skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short answer, the responses are happening too fast for that stimuli to be going through the language centers of our brain. In order to say that the processing of that stimuli is like a language model, we would need to widen our definition of a language model to encompass basically any communication between neurons happening within the brain.

----

So on one hand, you could call that a technicality, on the other hand I would say that if we reduce "like an LLM" to mean "responds to a stimuli by generating a response", at that point "like an LLM" is so broad as to be meaningless. Sure, we can define "humans use a language model" as "human brains generate signals to other parts of the human brain in response to stimuli" -- but that's not really a useful thing to say when we're comparing human reasoning to GPT-4.

If we're talking so broadly about reasoning, then it would be just as accurate to say that human brains are like Markov chains. After all, Markov chains interpret inputs and transform them into other signals that they send to other parts of the chain. But if I told you that GPT-4 was just a Markov chain you would (rightfully) disagree with me on that and you would (rightfully) say that I was oversimplifying what's going on within GPT-4's model.

Typically, when people say that human beings are text generators, they're talking in the context of GPT-4; they're trying to claim that GPT-4's behavior is analogous to human behavior. Whether or not GPT-4 can reason under any definition of reasoning (direct analogy to human thought should not be the only way we think about reasoning), the way GPT works and the way that it's trained and taught is extremely alien to how human brains work and how humans learn. Broadening the definition doesn't change the fact that LLMs and human brains are very different in practical ways that influence their observable behaviors.

----

I don't think people are consciously trying to do this, but the debate over whether humans are LLMs often ends up feeling like an attempt to simultaneously broaden and narrow a definition at the same time. What people seem to want to do is to describe LLMs extremely broadly but then assume that conclusions they draw from that broad definition are necessarily applicable to a very narrow definition of an LLM (specifically, GPT and similar models). But once we define an LLM broadly enough to encompass the entirety of human reasoning, we have also broadened the category enough to encompass a lot of processes that no one would call reasoning. What doesn't transform inputs into other forms and pass them along to another object? An AC/DC electrical converter does that, but that doesn't mean it can think.

It's like claiming, "computers are made of carbon and so are humans, so computers are basically the same as humans." Well, wait a second -- the category as you've defined it is so broad that objects within that category can no longer be assumed to share other attributes with each other.
As somebody who keeps inserting the USB-C charger cable into the SD card slot of the new MBP, I couldn't agree more.
Emacs uses a gap buffer because TECO used one, long before RMS finished high school.

Emacs was initially just a bunch of macros (in Eugene Ciccarelli's TECO init file IIRC) that provided an easier interface to TECO once a realtime display mode (^R mode of course!) had been added.

Yes, in TECO, control R was a keyword in the language. If you don't know TECO it looks like line noise. For controlling an editor, that's not necessarily insane.
> the :-separated blocks are not fractions, they are two-component vectors up to a multiple

Projective coordinates are fractions, or more precisely the ℤ⁺²-projective vector space[1] (over the positive integers) is ℚ⁺, the positive rational numbers[0]. You generally want to use ℝ instead of ℤ for obvious reasons, but that's not really "not fractions" in any useful sense.

But writing it as vectors does have the benefit of making the generalization from ℝ² to ℝⁿ (n≥2) somewhere between obvious and trivial, whereas fractions are at-least-implicitly specific to the ℝ² case.

0: give or take some issues with 0 and ∞ that we don't care about because 0 and 1 are not probabilities

1: I'm sure someone can out-pedant me on the terminology here, but the point is it's two-dimensional, which (2) is the fewest dimensions this works non-degenerately for (leaving one degree of freedom, versus zero for the ℝ¹ case, and negative one (aka doesn't work at all) for ℝ⁰)
The AI camp has economic incentives to inflate what their systems can do. I'd bet we'd get a different reaction from neuroscientists.
> if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine

From rough memory, Intel has a bad rep with chipsets above 1GbE speed.

I think the problems are with their 2.5 and 5 GbE chipsets (and not 10GbE?), but I don't run those personally so don't remember the exact specifics.
Huh, never heard of that before. An interesting paper!

Running the numbers - assuming 4k record size instead of 1k, ignoring data size changes, ignoring cache, ignoring electricity and rack costs, selecting a $60 Samsung 980 with 4xPCIe and a $95 set of 2x16GB DDR5-6400 DIMMs...I get $0.003/disk access/second/year and $0.0000113 for 4k of RAM, a ratio of 264.

That is remarkably close to the original paper's ratio of 400, even though their disks only got 15 random reads per second, not 20,000, and cost $15,000, and their memory cost $1000/MB not $0.002/MB.

I'm not sure the "Spend 10 bytes of memory to save 1 instruction per second" works equally well, especially given that processors are now multi-core pipelined complex beasts, but working naively, you could multiply price, frequency, and core count to calculate ~$0.01/MIP (instead of $50k). $0.01 is about the cost of 3 MB of RAM. Dividing both by a million you should spend 3 bytes, not 10 bytes, to save 1 instruction per second.
I have many USB-C cables that don't behave like other USB-C cables. Just this past week, I had to buy another cable for my son's desk setup because of the many USB-C cables I had, I was out of the ones that would carry 4K video and USB-C 80+W PD to his laptop at the same time. (I had a couple that worked, but they were in use for my wife and I, and the couple handfuls of others I had were capable of zero or one of those two functions.)
Side note: re-watched ST2 and 3 recently and switched to french audio for a bit for giggles and nostalgia: warp speed got translated to "exponential hyper-atomic".
Phishers Spoof USPS, 12 Other Natl' Postal Services
> Firewire ports can be inserted the wrong way

Hopefully only with a hammer!?
No it's not a technicality?
I can buy tickets from Deutsche Bahn for all kind of European Train Operators, including ÖBB Nightjet. It's just a nice service to have a unified booking system
But just that in some direction maters for some reason (layout of the castle forced a direction and thus this works out to random chance?), and the rest was just what the mason felt like building (default to right handed?). You can come up with your own story about why direction would matter, and why for the rest there would/would not be a bias in direction. Then play with how random each one is to get the 70/30 percentage split.
Yeah, I misread the post I replied to: I’ve been on a bunch of internal dashboard projects that were in danger of losing focus and turning into full-fledged visualization platforms.
the solution is obviously to always work on multiple tasks simultaneously. how often you need to switch depends on the granularity of the report. if your report is daily you touch each task once a day. if it is hourly, you switch through all tasks every hour. the pomodoro method has you taking a break every 30 minutes, so two tasks each hour are possible without cutting time on each task to short.

i am not entirely serious. but as an independent contractor with multiple customers, working on tasks for different clients every day or every week is not unrealistic.
There were auto-crossover RS-232 boxes going back deep into the 1980s.
> Generally, people in HN

These silly generalisations about HN are pointless. HN has a pretty diverse set of worldviews, approaches, and levels of expertise across a range of topics. There is zero point in lumping people into a single, or even a majority, behaviour.
I just looked at my nearest USB-A plug: There's no logo on either side.

I'm also almost certain I had connectors with a different logo on either side.
I think people found out that more falls happened while descending than while ascending, so it was more important to have right hand holding the rails at the outer wall when descending. Thus counter-clockwise direction while going down and clockwise when going up.
I refuse to believe that Google's pathetic 10+ year old excuse for blocking extensions on mobile (performance) can hold forever.

Mobile users are the ones by far the most in need of agency. Google saying no here is a top existential threat to their dominance. Hopefully now that Firefox is starting to re-allow webextensions on mobile broadly, pressure can mount. Keep trying folks!

Beyond "can mobile run extensions", I think the main thing missing so far in collaborative web extensions is that few are actually interoperable in any significant way. They're all isolated services. That's helpful for content discovery, but I don't think a centralized service is going to cut it for letting a new depth to the web really form.

I also would say that Hypothesis has been a fairly successful fairly great collaborative web extension. I don't often run into other people commenting on sites or articles or comments, but it happens, and the effort in general is well loved. It somewhat uses standard protocols, but is designed for their service. https://web.hypothes.is/
To add to this list of things LLMs don't understand:

- Numbers (LLMs still can't do math and the ones that "can" are very brute forced and don't generalize)

- Commutative properties (The (idk why anyone was surprised) "reversal curse": https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288)

- Associative properties

- World models (i.e. can understand some basic physics and causality. Not mathematically, but the same way a child understands that letting go of something in their hand falls to the ground and not up)

- How to say "I don't know"

- Any form of meaningful generalization (GPT 3.5 and most LLMs still have difficulties with "Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a kilogram of bricks". GPT4 gets it, but I'm not convinced it isn't because I've asked it that question too many times and they specifically trained on it.)

And a whole load of things. With basically all these things being quite relevant to the collective interpretation of "understanding." They aren't hard to tease out either. You ever have a problem that isn't easy to google because the search terms are too close to a different problem? The LLM will give you very similar results, even if you probe with corrections and specify that your problem is different. Like layer8, many many times I've corrected (many different) LLMs and cannot tease out the correct answer. Because the correct answer is too low likelihood and often the RLHF has decreased the distribution in that region to get to it. Because this is exactly what RLHF does, on purpose.
Hang on. I've watched these trainwrecks for a while. The people who usually don't let details get in their way are the ones who claim that LLMs think even though these same people can't explain what thinking means.

The onus [1] should go the other way.

____________

[1] Today's conversation-derailing trivium: "onus" means ass in Greek. As in donkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager
Tim Sweeny view on Pascal and derived languages
A lot of tech folks could do with reading this book. To really understand how “sticktoitiveness”/exhaustion of options/plain old hard work is a powerful way and sometimes the only way of troubleshooting and solving problems.
And perhaps k8s is a specific category to consider here.
I've read and thought I've experienced where 'active' (as opposed to in-active) page-cache does count towards k8s mem limit.
Well, it always depends on what you lookup i.e. how much time one needs to compute entries of the given lookup table. If it takes O(2^n) time , then payback comes quickly, where n is the input size. It’s good advice to be very skeptical if one drops general statements like that. Look for algorithms with the best worst -case time complexity is a good start. It will always win. Theory works. Question is only of big the input has to be in order to see that. Here, the fun part starts I guess.
The traditional alternative to Electron on mobile platforms is Capacitor (which uses the system webview, so in that sense it's closer to Tauri):

https://capacitorjs.com/

(fka Apache Cordova, fka PhoneGap)
The "bus factor" analogy is just that, an analogy. It shouldn't be solely taken literally, as in "what do we do if someone important becomes incapacitated".

The point of that analogy is to get people thinking about business continuity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning) and how to mitigate various types of risks. The keyword being mitigate. One cannot eliminate risk, and no sane customer expects their use of a client or software to carry 0 risk.

If a vendor tells a client that nothing can disrupt their ability to deliver their product, they are either lying, or have failed to understand the risks their company actually faces.

And the final point, "my partner can take of it". That addresses only one, frankly minor aspect of business continuity, which is "what happens if someone important becomes incapacitated". The number products that failed because someone important literally died (not just left the company) is probably extremely minute. There are way bigger risks a company should focus on mitigating first, including:

- software fails to meet regulatory compliance (if applicable)

- company fails to manage finances properly and has to close shop

- someone important leaving the company

Can some of these be mitigated by adding another partner? Depends on what they bring to the table.
I run a Linux system with 2GB of RAM... and Intel integrated graphics, it's storage is not exceptionally fast flash. The more pages I can keep compressed in RAM, the less the CPU has to spend waiting on the storage, especially if we're talking about the swap partition. After letting that computer run a long time I can tell whats been swapped to disk versus just compressed to zswap.
> Mastodon is used by millions. I’ve heard the devs make way below market rates and the foundation behind it is cash starved. That’s just one example.

Yes, the funding situation around mastodon is very transparent and many other interesting projects in this space are total labor of love. I will forever admire those people whether they manage to make the world better or not.

Well, politicians could create a healthy market for software overnight by outlawing various targeted advertising practices. Once personal data gathering and use for advertising (and who knows what else - who ever reads and understands these manipulative "terms and conditions") is prohibited, any software supported by generic ad technology will be unsufferable.

Ten years ago you could excuse politicians, regulators and the lot that is supposed to work on our behalf as not being informed. Today there is no excuse.
> The most fragile part (the wafer in the center of the receptacle) is on the expensive-to-repair device, while the least fragile part is on the cheap-to-replace cable.

Why do you think that the wafer is the most fragile part?

One might argue that the latch mechanism would be the part most exposed to wear and tear due to mechanical stress incurred by plugging and removing. Those side latches are located in the plug, not in the receptacle.

See also figure 3-14 in the USB-C spec [1].

[1]: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%...
At least PS/2 cables were mostly made with "keyed" rubber jackets where one side was flat and the other rounded, so in the dark you could tell which way was up.

(Though, that keyboard and mouse were different ports was stupid, so it loses points there)
Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37824060
Nuclear subs and air carriers are part of deterrence strategy. So, most reports will be classified, unlike for nuclear plants. Never the less, we know about numerous accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...

Also, let’s not forget about Hanford site, which was part of the US nuclear program
> the entire country

City/overseas territory*
Modern Man In Search Of A Soul (1933)
Maybe I misunderstood "built with", because I thought you were talking about the compiler version there. I know semver is just intent, but the intent doesn't even touch mixing internal data from multiple versions.

If linking against a different version of the code breaks like that, that sounds like someone did semver wrong. If that happens a lot to you, then oh, I'm sorry about that happening.
I would take the opposite opinion - we have to maintain a _critical_ mind. Otherwise, we're open to being taken advantage of by any smooth-talking charlatan (or LLM, but that's largely the same thing) that comes along.

Constantly moving the goal posts with this incessant "but what IS intelligence, though?!?" gets us nowhere. By your own argument we can never define intelligence, so we can never actually discuss it. LLMs consistently and constantly fall down on tasks that we would not expect a human to fail at, but you and people like you insist we cannot use this as evidence because you refuse to accept any defined terms.

I mean, remain as hopeful and uncritical as you want. But you're basically asking the rest of us "Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?" and that's gonna go about as well for you as it typically does.
> trying in vain to reach behind a heavy computer and unscrew the two jammed retaining bolts holding in a serial, parallel, scsi, vga, or DVI plug with slippery bent plastic jacketed heads

Oh yes, that brings back very bad memories.

Only gradually did it dawn on me that nothing really bad actually happens if I didn't screw the connectors tight on DVI/VGA etc. :)

(Yes, these are technically not plug-and-play, but the occasional disconnect sure beat all the banging my head on the desk and swearing profusely every time I changed something with my personal setup.)
> I'm not sure the LLM doesn't.

If you turn off the power to the computer hosting the LLM, you can also be sure it doesn't think.
I used to live in a New Road that ended in a gate onto a farm. Then the farmer sold the land for development and a furtherance of the road was built with access from the opposite direction. The gate remained and is firmly locked. So it became necessary to explain when calling for a taxi that they should find us on "Old New Road, not new New Road." I rather hope those get perpetuated into signage at some point...
When I asked ChatGPT what "jdnrirmd-gurlksjd" is, it says it doesn't recognize it and needs more context, but is readily able to tell me about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

https://chat.openai.com/share/4f36fe14-0201-4a69-aaf5-2e2e29...

When asked what happened last week, ChatGPT will be honest and tell me that its training data only goes up until Jan 2022, and that it doesn't know anything after that date.

https://chat.openai.com/share/ca5bd2e1-e91c-468c-9594-be3ac8...
https://www.physician.fyi/ca/c%2042520 shows up on the map as being in some random village in France.
Yup, it will depend on your workload a lot. Worth testing of course!
I grew up in London, in a house that shared a postcode with only one other house.

A school friend didn't believe I would successfully receive mail addressed with only my forename and postcode.

(Until he tried it and I brought the received letter to school.)
It sounds like we'd be better off not knowing about this law. Thanks.
did you try crisp.chat? we've been thinking about this as well
John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity
Part of it is because we already have flying/wheeling drones. Walking is just the last step of all terrain capabilities.

Flying can get you almost anywhere, but not quite. It is both very loud and has issues in enclosed spaces.

Wheels/tracks are very efficient at moving mass, but have issues crossing some materials such as exploded building internals like you would find in a war zone.

Walking/climbing is the last bit to get you inside enclosed 'human' spaces such as buildings and tunnels.

The war occurring now in Gaza would be an example area of what future battle would look like.... A target building it hit by a bomb and mostly destroyed. Smaller automated drones quickly fly over the area and assess visible targets and threats for follow up artillery. Multiple mobilized traced/wheeled heavily armored drones would address any residual ground level threats. Upon reaching the target building the larger drone vehicles would release multiple smaller 'walking/crawling' style drones to ascend the rubble, either addressing any remaining targets themselves, or reporting back to a command station for some other group to make a decision on what to do next. The final goal of these walking units is to probe deep into the rubble to ascertain if any tunnels survived the initial bombing, and if so to begin mapping any threats in said tunnels.
If you program, i3 is great.

Trivial to learn and just works.

Xmonad is much, much more difficult.
It's Förderung, not Forderung. Two totally different words.

Forderung: demand, requirement
Förderung: financial support (what you mean)

I guess the price spikes happen because demand spikes in these situations..
The language with a rude name sometimes known as 'BF' compiles trivially to C (from C), for instance:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
int c;
printf("#include <stdio.h>\nint main() {\nchar a[30000] = {0}; char *p = a;\n");
while((c = getc(stdin)) != EOF) {
switch(c) {
case '>': printf("++p;\n"); break;
case '<': printf("--p;\n"); break;
case '+': printf("++*p;\n"); break;
case '-': printf("--*p;\n"); break;
case '.': printf("putchar(*p);\n"); break;
case ',': printf("*p = getchar();\n"); break;
case '[': printf("while (*p) {\n"); break;
case ']': printf("}\n"); break;
}
}
printf("return 0;}\n");
return 0;
}

(Though sorry to any BF fans if I've missed something in the implementation) ;-)
Fuck K8. You literally don't need it. Maybe he needs it because he's building on google cloud.

AWS is easier, but you can do it with anything. The basic steps are:

1. Upload the file somewhere
2. Transcode it
3. Put the parts somewhere
4. Serve the parts

You should really transcode everything into HLS. It's 2023, and everything that matters supports it. If you want 4k you can use HLS or the other thing (which I keep forgetting the acronym for).

If you want to get fancy you can do rendition audio, which not everything supports. Rendition audio means sharing one audio stream amongst N number of video streams.

You can use FFMPEG to transcode, but I'd suggest using AWS MediaConvert. It's cheap, fast, and probably does everything you want. Using FFmpeg directly works, but why bother. You will get an option wrong and screw everything up. You don't want your video to not work on some random device that 50k people are using in some country you didn't think about.

He's using RabbitMQ but you should use SQS, because SQS can trigger lambdas...which means no polling required. But use whatever queue you want.

You can kick the process off by attaching a Lambda to S3, which will start the process when the file is uploaded.

You can kick your "availability activation" off by attaching a Lambda to the S3 output bucket.

Background: I help run a streaming service and built the backend pipeline.

This omits the entire "metadata management and analytics" side as well. That's left as an exercise for the user.