that future humans have to deal with.
I agree that ostracizing researchers using neural networks is not a good path for anyone to go down. However, even though NNs are great at modeling problems…we usually have no idea how those learned models actually work. So NNs are great at solving problems in the short term, but aren’t terribly useful for developing long term solutions due to data requirements and regular retraining.

In this instance, I’m going to choose to take an optimistic stance and believe the authors were talking a friendly elbow jab rather than fueling a mini culture war. The researchers leveraging DNNs are doing great work, but perhaps could be wrangled in just a bit :)
Rove beetles also parasitize army ants. As soon as army ants existed these beetles we're building backdoors. Of course the ants want to recognize these cheaters and eliminate them. As ant genera diverged over time some relied more on tactile recognition of body shape ('touchers') and others not so much ('sniffers'). The parasites of touchers look like the ant but the sniffers not as much.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.02.030

Touch is dependent on dopamine but smell not as much. And dopamine producing cells are pigmented. Could improved tactility and pigmentation be linked?
> One of us needs all of $2-3k/mo for one and the other needs ~$750/mo for two. There's a wide range of what one can spend on motoring versus what one must.

I spend $70 per month to go everywhere, whenever I want, with zero tail risk.

Forcing this huge cost on everyone is a regressive burden on the poor.

$750/month for a family's lifetime is easily $450,000. Wouldn't you prefer to retire early, or have an extra half million dollars to leave your kids?
This is very common with short or otherwise valuable usernames on social media platforms. Initials and so on.

That's what 2FA is there for, but you still get the annoying e-mail notifications for attempted sign-ins.

Make sure to weigh the pros and cons when you pick your username on the internet.

A dedicated e-mail filter to limit the mental attrition might not be the worst idea.
Totally unsupported hypothesis: They evolved first a big fat termite ass, that is much easier and it's probably good enough many times in the dark narrow alleys of a termite hive. Later they evolved the decoration. It would be nice to see how the beetle grows, because "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not exact, but sometimes is a good approximation.
Good luck with that. Let me know when you figure out a way to do that that doesn't kill a couple million people.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/blackfly/
> Provided you always plan ahead for where you're going by multiple hours.

I took Hong Kong MTR recently and during peak times they had 40 trains per hour (2 trains every 3 minutes), and off-peak it was like 8 trains per hour.

You really didn't have to plan ahead. It was lovely.

> And don't carry anything more then hand luggage.

Order it delivered.

> And don't semi-regularly need to move heavy loads.

Rent a car when you need it.

> Or need to get children from place to place

Go with them on transit.

> And that there's public transport service there at all.

Which is my point.

> Finally: "pay for the road you drive on" - that's literally what gas taxes are for, EVs already attract additional taxes to account for this, and I'm real curious how you think the things you buy in stores get there...

The entire cost of roads is not born by fuel taxes. Fuel taxes total about $50B but roads generally cost about $200B. Free parking, parking minimums in building, etc, etc, are all taxes non-drivers have to pay to support drivers habits.
They could be, but often they launched something on-platform in AOL's walled garden that could not be accessed by a web browser. Basically, windows inside of the AOL application. Screenshots would explain better than I can but I'm having trouble finding a good one. Maybe: https://i.insider.com/53f27f8069bedd317d1c5fb5?width=1200
As long as it’s food safe saw dust then the FDA is doing it’s job.

We should be perfectly happy to trade in higher quality but dangerous products for lower quality but safe ones. The airline industry kills many fewer people than it used to, and most crashes and fatalities happen in the less regulated parts. Because of course they do.
PlanetScale-style database branching for Rails and SQLite with 2-lines of code
The first time I read about PlanetScale's "database branching" feature, I felt the way one does when they realize something, but it feels like they always should have known it. Dealing with a single database schema for local development is a pain, especially with a team. Our schemas *need* to be branched. However, I don't use MySQL or PlanetScale, plus I wanted to consolidate my branching around the Git branch I already have and use. After a few days of exploring and experimenting, I found that I can achieve the developer experience I want with Rails and SQLite in literally 2-lines of code. It feels magical and I love it.
I don't know, Discord is the best for me because I can just talk to people without the app trying to cause something that needs to happen naturally.
Response Time Is the System Talking
A nice metaphor when the "modern replacement" for something as basic as a directory listing is deprecated while the original means (the built-in ls) still works fine and isnt.

EDIT: ls on linux is apparently an executable part of GNU and not a built-in
Tamagotchi’s were fun when they came out and I have fond memories of buying one from a buddy. I also liked the fighting one called Digimon that turned into Pokémon-ish video games.
Or in long form:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
That's an explanation, not an excuse
Not hard to fix:

if command -v exa &> /dev/null; then
alias ls='exa'
fi
You've gotten a lot of thoughtful answers here already. Here's mine.
I'll come at it from a constructivist perspective.

There is a way to completely define a countable list. I do not say that you can completely write the list out in finite time. But you can specify it fully. Write a function f : Nat -> X, where X is the type of the things in the list, such that f is total, i.e., provably halts on every input. Your favorite typed lambda calculus or other theorem proving language will give you this property basically for free. The entire list is encoded as f. It doesn't matter that you can only extract elements one at a time by processing this function. They're all there, well-defined.

Now, we use this technique twice in Cantor's argument. First, we suppose the existence of f : Nat -> Real with the property that f covers all the reals. What we mean by that is you cannot define a real, x, such that f i != x for all i. (But we will do so.)

Second, each real number is itself encoded as a countable list of digits. So, Real := Nat -> Digit. In some sense, every real number is itself "a process" of digit generation, but you don't need to carry it out. Simply holding the function will suffice. Now, it's kind of tricky to compare reals to see which are equal and unequal, but ignoring the 0.99999... = 1 issue, which can be resolved, a proof that x != y involves identifying just one place i : Nat where the digits disagree: x i != y i.

Here we go: define x as x i := (f i i) + 1 mod 10. We claim x witnesses that f doesn't cover the reals. We agreed this means we must show x != f i for all i. We agreed that means finding j such that x j != f i j. The proof we seek: Let j := i.

We're just pushing functions around in a suitably typed language. Everything halts, nothing is running forever, no infinite storage space is required to hold the supposed list of reals nor the digits of each real. You can whip this up pretty fast in Lean or Coq etc.
Sometimes slowing down and better process and standards are two parts of the same coin. While unit testing might speed you up on net, creating design specs, design reviews, architecture reviews, control boards for configuration changes, etc. slow things down. Sometimes in a useless way and sometimes in a good way. It all depends.

But I doubt the EU would be any more lax over time.
I dunno. Stopping one criminal is better than stopping none.
It doesn't really matter whether the universe is determinstic or not, because even if it were, it would be impossible to build anything to exploit that determinism on any useful scale, and so the future remains unknowable. You can think of the universe as a giant computer calculating its own future one picosecond at a time. There is no way to 'jump ahead' and find out the future. Hence it doesn't matter whether it's determinstic or not. And probably never be possible to tell anyway. And anyway if it's not determinstic, what is it instead, Random? How is that any better or any different?

How does free will approximate in this metaphysics? Imagine your skull as a boundary between whats inside it and whats outside it - what you do next is mostly to do with whats happening inside your skull rather than outside it. Apart from certain scenarios like freefall, skydiving or something. And yes the workings of your brain have been determined by things outside your skull over time - your experiences and memories and genetic inheritance and so on. But the proximate cause of what you do next is mostly whats inside your skull. So lets just call that agency or free will and be done with it.
I get anxiety just watching these elevators. I'll take the stairs thanks.
While there is an increasing amount of noise from various sectors about what not to do we as an industry need to be concerned with what to do.

I would have a lot more faith in regulation as a spur for security innovation if the overwhelming proportion of self labeled security people weren’t just obstructionist grifters.

And I would have a lot more faith in software developers if they didn’t go all in with npm madness and like to tell anyone that points this out that they’re out of touch.

Or when we collectively take a decentralized system and use it in a centralized way because we are too lazy.

One of the clearest things we must get a handle on is auditing where code came from, and on which machines, under which jurisdictions, any building, packaging, signing etc. occurred.

I would tend to also believe we need to have much stronger code permissions enforcement, especially moving towards a whitelist only model around network host access. If we can enable only sub sections of our code to have such permissions so much the better.

What we must not do is allow a few government supported gatekeeping organizations to act as man in the middle signatories, where dealing with them is mandatory to deploying anything. That is a government run App Store.
The argument is it is fair use, which a ToS can't deny you.
I'm more impressed by the fact that HN didn't convert this linked to old.reddit.com
Ask HN: Does anyone have any good resources for learning Google Apps Script?
I've been trying to program a google sheet using Apps Script but most of the time, when I have an idea how to do something, it turns out that my idea is not something Apps Script can do and I have to implement it myself. For example, I thought there would be a function where you put in a number and it spits out a string of letters: 1 maps to "A", 27 maps to "AA". It turns out apps script has no such function and I had to implement it myself.

Apps Script has a huge API but I barely use it mostly because it doesn't really do anything I want to do. The fact that I'm not really using the API tells me I'm doing something wrong. Is there a book I was supposed to read or something? I already read the documentation google provides and it wasn't really helpful.
How do I get my local pizza place or international delivery network to sign up to a new app?
> I have lived in the UK for 35 years and I didn't even know Google Messages existed until you mentioned it.

Exactly, even though it is the default messaging app on Android and receives their SMS texts for them, most users don't realise they are using it or that when they "send a text" to another Android user it is actually sending the message over data.

Anyway my understanding is that a text is a SMS text, and a whatsapp is a whatsapp message. I know that Google Messages hides itself by sending SMS texts when the number isn't known to Messages, and I guess Whatsapp does this too. I also live in the UK and occupy a space within multiple different communities which insist on different messaging apps. May be I just don't the option to be so vague.
The current 90s nostalgia wave is pretty interesting as a late 80s/early 90s millennial. The zoomers brought it back into the zeitgeist, and we are still young and hip enough to be interested in the trend, but we were actually there the first time round!
This is highlighted by Rawls' "highly idealized" (according to him) concept of a wel-ordered society[0], which sounds (according to Professor Wael Hallaq of Columbia University) like a distinguished Muslim jurist describing the reality of his own legal culture".

[0]

"To say that a society is well-ordered conveys three things: first (and implied by the idea of publicly recognized conception of justice), it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same principles of justice; and second (implied by the idea of the effective regulation of such conception), its basic structure— that is, its main political and social institutions and how they fit together as one system of cooperation—is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy these principles. And third, its citizens have a normally effective sense of justice and so they generally comply with society’s basic institutions, which they regard as just. In such a society the publicly recognized conception of justice establishes a shared point of view from which citizens’ claim on society can be adjudicated.

"This is a highly idealized concept. Yet any conception of justice that cannot well order a constitutional democracy is inadequate as a democratic conception."
You can access infinite locations. Nothing stops you from moving diagonally in an arbitrary angle, move forward and then backwards. I'd hoped my extravagant uses of > made that clear. Reality is practically continuous not discrete.
This has actually been a common pattern in the industrial revolution:

1. Invent new technology that revolutionizes society (e.g. railroad, telephone, software)
2. Quickly amass a fortune exploiting this new technology.
3. Use a portion of that fortune to lobby for industry regulation under the guise of concern for customers which just so happens to also raise the ladder and make it harder for startups to disrupt the incumbents, thus securing their fortune.

That said, even with the cynical take, I find it hard not to be in favor of regulation (assuming it's done well, which has been a bit hit and miss over the years). A lot of software has potentially severe liabilities and it's time companies took responsibility for those instead of shifting them onto customers.
I expect you're joking, but no need to be so callous. A society that feeds the mentally unwell to the fishes isn't one you actually want to be part of. Everyone is someone's child.
You can just specify the 0301 model in your API calls.
The key is to not write large Haskell programs. Write many Haskell libraries and compose them. This scales infinitely and is an excellent way to build software. But it's also hard to do and takes good & deliberate technical leadership if you want to get 50+ engineers doing it.
And exa users will still be allowed to use ls
Google performs too much ideological editorializing on their search results and on YouTube.
Did we forget about this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyhdNrUJmOM
There's no incentive for termites to be good at distinguishing impostors before there are impostors. So they could get away with very bad disguise at first, then arms race started.
The Case of the Descending Bed
There's Burner (https://burnerapp.com) and I'm sure there are at least a handful others around.
I did look at trying to launch one (as described in the article) but there were some regulatory hurdles.

Places like Twillio and SIPgate will happily let you rotate numbers - but there is a cost and they're often not tied to a specific SIM.
There was a recently a review of Apple Classical in The New Yorker [1], which compares it to a few other services, some also mentioned in this thread. Apparently, many fare better on grouping compositions as an serious listener would appreciate.

I'm not sure if the other options own their own label(s), though. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition shapes the content available on the app.

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/apple-aga...
Google: Political adverts must disclose use of AI
Something about how he brought his grandmother along and felt comfortable in his full enthusiasm was just so endearing.
> no questions asked w/o having to prove who you are SIM

The blogger said nothing about all this. That's totally over the top just to obtain a disposable number. He's talking about a prepaid SIM; but when I signed up to AT&T they didn't ask and I didn't tell, but who cares? That's not the point here.
As with many good things, it comes at a price.

Windows, back in the day, was both buggy and full of security holes. It was also $99, and enabled an inexpensive computer to do near-workstation feats. If it cost, say, three times as much, that would have changed the market dynamic quite a bit. Fewer of us would have been able to afford computers with Windows, and few of us wanted bare-metal computers.

Well, you say, that's just fine, we could have put Linux on it, and the world would have been a better place. Well, could you have put Linux on it? Can Linux survive in this regulatory environment? Can it survive as open as it is, as modifiable as it is, as free as it is? What about the rest of free software, that doesn't necessarily have a large company behind it?

The second-order effects of this could completely change the software landscape. We may not like the results.
This is one of the thought fallacies that lock in the status quo - "if you can't fix all problems everywhere all at once, then you shouldn't do anything at all"
There's no evidence that mom and pop shops are any less likely to put borax in their 100% organic, gluten free, artisanal milk than a large company. Or even just washing the kitchen you can't really see. It's food safety laws and regulation that also keep them in line.
Yes exactly.

I've also found that learning by "ask ChatGPT, paste, verify" is so much faster and more fun than banging my head against concrete to deeply read documentation to reason about something new.

I've started doing this for new programming languages and frameworks as well, and it shortens the learning curve from months down to days.
I feel you. The sense of neutrality in this article is what I would expect from a well-written PR piece.
I lost a yahoo account because I put in incorrect information (I claimed to be 99 year old female or some such thing) and then forgot the password. I never really did anything with my yahoo account though, so it doesn't matter other than I couldn't unsubscribe to some mailing list.
I must have been blind to the banners for a number of years :-). In any case, the larger point stands: the EU created the cookie banner mess that makes the Web worse for everybody, whether or not we are EU citizens. It seems the only debate is whether they have dawdled 14 years before attempting to address the issue or "only" 5 years.
"יצרם בדעת בבינה ובהשכל"
So the Android figure is now Mona the Octocat, essentially?
It's more the press. The monarchy are irrelevant, but the press massively support authoritarianism as long as it's against other people.