skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't really imply any sort of teleological character to what I was saying.

I do think that there's a tendency for this kind of thing to happen at a much larger scale in capitalist economies, but I don't think that's intentional. It's just an inevitable consequence of actual humans operating in such a system. That also doesn't mean that any one person consciously believes what they're doing is garbage - I'm sure they're all confident in their idea.

But it's really, really difficult for me to perceive a practical distinction between millions of people all operating under widely varying and often mutually contradictory beliefs, and simple randomness. Maybe that's my statistical training affecting how I view the world, though.
offtopic: Regarding the argument that we shouldn't plant trees because they'll release carbon again:

Sure, but we'd get 50 to 100 years or more of massive carbon capture, during which we can figure out how to get out of this mess we're in.

further offtopic: Eventually, the disasters will get bad enough that the pressure from people demanding action will outweigh the pressure from lobbying money. But the changes lag the emissions, possibly by a few decades. So by the time action is taken, things will be guaranteed to get worse for 20+ years!

Unfortunately, because of this I believe we're utterly fucked. Words like "doom", "extinction", and "hellscape of suffering" spring to mind. Billions of human lives are going to be lost, and I'm not sure there will be any survivors. Maybe there will be a few scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers?

I hope the biosphere can recover.
I disagree completely.
The best thing I did was starting to budget. Something I only started doing recently.
It is such a relief to know what my expenses will be for the coming months. It has also had the added effect that I am no longer wasteful. Like a switch went off in my head, I have reduced my daily food expenses to $5 from god knows what.
If they have doubts as to whether their students exist, then maybe they won't care much about whether they learn well?
> https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io/

Now I'm nostalgic for the early 2000s :)
A major threat to amphibians over the last 30 years has been the Chytrid fungus, which has been spread by human contamination, but has been aided in entering new regions by changing climates.

The upshot of this, as it relates to the submitted article, is there is a comprehensive, cross-functional and multi-method conservation action plan in place for amphibians, that has been operating now for some time, in response to threats like Chytrid. A new release of the plan is expected this year: https://www.iucn-amphibians.org/resources/acap/

Whilst the plan involves a lot of preservation of amphibians in their native habitats, a particularly interesting part of it is the “Amphibian Ark”, https://www.amphibianark.org/about-us/. Pretty much as it sounds, they’re taking live specimens of the most threatened species out of at-risk sites and trying to establish captive breeding populations. During the most aggressive periods of Chytrid spread, there’s been stories of expeditions reaching sites and securing specimens days before the disease tore through, most notably as told by a BBC crew filming golden frogs for an Attenborough documentary: https://news.mongabay.com/2008/02/the-panamanian-golden-frog...
Create demand from users for a choice of browser on ios.
I'm not so sure. Because of Amazon, local stores no longer carry a great deal of things I need and that they used to carry. When I ask them about it, their response is that everyone just gets that stuff from Amazon so it isn't worth them selling it themselves.
A semi-automated system that compares old unsafe code to new unsafe code would likely be really helpful here - say, a LLM prompted to investigate whether the new unsafe blocks are a significant difference in scope and documented intent from the old unsafe blocks. Unless the winners of https://www.ioccc.org/ are among your attackers, it's a pretty solid line of defense.
This was a nostalgia bomb for me, particularly because I did a project like this in my first car around the same time. In retrospect, it's a miracle my car never exploded, with questionable wiring running from my console to the trunk, and a power inverter / extension cord combo that was also fairly dubious. But the idea of having all my music was too much to pass up for a nascent driver and techie.

My setup was a mini tower encased in translucent green, bungee corded to my trunk's side panels, and a 10-key with a PS2 extender running to my console. I booted straight in to WinAmp and ran plugins to let me pick songs by entering +$NUM+ or variations of that. A few months in, I got a 4x40 LCD so I could see what was playing and so some menu-type things. The most clever move, I thought, was getting a hot swap HDD tray so I could periodically reload the files, and maybe the true crowning achievement was the printout I had up front of what was available. Simpler but much more fun times, because the challenge was the fun part.
They are obviously not the same. But, as a founder not coming from a rich family, you may get at best 2 or 3 chances at making a decent business. So now choose: 3 chances of winning 1M at 100% probability vs 3 chances of winning 1B at 1% probability each. Which would you take if your net worth happened to be less than 200K?
I've said it many times, but you hackers still can't see,
You should use Reader View like me

I navigate the web, I'm searchin' for the truth,
But these websites got me feelin' like I'm in a booth,

Ads poppin' up, distractions all around,
But Reader View's my savior, it's the holy ground.

I shed those tattoo tears, for a web so clear,
Reader View's the answer, no more fear,

Cluttered pages fade away, like the past years,

2Pac knew the struggle, in a different way,
But we're still fightin', we're makin' our own way,

Tattoo tears may be gone, but the pain remains,
With Reader View, we're breakin' all these chains.
No it's not just you. I usually get to the point where I have to wait until I have computer access to view the site properly. Sad.
I thought AI advisers were LLMs for the formation of AI government eg https://0a.io

real question though: can transiting into a system involving less humans in power (and more decentralised) actually fix politics? Or will things be the same (in terms of lobbying, etc)?

how can we design better systems for governance?
The desiccant pumps water out of the hot humid daytime air and pumps it into the cool humid nighttime air.
Ask HN: How do you fund your projects?
How do you fund your projects, apps and websites? Especially in the early days, when you're just starting out and trying to grow.
Be aware that there is no notification functionality. Most people you reply to will not see the replies, unless they frequently check their own comment history (where replies are shown in context) _and_ commented very little in the last two weeks (so that the comments you are replying to are still visible in the list).
Actually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.
Having run a bootstrapped-SaaS, I can say that it's 100% correct that customer service is the dominant term, time wise. More importantly, it's often the only commitment that has urgency (updating the site or the app can usually wait a day or a week).

That said, in my experience customer support was usually tied to new accounts. They need a bunch of support at the beginning. But once they get going, you essentially never get support tickets as long as the app continues to function. We literally had customers go 5+ years without ever filing a support ticket.

Once we realized customers do not really want to engage you & would rather self-serve, we invested more in documentation, simplifying UX, etc. Huge benefits to our time commitments for new accounts. I have seen others reduce time investment by having office hours where any customer can join and ask any question. The founder spends an hour or 3 a week and is able to help N customers, and customers are able to help each other as well.

Honestly we did not focus too much on tech debt because most of the things we considered tech debt ultimately did not impact the operation of the business.
I worked in Google for 9 years and even up at the director level there was no way to avoid this.

You either contradicted it and got defunded, slowed it to apply it appropriately and got removed from the project due to not appear ambitious enough, or you went full speed on prematurely scaling an application of it and inevitable failed at scale.

I did founding work on the Google assistant and I was caught in this exact conundrum. There was no solution.
I suspect it's going to be like Blockchain for awhile; companies are going to start rebranding themselves as "AI-first" or "AI-powered" just like camera companies [1] and iced tea companies [2] were doing with Blockchain back in 2017.

I guess that's the price of progress; some entity invents/refines a cool piece of tech, people speculate about the future of that tech, and then they wonder why Company X isn't fully utilizing that tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
Cool, thank you for the informative comment!
Not really, because the real malicious code can exist out-of-band of the source, and the attack vector is indistinguishable from normal code.
Cleansing the data-set is what has made the last 2 releases of stable diffusion duds. Even though its much less technically advanced, the latest version without censorship still beats everything else out.
At least five interesting things for the end of your week (#16)
They're the American national standards organization. The point of the competition is to pick a standard.
I agree mostly; one of the tricky areas is pages with split layout containers that are individually scrollable, where it doesn't make sense to use the page/body level scrollbar to control that content. Another common case are smaller widgets or modules that have their own scrolling context.

The other half of the issue is that native scrollbars, especially on Windows, are a huge eyesore in those scenarios because they disrupt the layout or conflict heavily with the app or site's branding in some way. Take any eyesore in real life and it produces the same psychological effect — scrollbars too often feel like they don't belong.

Of course, many here (and myself) would argue that usability is far more important than branding.

I think a happy medium would be to enforce a certain size and stay with fundamental usability principles, while allowing customization of colors / arrow images at most, probably.

A good, usability-focused designer alongside their engineers would keep these things in mind, ideally, but alas — a great many experiences are driven by amateur-level professionals who are still learning about these blind spots, and favor aesthetics over functionality.
You can only do that with a very small aperture - otherwise you're capturing the scene from slightly different angles across the aperture, and if you want all those images from different angles to "line up" you have to select a depth of interest. This is why focus is a thing.

A very small aperture is not so good for surveillance, because it doesn't let much light in. Good low light performance or wide depth of field: choose one.
I like the feel of the syntax on first glance.

I have been thinking recently that all of the new powerful features showing up in language (Typescrpt, Go, Rust, Elixir, Kotlin, etc.) have been exposing programmers to combinations of programming language features that were not widely available before. I mean, I grew up with Pascal, Basic, C/C++ and Lisp but kids these days are growing up with Python, Typescript, Rust, Go, Haskel, Kotlin, Dart, Swift, C#.

Specifically I was thinking about how I avoid classes now for almost all of my code. I used to be a OOP first guy. Now I want value semantics and abstract data types. I have always hated exceptions (or any non-local control flow in general) and I love guards and defer-like semantics. I love the idea of CSP and Erlang but I also want full low-level control of bits. I want custom allocators and no GC, except maybe when I want a GC for some reason.

I love that people are just experimenting by taking the bits and pieces they like from the multitude of available high-quality languages and they are mixing them up into strange new soups.
A good question. I am not sure if notifications on iOS, Android, Google Chrome or Firefox are end-to-end encrypted.
See my comment to a sibling reply. Basically I don't want to make victims prove their victimization was real, and I don't want to give criminals with real victims an opportunity to argue they "thought it was AI generated."
I haven't used an iPhone since iPhone 3g so I can't comment on apple devices, but on android it sucks so horribly I simply don't browse "general Internet" on my mobile. It is 100% unusable.

I cannot understand why no one can release a clone of Firefox on android compatible with desktop extensions or make an extension that blocks these cookie popups that works.
Return Ukrainian Translation – Ubuntu
I had the same idea, and would love to help with something like this. However, there are significant barriers to capital investment/fundraising, at least in the US. For a small web hosting coop it's not a problem since that's mostly labor, but it'll be hard to scale infrastructure (data centers). You'd just end up being another AWS reseller, I think?

Some existing tech co-ops:
https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

The only one I'm personally familiar with there was Electric Embers. A nonprofit I was volunteering for used them for years, but they were way overcharging. I moved the nonprofit to Wix instead and they saved a lot of money and time that way. I met someone who used to work for that co-op and they told me it'd basically been taken over by one or two long time partners and the newcomers became second class citizens.

At the end of the day, a lot of these agencies just look like generic web boutiques, selling commoditized labor on someone else's infra. If that's the scale you want, it's probably doable, but with a lot of management and time spent teaching employees. If you're looking to scale it up to an international provider, I don't think it will be easy.

Still, if you want help, I'd love to pitch in. Best of luck!
Can't wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the free ride ends and Microsoft starts turning the screws on their (now captive) audience.
> You want my attention? Put some call to action in the text I'm reading.

Please no. In-article advertisements and link blocks are a plague on online publishing.

I'm sure Substack will eventually do this however. In the early days they didn't have a nagging modal. Over time they'll go full Medium.com and straight up hide free articles behind a signup/subscribe.
A direct, objective comparison with a well-crafted set of heuristics is the kryptonite of many a deep learning model.
One thing that I think gets lost in the shuffle of air conditioning discourse:

AC units are generally heat pumps and they generally have smaller temperature differentials to overcome (i.e. heating a house to room temperature while it is snowing is a much bigger job than cooling a house to room temperature on all but the hottest of days).

This means, generally, AC is more energy efficient than direct heating like a furnace. The narrative about 'AC is going to destroy the world via emissions' is mostly because the already developed places have cooler climates than emerging places.
RK3588
The voice actor for a popular video game died, so its makers cloned him with AI
> What I did find evidence for is that Redditors started a manhunt leading to a suicide

The guy he's talking about was already dead weeks before the Boston bombing occurred. Reddit could not have been responsible for his death, reddit libeled a dead man.
It's not waste to the vast majority of us.
> Then as for scam artist -- I suppose that is a matter of personal judgment, since no fair trial ever occurred or made a guilty verdict before he was murdered.

It's mildly impressive that in the same sentence where you mention there was no guilty verdict "for scam artist", you say Joseph Smith was "murdered", a thing for which there was also no guilty verdict: the five men indicted for the killings were acquitted.
I wonder how long until Microsoft will add "AI" to Calculator.
A really fast javelin (throwing spear), technically.
Language analysis finds Bezos and Zuckerberg are smarter than Musk
Rumor is that Bobby is stepping down once the acquisition closes, which is a good start.
I haven't seen enough papers about safety for computers or mathematics in general. Has there been any progress on preventing them being used for anything harmful? Could we possibly only allow an elite few to use them? (For the sake of Poe's law, this is satire)
As someone who lives in Europe I would prefer to remain a subject of the Great American Empire than get swallowed up by the Russians or the Chinese, and I doubt Europe alone will ever have the military might necessary to defend its sovereignty against a possible Russian-Chinese-Iranian axis. Even if the US decides to give up its role as the world's judge, jury, and executioner, how long would a absolute insular existence last, and what would life for Americans under those conditions be like?
*linear logistic regression

I mean, a typical LLM is also logistic regression, but it's not linear.
It wasn't a pleasant task but when I ripped the band-aid off and converted my rules, I took it as an opportunity to reevaluate them and was able optimize a lot of them, converting to IPSSETs, tweaking them into CIDR ranges, pruning, etc and got a decent speed boost. Maybe that isn't applicable to you, but something to keep in mind.
Examining the Toxins in the Common Tomato
Abusers who have actual CSAM could intentionally publish the fingerprints to sabotage the scanning scheme. If the illegal fingerprints become known, it will be possible to generate false positives and overwhelm verification/enforcement with bogus matches.
I'm curious as to how much maintenance the desiccant would require under realistic loads. Does it need to be flushed/replaced periodically? Is is corrosive to its enclosure?

I really wish science journalism would pay more attention to stuff like this. I've been burned by all the Popular Science articles from 20 years ago about zero-emission coal plans with filtered exhaust and built-in carbon capture facilities. They all sound the same, and all leave out details necessary to determine viability. I'm convinced at this point that most science journalists have simply learned to not ask questions beyond a certain point.

But hey I'm happy to be surprised if this actually works.
Yes, the EU is already working to make this illegal

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/1/eu-chat-control-law-wil...

The best bet is Android fork based on Android open source distribution, without Google.
Check out CesiumJS, its used heavily in aerospace applications. Heres their demo page https://sandcastle.cesium.com/
This looks interesting, how would you compare it with colly? I’ve used colly for a while and overall am pleased with it, but things can always be improved.
15 years ago I worked with a guy on NGO projets in Africa.

The projects were either prototypes, concepts, in testing, or small scales. Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing so I wouldn't say he was much involved in them apart from claiming he was doing good.

Well, it worked because he was in the top 100 people of Time magazine the year after for "saving millions of children".

That was my wake up moment about the medias.
Mobile usability inherently sucks due to the constrained form factor, and web usability has been steadily declining because every site wants to monopolize your attention. Put the two together and yeah, you're going to have a bad time.

The most important thing is setting your own expectations appropriately. When not actually mobile, do the work of getting over the activation energy of using a larger device. I don't delude myself into thinking I can sit on the couch at the end of the day while accomplishing anything useful on a phone/tablet - I have a laptop there instead. Even then if there's some stuff I want to spec/buy I often just get up and use a desktop to better mitigate website nags/popups/borders and get it done.

When actually mobile - limit my usage since I'm connected plenty when not-mobile, use libre apps where possible, mitigate exposure to propriety apps through multiple devices and user-representing operating systems (where possible/critical), and actively resist infrequent interactions trying to herd me into installing new crapps.

(and obviously ad blocking is just table stakes)
Neanderthals were built for the winter and for the colder periods of the earth's weather. Cold temperatures would also lead to smaller group sizes. It then seems likely that Neanderthal groups were picked off one by one by large groups of homo sapiens. If you have a 1:100 or even a 1:10 numbers advantage (when you opponent's group doesn't exceed ~80 people), it often doesn't matter how advanced or smart your opponent is. They're going to get flattened no matter what they do. Bloodlust combined with very large group sizes usually leads to lower individual quality but there's a limit to how many one guy could pick off. After the 15th or the 20th guy you're likely to get hit a couple of times, no matter how skilled you are. And after that you're done for, no strongman can stand even a 10-man dogpile.
A common way around this is to simply send a notification through Firebase/other push notification mechanism that tells the app there is a new message.

The app can then retrieve the message and decrypt it. Most of them will then update the notification shown to the user with the full message content.
New research sheds fresh light on mystery of infant consciousness
To the degree that’s true, there is no need for the regulatory intervention you desire.
When I read

> Try Headspace AI. where one of our robots will meditate FOR YOU and then tell you all the lessons it learned.”

I also thought of the electric monk, although for some reason I remembered it as being something that watched television for you.
Don't forget that they have had larger brains too.
> I don't think that's efficient.

Uh oh, sounds like someone wants a command economy!

No, honestly that's exactly what you're saying "You shouldn't do X because I don't think it will have a potential payoff". Now in some particular cases where there are particular social or environmental harms we may pass laws to limit said behavior. After that point businesses and individuals have the right to waste money on whatever they like.

Note, this is why it's also important to have government funded research on things that may not be profitable. While industry is screwing around trying to squeeze and extra penny out of a dime, research projects, while risky can find hidden quarters.
Back in the early days of the internet the market was flooded with ill-conceived Web-powered products. We don't remember any of them because they didn't last, but in the late 90s they were EVERYWHERE.

Similarly... it's not that I don't think machine learning is useful. I wouldn't have built my career on it if I didn't. But it is no more immune to Sturgeon's Law than the Information Superhighway was.
Ask chatgpt? Pretty good example of a thing it'll probably handle in a second.
My take was needlessly hard sorry about that. I wish you and your blog all the success. But thank you for not making it modal.
Aka keeping up with the Joneses. Living below your means is somehow shameful for some people in our current society.