skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It frustrates me every time when people talk about consciousness. The word has several meanings, but very often people just use it without specifying which consciousness do do they talk about and then proceed to conflate all the types of the consciousness.

You just end up with everyone being confused and both the author and commenters talking about completely different things.

In this article I feel like we have:
1. Phenomenological consciousness:
Does the GPT experience things or is it a P Zombie? Is GPT perceiving the world, or just processing data? Experiencing/Perceiving in this context means seeing "red" not just processing picture and reacting to it. Does it experience the qualia of red or does the data just go through it and you get and output at the end, regardless of how sophisticated is it.

Nobody knows, you can't even reliably prove that you, dear reader, are not the only person in the world who has it.

There's a good example of how ridiculously hard is it and how can we not even talk about these things. Try to establish whether another person sees the same color palette, or is this person's palette inverted? Is your red the same as the other person's red? Absolutely no way to give a definitive answer.

2. Self awareness:
Is GPT capable of behaving as if it would be capable of seeing itself as an entity? Yes. It can treat itself as an entity in conversations. Now where we draw a line in terms of memory is in my opinion just semantics. It loses all the memory once you open a new chat window, but people with dementia also lose memory. It's all semantics here and where does your gut feeling draw the line.
For me one major aspect of this “debate” is that the people who see or espouse what I see as over extensions of the abilities of technologies are the ones most unfamiliar with it.

There is an old bit of unscrupulous advice that if someone over assumes your abilities that you should refrain from correcting them.

That is, it benefits the NSA that people think they are actively recording all of their conversations all the time because it forces compliance without the necessary competence, but the people who hold these opinions are often wholly ignorant of the kind of technology required to achieve that level of surveillance.

Have you built your own minigpt? Have you implemented rudimentary transformers?

Are you projecting your desires onto something wholly unworthy of your devotion?

Because the people behind these things are financially incentivized to nod along as your impart more ability than what they know they put into them.

For clarity, my “religion” is math. I believe existence fundamentally is a mathematical construct and as such so are all of its creations.

The brain is to me a mathematical byproduct, but even still, when I familiarized myself with the math of llms and their abilities I recognized that they fall short of being, simulating, or explaining the former.

Llms are stochastic next token pickers, full stop.

Any perceived “intelligence” is projection and anthropomorphising by the agent using them.

I saw a comment on here in another thread stating that the capacity for coherent use of language falls short of being evidence of “intelligence” as children show signs of human “intelligence” long before they can form coherent sentences.
Nope. I support open source and personally release all my work in the open, but also support authors' freedom to distribute their own work however they wish and users' freedom to choose between them. These are fully consistent views.
I've been a long-term mcpro24fps and a user of Filmic pro before that. It's a great app, no doubt about it. The issue is not the app, but the OEMs who makes things difficult, artificially limiting the capabilities of the devices and even removing features in updates. Nothing is consistent and each device works differently from the next one, even from the same manufacturer. A long running joke in the McPro24fps Telegram chat is to never upgrade!
On the bright side, they could still switch to using a proper pure Rust UI library like iced.
> hypochondriacs claim to have without evidence.

> people claim to have without evidence.

Bit of a technical note. Patients claim is the evidence on its own. Patient may be undiagnosed, but there is an evidence for such claim.

IBS, lyme disease, all sorts of allergies are very hard (and expensive) to diagnose. Some people have no money for doctors, and may not be even registered with GP.

If customer at restaurant says they have a peanut allergy, you better to believe them. Saying "there is no evidence for such claim" may get you in troubles very fast...
https://hackerone.com/reports/2187833
> unless for justified cybersecurity risk-related grounds

Means they can keep things confidential, assuming it’s still relevant.
Aside from all the useful tips already written here, I'd add the following:
Identifying and focusing on the areas that really push the needle forward is the biggest challenge for most but a very critical step. It is easy to fall into the trap of "looking busy, but getting no results".

What worked for me and my startup is committing to split testing / A/B testing of various initiatives. Before any initiative we identify what is the best outcome, the worst outcome and the probably outcomes. Then we test A strategy for a few days, after which we experiment and switch to B strategy. At the end we see which one is better, eliminate what doesn't work and stick to what does. From there it's just further experimentation and split testing of strategies until you hit your end goal.

This experimentation and identification of what pushes the needle forward takes time to refine which is why most startups (and businesses overall) take around 2 years to breakeven.
Presumably.

It's also possible that some organizations incur more than $9 per month in admnistrative or other costs to bill a single customer.
What are the handles of these fake news accounts? I'd like to try and see for myself why Musk made a mistake and if he just made a minor mistake or if he has bad judgement.
But that's the trouble: there's more than enough hardware in a Studio to game with. Saying that people who need a "media" computer don't care about games is silly. I used to run $5,000 PC's for CAD/FEA, and you better believe I ran games on it after hours. I've had high-end Mac laptops for software development work for 10 years now. I keep buying the ones with GPU's. They ALL suck for gaming. Not for lack of hardware! My $4,000 Intel MBP with a Vega 20 runs Elder Scrolls Online (NOT a demanding game) at 720p and 30 FPS. It runs BETTER if I force it to use the internal Intel "GPU". So I bought a $700 PC which runs the game at 4K, "high" settings, and an unwavering 60FPS. A friend just bought an M2 Studio. It manages to run the game at 4K, but < 30 FPS. On the fastest computer in the world, currently! I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks. Lots of people WANT to play games on Macs, but wind up moving back to Windows.

IMO, this terrible situation is on Apple. They have the resources to fix this ecosystem, and buy a seat at the table, the same way Microsoft has, at so many tables.
> There are lots of 1970s in-jokes and references, which may baffle readers from later generations

In fairness, this is something he kept doing, albeit with more contemporary references, hence the Annotated Pratchett Files: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/
Dinorwig hydroelectric power station in Wales is probably the last example of great British engineering - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Amazing to think that, adjusted for inflation from 1984 pounds, it cost less to build than ten miles of track on HS2 (current estimate £307m per mile).
> I was on teams where patent filing was encouraged

Cisco did/does the same.
The problem is that an arrest and a mugshot is not a conviction.

The record of the former is still public even if the charges get dropped or the arrest was unlawful. And will appear on web searches or be surfaced by all of the background checkers that HR uses.
> Why in the world would I ever not want the software I install to read files in the Desktop and Documents folders?

Because it may be software which has no business reading local files to do what you want it to do. Arc, a closed-source web browser which requires (required?) an account asked for permissions to my Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders. I didn’t grant them. Same with Slack.

Dealing with files is secondary to what those apps do. I used them out of external necessity, so I’d never give them access to my files. In fact, because they asked for those permissions when I wasn’t doing anything related to files it made me distrust them even more.
What about converting personal data into anonymous data? For example, say a company tracked how many miles some person was a passenger on a bus. Now there is a request to delete their data, so could they simply overwrite their ID and name with "0000", "noname"?
"unless for justified cybersecurity risk-related grounds" sounds to me like "let us fix it first, in a reasonable timeframe" is absolutely an option. So it does not require publishing in the first 24 hours (which was afaict) the basis of this argument.
Yeah, off-topic but I definitely agree. The book is an easy read and good. I didn't know there was a movie; I should watch it.
Just an en-passe mention (under "Documentation") to the new Bookworm way of handling Python modules which already pissed me off^W^W^W surprised me in Ubuntu 23.04. Basically you cannot install modules with `pip3 install module` (or `python3 -m pip install module`) without using a virtualenv or using the .deb packaged version in the repos.
I've got used to it but it was a headache for a few days after the first upgrade I did.
Halide costs 12$ a year (or 60$ OTP I believe). I don't like subscriptions, but given the app has replaced 1500$ worth of camera I used to carry with me, I'm ok eating the 1$ a month.
ChatGPT Saved My Startup
Still do, I think? Small local papers will often take practically anything, if it fills pages.
> BUT it is simply an ideal that I do not see ever happening on a large scale

Too much money to be hoarded for it to ever happen.
Thanks for the tip, I'll use this for our company's needs.
I wrote a series of shell scripts called docker-proxy that creates SOCKS5 tunnels to Docker containers running openconnect VPNs, useful when you're working with multiple customers who have different VPNs that want all traffic on your machine forwarded through. https://github.com/carlosonunez/docker-proxy

Since DNS resolution is meant to occur remotely, this CVE would be directly applicable here.
I've never seen a wedding photographer using an iPhone, and the ratio of wedding photographers to news org photographers is probably 100:1 if not more.
Given the travel time, any visit to Mars would probably not be short-stay like 1 day. More likely weeks, months or longer.

So you'd have Mars G for time on the surface anyway.

And besides: a few astronauts have already done long duration microgravity, returned to Earth & lived to tell.
It's a useful shared illusion, but not 'real' once you reach a certain level of meditative concentration.

If you look at a bicycle wheel in motion, you don't see the spokes. If you and everyone you knew had only ever seen wheels in motion, you'd talk about a semi transparent field from the centre to the rim. You would all describe the same phenomena.

I was at a meditation retreat, and I caught a glimpse of the spokes. That's how I've explained it to others.

Does the self seem real? Yes. Is it a useful construct? Can we predict it and manipulate it? Yes. Once you've followed the meditation practices, do you see that it's an illusion? That was absolutely my experience.

Which is a round about way of saying, the conflict you perceive in Buddhism is rooted in the ongoing struggle to perceive the nature of the self, and to notice when your practice becomes entangled in its illusions.
I'm not sure it qualifies as any sort of sarcasm. It's just a non-sequitur.
Thank you for this list. I started my career with Opnet (Riverbed purchased them in 2013) and IIRC the license cost mid five figures per year. This list tipped me to OmNet++ which may provide a similar DES environment. I look forward to checking it out.
Are you sure this is common? I've never seen it before.
I’ve done a tour, very enjoyable and very cool to see up close
Perry Lott Is Exonerated After 35 Years of Wrongful Conviction in Ada, Oklahoma
What do you suggest is done then? Given some people experience legitimate IBS, what quantity of false negatives (i.e. legitimate sufferers who are ignored by the medical system) are you willing to tolerate?

Also - given medical developments in gut health on GABA, the gut-brain link is not so crazy. So your study could be a reverse causation.
It seems that this article should be titled "How Netflix uses JVM" (not "Java").

The article is superficial, mentions Java but seems that Groovy had a more important role there. But in the end, it really talks about JVM.

It reads like a PR piece from a Oracle and Netflix partnership to promote Java. Oracle have done that before.
Sibling is right, "close enough" == "habitable surface that humans can live on without some life support".

Aurora uses the generation ship model of transport, which . . does not go ideally. Many problems unforeseen for hundreds of years of travel in the utter empty (you hope desperately that it is empty). It's also a fast but not relativistic ship, .07C, at exorbitant energy costs. Hope you like the moon / mercury covered in purple lasers. Relativistic lower-mass vessels with the same technology, I guess, but the impact threat goes through the roof, and it's not a settlement ship. A better way to make the Aurora-style project is a small ship with frozen embryos that get birthed insitu by machines of loving grace. Then you can go faster, smaller.

But it's all talk talk. We're technically capable of doing these things, but I'm not sure we're socially capable of even lunar settlement at this stage of our history. Let alone Mars, the outer system. The Expanse was, in its own way, optimistic about our future. They just had to get medieval to get Earth's gas balance (and probably phosphorous! and who knows what else) back in the normal range.

Heh heh you know it's funny but if we took the solar system as it exists right now, a floating settlement higher up in the Venutian cloud layers would be closest[1] to fitting that bill, in terms of kgs of crap you need to carry around outside with you. Just, yknow, not anyone's typical idea of a "settlement".

[1] And yet so very damn far away.
Cell phones already killed compact point-and-shoots with their small lenses.

But DSLR's with their large lenses aren't going anywhere, because physics. If you want to capture high-quality footage under low light conditions, or work with a variety of lenses, the tiny aperture on a phone is never going to be enough.
No. Like Equifax when you are applying for a home loan.
I'll never not recommend this book. Fantastic and free, but you can get an official paperback book these days too. It's well written if you want to learn basic networking with the BSD sockets API. It's also the funniest software book I've ever read. A lot of programming book authors have some charm to their writing, but Beej is on another level.
age old
This is America, fines are how everything is addressed. Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez, Facebook, you name it. We don't haul CEOs off to jail in this country.
Not sure why I should do your homework for you, but here you go, an article about the incident which contains the account names: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/08/israel-...
I want to believe in human intelligence, but seen so perspective technology mostly unused, make me desperation.
I especially would like formats and protocols to be open source and freely available. Do you remember the state of digital video in the 90s, 2000s? Absolute clusterfuck of codecs, players, really ugly software being pushed upon users because they were the only way to play a specific piece of media. The UX sucked, people hated it, so codec pack installers, and then free players that bundled codecs became popular, VLC became popular, then streaming video became popular, and now we were back to square one, because no two browser supported the same video formats. But in the meantime Matroska came along, then Google bought a company with a good codec and open sourced it, and a bunch of streaming providers banded together to work on future formats, and the very similar audio advancements were bundled in the mix. And so, now we have a great, open source, royalty-free video container, a bunch of great video formats, audio formats. Browsers support it, smart appliances support it, hardware can have decoders for it, and everyone is better off because of this. It's a huge investment to iron out the details, but the pipes are infrastructure. Private ownership, and rent extraction only makes it worse, but if they are free / belong to the commons, then a lot of great things can be built on top of that.
What's unrealistic about adding "send an email to this address at ENISA" to todo-list for stuff you plan to do if you're informed of some problem defect in your product?

> When do those even start counting? When I think I've found something, or when I'm done investigating and confirming it and have completed a technical writeup?

It's explicitly clear, as soon as you're aware of the problem, which means that either you or someone else (potentially outside the company) has found something.

They don't require you to fix the problem or even to finish investigating the problem - all this requirement is saying that you send off an email first, instead of waiting until after you've finished your stuff. That's the whole point of this requirement (similar to GDPR requirement to notifications for breaches of private data) - companies aren't allowed to postpone notification for arbitrary amount of time, since even good faith rapid investigation can take weeks, and we've seen companies asserting that they're still investigating after more than a year has passed.
Yes definitely. Many things initially recommended to me were actively detrimental. There is no one size fits all treatment.
If vulnerability is actively exploited (and not just some theoretical) then it should be entirely fair that government gets to know it as the government might be one being attacked by it unknowingly.

It's not disclosing it to public. It's making the companies disclose it to:

* their actual users

* the government

You know, the government that a ton of info about every citizen ? Yeah they should probably know.

It seems like "security experts" are really PR experts that don't want their big company to not be able to control the information about the vulnerabilities
Was always the case. Adding more monkeys with typewriters will get you Shakespeare sooner which is why I’m excited for the future of entertainment & software.
I'm always confused by Raspberry Pi OS. It feels like Debian with a pre-set of packages, and a few additional software to control the board and bootloader.

Why not maintain these additional pieces of software packaged in debian, and provide a prebuilt image for the Raspberry Pi? Why maintain an entire different apt repository? Why publish new version months after the upstream debian is already released?
Commercial content should be flagged and filterable by the user if desired. Anyone posting commercial for-profit content and doesn't flag it accordingly should be banned.

Other than that, non-user-hostile client apps and an open API.
Here's a more informative article about the incident: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/08/israel-...
Will be interesting if configuring a Bluetooth sink using PipeWire is less of a hassle than Alsa, which was really unpleasant. Having all the codecs on a Pi Zero is nice!
The point isn’t technical ability, it’s market share. And smartphones have decimated DSLR market share despite being less technically able.

I’m a data point in that: I bought a DSLRs and a few lenses probably 15 years ago. Over the years I used them less and less to the point that they’re gathering dust now. It isn’t worth the extra bulk when I head out the door, smartphone cameras are good enough.
I got it from context, but this title took me a second to figure out.

Is it saying that the idea stairs are built clockwise for a defense advantage is a myth? eg: "Medieval staircases were not (built going clockwise for the defender's advantage)"

Or that stairs were were purposely built NOT clockwise (or rather anti/counter clockwise), so that defenders would have an advantage? eg: "Medieval staircases were (not built going clockwise) for the defender's advantage"

English is weird.
As a non-native reader it seemed pretty clear to me as well. I guess knowing some French and having read a lot of fantasy novels helps.
> I'd say Valve is exactly that.

No it's not. Valve is just a member of the community. It cannot for distributions to adopt anything. Valve cannot prevent kernel developers from making it difficult for them to improve gaming on Linux. Valve just does its own thing and offers up its work. They cannot force anything into Linux like Apple can with its OS.
Yeah, you'd have to actually do your fucking job.

It's not up to one that did the fuck up to decide when people affected by the fuckup gets to know it happened.
This monitoring software is so stupid.

What's better: being on your work computer for 14 hrs/day producing nothing of value and/or taking meetings that you're at best a passive observer in, or being on your work computer for 3 hrs/day hitting and exceeding personal/team goals and driving tons of value and spending the remaining 5 work hours living life while being available?

I hope we can collectively move away from time-spent-working as the measure of productivity.
I don't understand the mindset behind a comment like this. Where does the confidence behind this opinion come from, when the knowledge basis falls below "bothered to Google it"?

The idea of a hypochondriac making a spurious claim to IBS is pretty ludicrous. You know if you have the symptoms or not, and IBS is probably the best possible outcome for someone with chronic bowel symptoms.

Lumping PCOS in with gluten allergy is giving "shit men believe about women's health." Maybe try listening to some women before forming opinions on their reproductive health.
I recognize your clarification of “discovery” and conclusion from that research, but I do think there is a strong argument that in terms of the stochastic usage of a nonlinear system the “undefined” state of your nullable boolean is itself a falsey state.
> That is fundamentally what an ad is. Someone paying to spread disinformation.

So when I see an add for say Kenwood's latest radios in QST magazine, what would be the disinformation being spread? Or an ad for House of Staunton chess sets in Chess Life magazine?
Ask HN: What Productivity Tools do you use?
Just curious what tools you use to either complete tasks faster, collaborate with teammates (avoiding unnecessary meetings and time-wasting back-and-forth clarifications), stay accountable/place time pressure, etc.

Thanks!
> If there's one person who knows about [thing] it's him so naturally he knows how to present relevant subject matter

One lesson (no pun intended) of the academic environment is that no, it doesn’t work that way. Some people are subject-matter experts, some are brilliant expositors, but while you can’t be a good expositor without a decent knowledge of the subject matter, you absolutely can be a world-leading scientist and at the same time completely rubbish at explaining your ideas. (Some areas are better at making use of such people than others.)

Good exposition deserves additional credit on top of subject expertise, is what I’m trying to say.
i totally disagree, but the article is written well